We now know exactly how Donald Trump is going to try to get reelected
Analysis by Chris Cillizza
During Game 7 of the World Series on Wednesday night, President Donald Trump's campaign launched a seven-figure national ad buy -- a 30-second commercial touting his first-term accomplishments on terrorism, the economy and immigration.
But the real key to the ad -- and the bit that you need to pay very close attention to -- comes in the final moments of the commercial, when the narrator says this:
"He's no Mr. Nice Guy. But sometimes it takes a Donald Trump to change Washington."
Those two sentences are hugely telling when it comes to understanding how Trump (and his campaign) are going to position him in the race for a second term next November.
What's clear from that tag line -- "no Mr. Nice Guy ... sometimes you need a Donald Trump" -- is that the campaign understands how poorly the President is perceived on a bevy of personality traits. He's not seen as friendly. Or kind. Or empathetic. Or even really, someone you'd want to spend a bunch of time around.
This ad tries to turn those traits on their head. Rather than being regarded as a negative for Trump, his campaign is trying to argue that in order to fix a place as broken as Washington, you need someone who doesn't care about whether you like him. Or whether anyone likes him. Who only cares about results.
In a bumper sticker, the campaign messaging that this ad appears to preview goes like this: Yes, he's a jerk. But he's a jerk who gets results!
The underlying argument here is that for too long, voters elected presidential-looking and sounding politicians. People who played nice with one another, who gave predictable speeches, who went to all the Washington dinners and made friends with the media. And look where that got us! It screwed the average Joe, while these so-called elites feathered their nests.
Trump's lack of manners, his bullying, his at-times outrageous and dangerous rhetoric are, under this formulation, simply proof points of how different he is than all of the failed politicians who have come before him. Democrats don't like him? Even some Republicans don't? The media is outraged? Good! They should be -- that's the whole point.
There's at least some reason to believe that sort of positioning could work for Trump. The 2016 exit poll tells that story. Just 1 in 3 voters said that Trump "honest" and "trustworthy". (He won 1 in 5 voters who said he wasn't honest or trustworthy.) About that same number -- 35% -- said Trump had the "temperament" to be president. (He won 1 in 5 voters who said he didn't have the right temperament to be president.)
In virtually every previous election, those are numbers that guarantee a loss. After all, how does a candidate that two-thirds of the country thinks isn't honest and doesn't have the right temperament to be president win? That answer -- in 2016, at least -- is also in the exit poll. Asked which candidate quality mattered most to them in deciding their vote, almost 4 in 10 (39%) named "can bring change." Of that group, Trump won 82% to 14% for Hillary Clinton.
The desire for radical change in Washington trumped -- ahem -- absolutely everything else in these critical voters' mind. They were so sick of the status quo that they were willing to vote for someone in Trump who they neither liked nor trusted.
Which brings us back to Trump's ad -- and this line in particular: "Sometimes it takes a Donald Trump to change Washington." And explains why that sort of message just might work. Again.
October 31, 2019
Traitorous Pussy Republicans Cried Like Bitches While Supporting A Criminal....
A divided House backs impeachment probe of Trump
By Karoun Demirjian, Rachael Bade, Mike DeBonis and Elise Viebeck
A divided House approved a resolution Thursday formally authorizing and articulating guidelines for the next phase of its impeachment inquiry, a move that signaled Democrats are on course to bring charges against President Trump later this year.
The 232-to-196 vote, which hewed closely to party lines, was expected to fuel the partisan fighting that has accompanied every stage of the impeachment probe and much of the Trump presidency. Nearly all Democrats backed the resolution, and House Republicans, who spent weeks clamoring for such a vote, opposed it.
At issue is whether Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign leader to investigate his domestic political rivals.
In remarks before the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described the impeachment inquiry as a “solemn” and “prayerful” process — “not cause for any glee or comfort.”
Pelosi announces passage of impeachment inquiry resolution.
At the same time, Pelosi said, “I don’t know why Republicans are afraid of the truth.”
“Every member should support the American people hearing the facts for themselves,” she said in a floor speech. “That is what this vote is about. It’s about the truth. And what is at stake in all of this is nothing less than our democracy.”
The White House blasted Democrats’ “unhinged obsession with this illegitimate impeachment proceeding” in a statement following the vote.
“The Democrats are choosing every day to waste time on a sham impeachment — a blatantly partisan attempt to destroy the President,” press secretary Stephanie Grisham stated.
Trump, who had no public events on his daily schedule, tweeted: “The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!”
House Republicans echoed the White House in their criticism, describing the inquiry as an effort aimed at removing Trump from office.
“Democrats are trying to impeach the president because they are scared they can’t defeat him at the ballot box,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on the floor before the vote, calling the opposing party’s approach a “disaster for democracy.”
“To my colleagues on the other side, I say this: Give the people back their power. Let them choose the next leader of the free world. Follow the principles of our Constitution. And do not dilute our democracy by interfering in elections from Washington,” McCarthy said.
The House’s resolution clears the way for nationally televised hearings as Democrats look to make their case to the American people that Trump should be impeached.
At the same time, House investigators were hearing testimony from Timothy Morrison, the top Russia and Europe adviser on the National Security Council, who was expected to corroborate testimony from a senior U.S. diplomat who gave the most detailed account of the alleged quid pro quo.
Democrats unveil procedures for Trump’s impeachment inquiry, rebutting GOP attacks
Democratic leaders expected that two to four of their members would vote against the resolution. In the end, Reps. Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.) and Jeff Van Drew (D-N.J.), who represent Republican-leaning districts, opposed it.
Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.), one of the few Trump-district Democrats who has been reluctant about backing an impeachment inquiry, voted yes.
“It’s about transparency in the process; I like the fact that the transcripts will be made public and the American public will get the chance to understand what’s going on,” he said Wednesday, adding that he still is not convinced Trump needs to be impeached. “I am not prejudging anything . . . until I see all the evidence.”
Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.), who was undecided as of Wednesday night, also supported the resolution.
“I think the vote will allow a fair and open process and will finally let Americans judge for themselves,” Brindisi told Syracuse.com on Thursday morning.
Joining the Democrats in voting for the resolution was Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who abandoned the Republican Party in July and has been sharply critical of Trump.
The resolution allows the president and his counsel to request and query witnesses and participate in impeachment proceedings once they reach the Judiciary Committee, which is tasked with writing any articles of impeachment that will be voted on by the House. It also authorizes the House Intelligence Committee to release transcripts of its closed-door depositions to the public, and it directs the committee to write and then release a report on that investigation in the same fashion.
The resolution gives the Republican minority on both the Intelligence and Judiciary committees a chance to subpoena documents and testimony — provided that either the Democratic chairman or a majority of the committee agrees. And it establishes special procedures under which the chairman and top Republican on the panel can take up to 90 minutes to make their cases or defer to a staff lawyer to do so.
As the final minutes of debate ticked by, Republicans loudly jeered Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), chairman of the Rules Committee, when he defended the process and argued that Democrats remain focused on the legislative agenda.
Members of the committees conducting the Trump investigation made their way to the House floor, from the secure basement rooms where they huddle each day for depositions, many carrying several pages of witness statements in their hands or under notepads.
Reps. Dean Phillips (Minn.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.), two freshmen who flipped GOP seats last year and helped give Democrats the majority, huddled in the well of the chamber looking at the statement, pointing to passages and scribbling on it — having just left the Morrison deposition.
When the impeachment resolution vote occurred, Pelosi took the chair to read the final vote tally in a sign of the formal nature of the proceedings.
Before the roll call on Thursday morning, partisan tensions were visible on the floor of the House, as Democrats called attention to mounting evidence against Trump while Republicans decried the process as secretive and unfair.
“If we don’t hold this president accountable, we will be ceding our ability to hold any president accountable,” McGovern said in a speech. “The obstruction from this White House is unprecedented. It’s stunning. We don’t know if Trump will be impeached but the allegations are as serious as it gets.”
“It’s a sad day for all of us,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), McGovern’s GOP counterpart. “It’s not a fair process. It’s not an open process.”
Leading Republicans were adamant that not a single GOP member would back the measure — and they leaned heavily on Republicans who have openly criticized the president in the past.
“It is still not a fair process in my mind,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who, like most Republicans, voted against the resolution. “It is still a process where the Democrats call all the shots and we were not consulted along the way. . . . So, no. I’m a no.”
The resolution does not deal with the merits of impeaching the president, just procedure. But even Republicans who have expressed concern about points of Trump’s conduct — such as Walden, who Democrats believe could be swayed on an ultimate impeachment vote — held the party line on Thursday.
Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Fla.), who like Walden recently announced his upcoming retirement and has refused to rule out voting to impeach Trump, also voted against the measure.
By Karoun Demirjian, Rachael Bade, Mike DeBonis and Elise Viebeck
A divided House approved a resolution Thursday formally authorizing and articulating guidelines for the next phase of its impeachment inquiry, a move that signaled Democrats are on course to bring charges against President Trump later this year.
The 232-to-196 vote, which hewed closely to party lines, was expected to fuel the partisan fighting that has accompanied every stage of the impeachment probe and much of the Trump presidency. Nearly all Democrats backed the resolution, and House Republicans, who spent weeks clamoring for such a vote, opposed it.
At issue is whether Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign leader to investigate his domestic political rivals.
In remarks before the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described the impeachment inquiry as a “solemn” and “prayerful” process — “not cause for any glee or comfort.”
Pelosi announces passage of impeachment inquiry resolution.
At the same time, Pelosi said, “I don’t know why Republicans are afraid of the truth.”
“Every member should support the American people hearing the facts for themselves,” she said in a floor speech. “That is what this vote is about. It’s about the truth. And what is at stake in all of this is nothing less than our democracy.”
The White House blasted Democrats’ “unhinged obsession with this illegitimate impeachment proceeding” in a statement following the vote.
“The Democrats are choosing every day to waste time on a sham impeachment — a blatantly partisan attempt to destroy the President,” press secretary Stephanie Grisham stated.
Trump, who had no public events on his daily schedule, tweeted: “The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!”
House Republicans echoed the White House in their criticism, describing the inquiry as an effort aimed at removing Trump from office.
“Democrats are trying to impeach the president because they are scared they can’t defeat him at the ballot box,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on the floor before the vote, calling the opposing party’s approach a “disaster for democracy.”
“To my colleagues on the other side, I say this: Give the people back their power. Let them choose the next leader of the free world. Follow the principles of our Constitution. And do not dilute our democracy by interfering in elections from Washington,” McCarthy said.
The House’s resolution clears the way for nationally televised hearings as Democrats look to make their case to the American people that Trump should be impeached.
At the same time, House investigators were hearing testimony from Timothy Morrison, the top Russia and Europe adviser on the National Security Council, who was expected to corroborate testimony from a senior U.S. diplomat who gave the most detailed account of the alleged quid pro quo.
Democrats unveil procedures for Trump’s impeachment inquiry, rebutting GOP attacks
Democratic leaders expected that two to four of their members would vote against the resolution. In the end, Reps. Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.) and Jeff Van Drew (D-N.J.), who represent Republican-leaning districts, opposed it.
Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.), one of the few Trump-district Democrats who has been reluctant about backing an impeachment inquiry, voted yes.
“It’s about transparency in the process; I like the fact that the transcripts will be made public and the American public will get the chance to understand what’s going on,” he said Wednesday, adding that he still is not convinced Trump needs to be impeached. “I am not prejudging anything . . . until I see all the evidence.”
Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.), who was undecided as of Wednesday night, also supported the resolution.
“I think the vote will allow a fair and open process and will finally let Americans judge for themselves,” Brindisi told Syracuse.com on Thursday morning.
Joining the Democrats in voting for the resolution was Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who abandoned the Republican Party in July and has been sharply critical of Trump.
The resolution allows the president and his counsel to request and query witnesses and participate in impeachment proceedings once they reach the Judiciary Committee, which is tasked with writing any articles of impeachment that will be voted on by the House. It also authorizes the House Intelligence Committee to release transcripts of its closed-door depositions to the public, and it directs the committee to write and then release a report on that investigation in the same fashion.
The resolution gives the Republican minority on both the Intelligence and Judiciary committees a chance to subpoena documents and testimony — provided that either the Democratic chairman or a majority of the committee agrees. And it establishes special procedures under which the chairman and top Republican on the panel can take up to 90 minutes to make their cases or defer to a staff lawyer to do so.
As the final minutes of debate ticked by, Republicans loudly jeered Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), chairman of the Rules Committee, when he defended the process and argued that Democrats remain focused on the legislative agenda.
Members of the committees conducting the Trump investigation made their way to the House floor, from the secure basement rooms where they huddle each day for depositions, many carrying several pages of witness statements in their hands or under notepads.
Reps. Dean Phillips (Minn.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.), two freshmen who flipped GOP seats last year and helped give Democrats the majority, huddled in the well of the chamber looking at the statement, pointing to passages and scribbling on it — having just left the Morrison deposition.
When the impeachment resolution vote occurred, Pelosi took the chair to read the final vote tally in a sign of the formal nature of the proceedings.
Before the roll call on Thursday morning, partisan tensions were visible on the floor of the House, as Democrats called attention to mounting evidence against Trump while Republicans decried the process as secretive and unfair.
“If we don’t hold this president accountable, we will be ceding our ability to hold any president accountable,” McGovern said in a speech. “The obstruction from this White House is unprecedented. It’s stunning. We don’t know if Trump will be impeached but the allegations are as serious as it gets.”
“It’s a sad day for all of us,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), McGovern’s GOP counterpart. “It’s not a fair process. It’s not an open process.”
Leading Republicans were adamant that not a single GOP member would back the measure — and they leaned heavily on Republicans who have openly criticized the president in the past.
“It is still not a fair process in my mind,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who, like most Republicans, voted against the resolution. “It is still a process where the Democrats call all the shots and we were not consulted along the way. . . . So, no. I’m a no.”
The resolution does not deal with the merits of impeaching the president, just procedure. But even Republicans who have expressed concern about points of Trump’s conduct — such as Walden, who Democrats believe could be swayed on an ultimate impeachment vote — held the party line on Thursday.
Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Fla.), who like Walden recently announced his upcoming retirement and has refused to rule out voting to impeach Trump, also voted against the measure.
Conservatism has left Sen. Romney behind.
Republicans don’t want Mitt Romney to save them from Trump
Movement conservatism has left Sen. Romney behind.
By Jane Coaston
Some Never Trump conservatives and liberals hope that Sen. Mitt Romney is about to transition from a lonely Donald Trump critic to the leader of a movement to get Republicans in Congress to turn on the president.
The senator and former presidential candidate has become the most prominent opponent of Trump’s agenda inside Washington — prominent enough to be personally attacked by the president on Twitter multiple times (including calls for his improbable impeachment), prominent enough to be listed among the liberal critics of the president who Donald Trump Jr. would like readers to send copies of his new book.
Romney has been outwardly critical of Trump on Ukraine, specifically, tweeting, “By all appearance, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”
And now Romney has gained a measure of “strange new respect” among media observers. Vanity Fair wrote that Romney was the “pressure point” for impeachment.
Meanwhile, some conservatives hope for the same. The Bulwark, a right-leaning publication that opposes Trump, published a piece titled “Mitt Romney to the Rescue?” An article for the Atlantic written by the executive director of Republicans for the Rule of Law said bluntly, “Mitt Romney, It’s Time,” arguing, “The senator is best positioned to pry the Republican Party from President Trump’s hands” because he’s not up for reelection until 2024. He’s also a Republican elected in a deep red state — so he does have a constituency.
But there’s a problem with these arguments: Many conservative voters were unenthused by what Romney was selling in his 2012 presidential bid and don’t appear to want it now, either. For voters on the right, Romney is a symbol of the establishment GOP they rejected in 2016 in favor of Trumpist populism. Romney is a wealthy blue blood who earned his money in private equity and is a former governor of a liberal state. He has a reputation for pragmatism that, to some conservatives, is seen as weakness.
For those looking to Romney to lead the charge against Trump in the Senate, or at least thwart him, it’s important to understand that he would begin at a distinct disadvantage. Not only would he need to change the hearts and minds of his fellow Republicans, he would need to grab hold of a conservative movement that has largely left him behind.
A man standing alone — really, really alone
First and foremost, Romney has decidedly not gained the ability to assemble a team of fellow travelers around him to stand united in opposition to Trump. Far from it; as conservative writer Varad Mehta noted in Arc Digital, Romney’s popularity is underwater in his home state of Utah (he has a 46-51 percent approval rating), but Trump’s popularity has remained remarkably static — and very high — within the GOP:
In their latest surveys, Gallup, CNN, and Quinnipiac all found only 6 percent of Republicans endorse removing President Trump from office, with 93, 90, and 91 percent, respectively, against. After peaking around 15 percent earlier this month, GOP support for impeachment in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker has dropped to 11 percent. If anything, Republican opposition is hardening.
Equally solid is Trump’s standing in the party. His job approval with Republicans is 83 percent in Quinnipiac, 87 percent in Gallup, and 90 percent in CNN. These numbers are not the making of an anti-Trump uprising by congressional Republicans.
On that front, the decision for congressional Republicans is an easy one, and the battle for the “soul” of the GOP has already ended: If the choice is between siding with an unpopular senator recently described by a former campaign volunteer as a “virtue-signaling headline-chaser” or a popular (at least within his party) president, they’ll take Trump. (Not least because the alternative might entail a damaging primary fight with a Trumpian challenger, in the vein of Kelli Ward or Katie Arrington.)
But the problem for Romney isn’t just about his standing among conservatives in comparison with Trump. The problem — newfound liberal interest notwithstanding — is that his conservative bona fides have always been somewhat up for debate. And that argument has largely been shaped by people other than Romney.
Back in the 2008 presidential cycle, when Romney won the Iowa straw poll before dropping out in February 2008, he had the support of conservative outlets like National Review and visible right-leaning pundits like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, who said of Romney:
I think now, based on the way the campaign has shaken out, that there probably is a candidate on our side who does embody all three legs of the conservative stool, and that’s Romney. The three stools or the three legs of the stool are national security/foreign policy, the social conservatives, and the fiscal conservatives.
To some conservatives, it was John McCain who was the secret liberal, not Romney. One man interviewed by Reuters in 2008 said after Romney dropped out, “The only thing I can think to do is to vote for McCain (in November) and I am not voting for McCain because of his views.”
But others were suspicious, viewing Romney’s famous pragmatism as evidence that he wasn’t really one of them after all. As a right-leaning blogger who goes by KLSouth on Twitter wrote in a post in 2011:
Mitt Romney represents everything that is wrong with our party and everything that has left us dying in a ditch. Romney is a RINO. A progressive Republican. A pretend conservative. Pretend conservatives are what got us to where we are and are what will completely destroy us if allowed. Romney will be an exact repeat of John McCain.
And Limbaugh seemingly changed his mind on the former Massachusetts governor by 2011, saying of Romney:
“Romney is not a conservative. He’s not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn’t… What he has going for him is that he’s not Obama. This isn’t personal, not with what country faces and so forth. I like him very much. I’ve spent some social time with him. He’s a fine guy. He’s very nice gentleman. He is a gentleman. But he’s not a conservative.”
The thing is, nothing about Romney’s record had changed between 2008 and 2011. He was still the same Bain Capital founder and former Massachusetts governor noted for working across the aisle with Democrats (or as then-RedState writer Ben Howe put it, a pandering flip flopper who “does what gets him popular and earns him votes”) he was in 2008. Back then, conservative pundit Mark Levin wrote he shared “most of our conservative principles” and demanded conservatives get on board with Romney’s campaign.
As my colleague Matt Yglesias noted in a piece for ThinkProgress in 2011 on a critique of Romney published in National Review, “What’s strange about this editorial is that it involves NR pretending that somehow it’s Romney who’s changed since they endorsed him four years ago rather than conceding that they’ve simply changed their standards of what counts as conservative health policy.” (National Review’s editors argued that the Affordable Care Act “raised the stakes” for the health care debate, necessitating the critique.)
And little has changed about Romney since he lost in 2012 and, after nearly becoming secretary of state, decided to run for Senate. But a lot changed about conservative voters, what they want, and more importantly, who they want to vote for.
When Romney ran in 2012, he was encountering a GOP transformed — particularly after the Tea Party shifted the party to the right beginning in 2009.
As I wrote last year:
I spoke with Jennifer Stefano, who first got involved with the Tea Party back in 2008 and is now vice president of the Commonwealth Foundation. She told me that the movement’s basic ethos is: “We want a limited government that respects the rights of the individuals over the state. We fought and still fight for economic freedom so all Americans can have opportunity, economic prosperity, independence and fairness from their government.”
Stefano added that in her view, much of the Tea Party’s activism was intended to be a rejection of Republican economic policies, not a response to Obama. “There was no chance that we were going to embrace Republican messaging,” she said. “We were furious at the bailouts that began under President George W. Bush, and many of us felt that the Republican Party betrayed what they were supposed to stand for, namely a limited government whose policies allow individuals the opportunity to flourish. Bailing out corporations with taxpayer money is antithetical to that.”
But the shift went deeper than the Tea Party. As detailed in Washington Post reporter Dan Balz’s book Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America, the Tea Party revolution and the 2010 midterms “produced a party that, at its grassroots, was more militant in its beliefs and less willing to accept compromise from its leaders.” And Romney was — and is — many things, but militant is not among them. It was that militancy from grassroots conservatives that made blunders like Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe — referencing the number of Americans who don’t pay income tax — even more dangerous.
As National Review’s Rich Lowry argued at the time, such remarks “represent[ed] a backdoor return to country-club Republicanism.” But Romney himself fit that stereotype — not just of a country-club white shoe Republican, but of a Republican all too happy to glad-hand with Democrats like the late Sen. Ted Kennedy when it suited his purposes while simultaneously declaring himself to be “severely conservative.”
Romney was exactly the kind of Republican that, while once representative of the conservative brand, was anathema to many conservatives in 2012 — and in 2016. They didn’t want bipartisanship. They wanted, more or less, to punch Democrats in the face.
And that leads us to 2019, and a GOP electorate that, after losing in 2008 and 2012, finally has a pugilist in office. While Trump’s conservative bona fides have themselves been debated by right-leaning thinkers most of all, his ability to fight has not — and in a world in which, as Daily Wire editor at large Josh Hammer told me, conservatives believe they are “fundamentally under siege from the left,” a fighter is what the right wants.
A conservative pundit told me that in 2012, “Romney’s entire pitch was civility. He wasn’t particularly conservative in his record (see Romneycare) and was widely perceived to be middle-of-the-road on issues like abortion until the primaries. So the pitch was Inoffensive Republican 2.0 (John McCain was 1.0). After he lost, the specific kickback was on that civility pitch. Hence Trump.”
It’s not that Romney became a different kind of conservative from the one he was in 2008. It’s that conservative voters did. They’re more populist, and more suspicious of the machinations of big business. (It’s no wonder that Sen. Tom Cotton is demanding an investigation into WeWork.)
Mitt Romney? The Romney of Bain Capital and country-club Republicanism, someone who didn’t seem to get the base — and moreover, how mad the base was — back in 2012? That’s not the person conservative voters are looking for.
Romney is alone among Senate Republicans in his outspoken disapproval for Trump, but he’s alone among Republicans in other ways, too. He’s not a populist. He’s not a fighter. He’s an incredibly wealthy former presidential candidate whom voters never quite grew to love in 2008 and voted for begrudgingly in 2012. And now, with a real fighter firmly entrenched in the White House, the conservative movement doesn’t need Romney anymore.
Movement conservatism has left Sen. Romney behind.
By Jane Coaston
Some Never Trump conservatives and liberals hope that Sen. Mitt Romney is about to transition from a lonely Donald Trump critic to the leader of a movement to get Republicans in Congress to turn on the president.
The senator and former presidential candidate has become the most prominent opponent of Trump’s agenda inside Washington — prominent enough to be personally attacked by the president on Twitter multiple times (including calls for his improbable impeachment), prominent enough to be listed among the liberal critics of the president who Donald Trump Jr. would like readers to send copies of his new book.
Romney has been outwardly critical of Trump on Ukraine, specifically, tweeting, “By all appearance, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”
And now Romney has gained a measure of “strange new respect” among media observers. Vanity Fair wrote that Romney was the “pressure point” for impeachment.
Meanwhile, some conservatives hope for the same. The Bulwark, a right-leaning publication that opposes Trump, published a piece titled “Mitt Romney to the Rescue?” An article for the Atlantic written by the executive director of Republicans for the Rule of Law said bluntly, “Mitt Romney, It’s Time,” arguing, “The senator is best positioned to pry the Republican Party from President Trump’s hands” because he’s not up for reelection until 2024. He’s also a Republican elected in a deep red state — so he does have a constituency.
But there’s a problem with these arguments: Many conservative voters were unenthused by what Romney was selling in his 2012 presidential bid and don’t appear to want it now, either. For voters on the right, Romney is a symbol of the establishment GOP they rejected in 2016 in favor of Trumpist populism. Romney is a wealthy blue blood who earned his money in private equity and is a former governor of a liberal state. He has a reputation for pragmatism that, to some conservatives, is seen as weakness.
For those looking to Romney to lead the charge against Trump in the Senate, or at least thwart him, it’s important to understand that he would begin at a distinct disadvantage. Not only would he need to change the hearts and minds of his fellow Republicans, he would need to grab hold of a conservative movement that has largely left him behind.
A man standing alone — really, really alone
First and foremost, Romney has decidedly not gained the ability to assemble a team of fellow travelers around him to stand united in opposition to Trump. Far from it; as conservative writer Varad Mehta noted in Arc Digital, Romney’s popularity is underwater in his home state of Utah (he has a 46-51 percent approval rating), but Trump’s popularity has remained remarkably static — and very high — within the GOP:
In their latest surveys, Gallup, CNN, and Quinnipiac all found only 6 percent of Republicans endorse removing President Trump from office, with 93, 90, and 91 percent, respectively, against. After peaking around 15 percent earlier this month, GOP support for impeachment in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker has dropped to 11 percent. If anything, Republican opposition is hardening.
Equally solid is Trump’s standing in the party. His job approval with Republicans is 83 percent in Quinnipiac, 87 percent in Gallup, and 90 percent in CNN. These numbers are not the making of an anti-Trump uprising by congressional Republicans.
On that front, the decision for congressional Republicans is an easy one, and the battle for the “soul” of the GOP has already ended: If the choice is between siding with an unpopular senator recently described by a former campaign volunteer as a “virtue-signaling headline-chaser” or a popular (at least within his party) president, they’ll take Trump. (Not least because the alternative might entail a damaging primary fight with a Trumpian challenger, in the vein of Kelli Ward or Katie Arrington.)
But the problem for Romney isn’t just about his standing among conservatives in comparison with Trump. The problem — newfound liberal interest notwithstanding — is that his conservative bona fides have always been somewhat up for debate. And that argument has largely been shaped by people other than Romney.
Back in the 2008 presidential cycle, when Romney won the Iowa straw poll before dropping out in February 2008, he had the support of conservative outlets like National Review and visible right-leaning pundits like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, who said of Romney:
I think now, based on the way the campaign has shaken out, that there probably is a candidate on our side who does embody all three legs of the conservative stool, and that’s Romney. The three stools or the three legs of the stool are national security/foreign policy, the social conservatives, and the fiscal conservatives.
To some conservatives, it was John McCain who was the secret liberal, not Romney. One man interviewed by Reuters in 2008 said after Romney dropped out, “The only thing I can think to do is to vote for McCain (in November) and I am not voting for McCain because of his views.”
But others were suspicious, viewing Romney’s famous pragmatism as evidence that he wasn’t really one of them after all. As a right-leaning blogger who goes by KLSouth on Twitter wrote in a post in 2011:
Mitt Romney represents everything that is wrong with our party and everything that has left us dying in a ditch. Romney is a RINO. A progressive Republican. A pretend conservative. Pretend conservatives are what got us to where we are and are what will completely destroy us if allowed. Romney will be an exact repeat of John McCain.
And Limbaugh seemingly changed his mind on the former Massachusetts governor by 2011, saying of Romney:
“Romney is not a conservative. He’s not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn’t… What he has going for him is that he’s not Obama. This isn’t personal, not with what country faces and so forth. I like him very much. I’ve spent some social time with him. He’s a fine guy. He’s very nice gentleman. He is a gentleman. But he’s not a conservative.”
The thing is, nothing about Romney’s record had changed between 2008 and 2011. He was still the same Bain Capital founder and former Massachusetts governor noted for working across the aisle with Democrats (or as then-RedState writer Ben Howe put it, a pandering flip flopper who “does what gets him popular and earns him votes”) he was in 2008. Back then, conservative pundit Mark Levin wrote he shared “most of our conservative principles” and demanded conservatives get on board with Romney’s campaign.
As my colleague Matt Yglesias noted in a piece for ThinkProgress in 2011 on a critique of Romney published in National Review, “What’s strange about this editorial is that it involves NR pretending that somehow it’s Romney who’s changed since they endorsed him four years ago rather than conceding that they’ve simply changed their standards of what counts as conservative health policy.” (National Review’s editors argued that the Affordable Care Act “raised the stakes” for the health care debate, necessitating the critique.)
And little has changed about Romney since he lost in 2012 and, after nearly becoming secretary of state, decided to run for Senate. But a lot changed about conservative voters, what they want, and more importantly, who they want to vote for.
When Romney ran in 2012, he was encountering a GOP transformed — particularly after the Tea Party shifted the party to the right beginning in 2009.
As I wrote last year:
I spoke with Jennifer Stefano, who first got involved with the Tea Party back in 2008 and is now vice president of the Commonwealth Foundation. She told me that the movement’s basic ethos is: “We want a limited government that respects the rights of the individuals over the state. We fought and still fight for economic freedom so all Americans can have opportunity, economic prosperity, independence and fairness from their government.”
Stefano added that in her view, much of the Tea Party’s activism was intended to be a rejection of Republican economic policies, not a response to Obama. “There was no chance that we were going to embrace Republican messaging,” she said. “We were furious at the bailouts that began under President George W. Bush, and many of us felt that the Republican Party betrayed what they were supposed to stand for, namely a limited government whose policies allow individuals the opportunity to flourish. Bailing out corporations with taxpayer money is antithetical to that.”
But the shift went deeper than the Tea Party. As detailed in Washington Post reporter Dan Balz’s book Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America, the Tea Party revolution and the 2010 midterms “produced a party that, at its grassroots, was more militant in its beliefs and less willing to accept compromise from its leaders.” And Romney was — and is — many things, but militant is not among them. It was that militancy from grassroots conservatives that made blunders like Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe — referencing the number of Americans who don’t pay income tax — even more dangerous.
As National Review’s Rich Lowry argued at the time, such remarks “represent[ed] a backdoor return to country-club Republicanism.” But Romney himself fit that stereotype — not just of a country-club white shoe Republican, but of a Republican all too happy to glad-hand with Democrats like the late Sen. Ted Kennedy when it suited his purposes while simultaneously declaring himself to be “severely conservative.”
Romney was exactly the kind of Republican that, while once representative of the conservative brand, was anathema to many conservatives in 2012 — and in 2016. They didn’t want bipartisanship. They wanted, more or less, to punch Democrats in the face.
And that leads us to 2019, and a GOP electorate that, after losing in 2008 and 2012, finally has a pugilist in office. While Trump’s conservative bona fides have themselves been debated by right-leaning thinkers most of all, his ability to fight has not — and in a world in which, as Daily Wire editor at large Josh Hammer told me, conservatives believe they are “fundamentally under siege from the left,” a fighter is what the right wants.
A conservative pundit told me that in 2012, “Romney’s entire pitch was civility. He wasn’t particularly conservative in his record (see Romneycare) and was widely perceived to be middle-of-the-road on issues like abortion until the primaries. So the pitch was Inoffensive Republican 2.0 (John McCain was 1.0). After he lost, the specific kickback was on that civility pitch. Hence Trump.”
It’s not that Romney became a different kind of conservative from the one he was in 2008. It’s that conservative voters did. They’re more populist, and more suspicious of the machinations of big business. (It’s no wonder that Sen. Tom Cotton is demanding an investigation into WeWork.)
Mitt Romney? The Romney of Bain Capital and country-club Republicanism, someone who didn’t seem to get the base — and moreover, how mad the base was — back in 2012? That’s not the person conservative voters are looking for.
Romney is alone among Senate Republicans in his outspoken disapproval for Trump, but he’s alone among Republicans in other ways, too. He’s not a populist. He’s not a fighter. He’s an incredibly wealthy former presidential candidate whom voters never quite grew to love in 2008 and voted for begrudgingly in 2012. And now, with a real fighter firmly entrenched in the White House, the conservative movement doesn’t need Romney anymore.
Regulations on coal toxins
New York Times: Trump administration set to undo Obama-era regulations on coal toxins
By Devan Cole
The Trump administration is poised to undo an Obama-era regulation intended to limit emissions of toxins from coal-fired power plants, a move that environmental groups say could lead to significant health problems, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The Times, citing conversations with two people familiar with the plans, said the Environmental Protection Agency could move as early as Thursday to "weaken" the regulation by "relaxing some of the requirements on power generators and also exempting a significant number of power plants from even those requirements." The newspaper said the agency was pursuing the changes in order to extend the life of older power plants run by coal that have been closing down as cleaner alternatives become more preferred.
Under President Donald Trump, the EPA has rolled back a number of Obama-era regulations that sought to reduce the environmental and health impacts of non-renewable energy, and Thursday's move would be the latest example of that pattern of deregulation.
The Times said each year power plants produce about 130 million tons of coal ash -- the residue produced from burning coal that is stored in more than a thousand sites across the country. The Obama-era regulation "set deadlines for power plants to invest in modern wastewater treatment technology to keep toxic pollution out of local waterways," which was estimated to stop about 1.4 million pounds of "toxic metals and other pollutants" from going into waterways, the newspaper said.
Environmental groups opposed to the changes are warning that they could lead to significant health issues contracted from drinking water, such as "birth defects, cancer and stunted brain development in young children," according to the Times, which said some groups plan to challenge the rollback.
According to the newspaper, the Trump administration plans to say their proposed changes "will remove more pollutants than the Obama-era regulation," an argument the Times said was based on "an analysis that assumes about 30 percent of power plants will voluntarily chose to install more stringent technology."
By Devan Cole
The Trump administration is poised to undo an Obama-era regulation intended to limit emissions of toxins from coal-fired power plants, a move that environmental groups say could lead to significant health problems, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The Times, citing conversations with two people familiar with the plans, said the Environmental Protection Agency could move as early as Thursday to "weaken" the regulation by "relaxing some of the requirements on power generators and also exempting a significant number of power plants from even those requirements." The newspaper said the agency was pursuing the changes in order to extend the life of older power plants run by coal that have been closing down as cleaner alternatives become more preferred.
Under President Donald Trump, the EPA has rolled back a number of Obama-era regulations that sought to reduce the environmental and health impacts of non-renewable energy, and Thursday's move would be the latest example of that pattern of deregulation.
The Times said each year power plants produce about 130 million tons of coal ash -- the residue produced from burning coal that is stored in more than a thousand sites across the country. The Obama-era regulation "set deadlines for power plants to invest in modern wastewater treatment technology to keep toxic pollution out of local waterways," which was estimated to stop about 1.4 million pounds of "toxic metals and other pollutants" from going into waterways, the newspaper said.
Environmental groups opposed to the changes are warning that they could lead to significant health issues contracted from drinking water, such as "birth defects, cancer and stunted brain development in young children," according to the Times, which said some groups plan to challenge the rollback.
According to the newspaper, the Trump administration plans to say their proposed changes "will remove more pollutants than the Obama-era regulation," an argument the Times said was based on "an analysis that assumes about 30 percent of power plants will voluntarily chose to install more stringent technology."
Facts matter
Fox News departure: Catherine Herridge joins CBS News, saying 'facts matter'
By Brian Stelter
In another major defection from the newsroom of Fox News, Catherine Herridge is joining CBS News as a senior investigative correspondent.
Herridge, Fox's chief intelligence correspondent, was a founding employee of Fox News in 1996 and a leader in the network's Washington bureau. She was in talks to join CBS before Shep Smith, also a founding Fox employee, resigned on October 11 in the middle of a multi-year contract, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
Herridge's Fox contract expired over the summer. Fox wanted her to renew, but knew her exit was a possibility, one of the sources said. Friday will be her last day.
In a statement released through Fox, Herridge thanked Fox patriarch Rupert Murdoch "for the opportunity to cover the most impactful stories of the last 23 years, most recently the Special Counsel report and impeachment inquiry. I have received great personal satisfaction from mentoring the next generation of reporters and producers and sharing my journalistic values — that facts matter and enterprise reporting will always win the day."
In a statement released through CBS, Herridge also invoked the importance of facts, but in a way that could be interpreted as a criticism of Fox: "CBS News has always placed a premium on enterprise journalism and powerful investigations," she said. "I feel privileged to join a team where facts and storytelling will always matter."
CBS said she will begin her new role in November.
"She will report original investigations and cover national security and intelligence matters that impact the country," the network said.
Herridge is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from Fox in the Trump age.
Some journalists at the network have complained about a lack of space for real reporting and described feeling squeezed out by the right-wing talk shows that President Trump and his supporters prefer.
It is unknown whether Herridge felt those frustrations. She frequently appeared on Fox's opinion shows with her reporting, as well as daytime newscasts.
Fox News president Jay Wallace recently pushed back on the assertions that Fox's news operation is being minimized, saying, "Journalism is a huge part of the mandate here."
Smith's 3 p.m. time slot is being filled by a rotating cast of Fox's news anchors. Wallace told Variety magazine that a new anchor will likely be named next year.
Herridge's intel beat will similarly be filled by a rotation of DC-based correspondents, according to Fox.
By Brian Stelter
In another major defection from the newsroom of Fox News, Catherine Herridge is joining CBS News as a senior investigative correspondent.
Herridge, Fox's chief intelligence correspondent, was a founding employee of Fox News in 1996 and a leader in the network's Washington bureau. She was in talks to join CBS before Shep Smith, also a founding Fox employee, resigned on October 11 in the middle of a multi-year contract, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
Herridge's Fox contract expired over the summer. Fox wanted her to renew, but knew her exit was a possibility, one of the sources said. Friday will be her last day.
In a statement released through Fox, Herridge thanked Fox patriarch Rupert Murdoch "for the opportunity to cover the most impactful stories of the last 23 years, most recently the Special Counsel report and impeachment inquiry. I have received great personal satisfaction from mentoring the next generation of reporters and producers and sharing my journalistic values — that facts matter and enterprise reporting will always win the day."
In a statement released through CBS, Herridge also invoked the importance of facts, but in a way that could be interpreted as a criticism of Fox: "CBS News has always placed a premium on enterprise journalism and powerful investigations," she said. "I feel privileged to join a team where facts and storytelling will always matter."
CBS said she will begin her new role in November.
"She will report original investigations and cover national security and intelligence matters that impact the country," the network said.
Herridge is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from Fox in the Trump age.
Some journalists at the network have complained about a lack of space for real reporting and described feeling squeezed out by the right-wing talk shows that President Trump and his supporters prefer.
It is unknown whether Herridge felt those frustrations. She frequently appeared on Fox's opinion shows with her reporting, as well as daytime newscasts.
Fox News president Jay Wallace recently pushed back on the assertions that Fox's news operation is being minimized, saying, "Journalism is a huge part of the mandate here."
Smith's 3 p.m. time slot is being filled by a rotating cast of Fox's news anchors. Wallace told Variety magazine that a new anchor will likely be named next year.
Herridge's intel beat will similarly be filled by a rotation of DC-based correspondents, according to Fox.
Politicians Can Lie........
Civil Rights Groups See Profound Danger in Facebook’s “Politicians Can Lie” Policy
Advocates argue the new policy will endanger minorities and put racial division front and center in 2020.
PEMA LEVY
On September 26, a handful of Facebook executives joined a large group of civil rights advocates in Atlanta for a forum addressing discrimination in technology. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operations officer, sat in the front row. The event signaled a new level of collaboration between Facebook and activists who had long been at odds.
But shortly before the event, Facebook made a decision that hit the civil rights community like a gut punch. Two days ahead of the gathering, Facebook announced it would allow politicians to publish false information in Facebook posts, arguing that politicians’ lies are newsworthy and deserve protections that other Facebook users do not. The organization also said it would not factcheck politicians’ paid ads.
After years of trying to get Facebook to remove hate speech and voter suppression from its platform, the civil rights advocates saw Facebook’s move as establishing a truck-sized loophole in its content rules just to avoid taking down President Donald Trump’s campaign ads. Ahead of 2020, they fear the new guidelines will allow the free flow of racist content that puts people at risk of harm and suppresses votes.
“We were taken a bit aback that not only would this news come out, but they would break this news right before the forum without giving us a heads up or having a discussion,” says Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights group Color of Change, which organized the event, noting that the decision was made despite previous calls from his organization and others for Facebook to assess the impact of its decisions on minorities before implementation.
The lack of communication over the policy led to tense moments and anger at the gathering, just as advocates felt historic progress was being made. Henry Fernandez, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, accused Facebook from the stage of inventing the policy to avoid a confrontation with Trump. “Because Facebook does not want to say this is really about Trump, it has extended this protection to all elected officials,” Fernandez said. “So now if you are a school board member or sheriff in a small town, you can say the most vile things on Facebook because 300 people voted for you? That’s bad policy, made in fear that conservatives will say Facebook is silencing Trump.”
The reaction from Facebook representatives in Atlanta was that feedback was welcome and that the policy was still evolving, according to advocates who attended. But in the weeks following the forum Zuckerberg has doubled down and defended the new rule multiple times, even as its contours remain hazy and lawmakers and some Facebook employees urge him to reconsider.
Civil rights advocates believe the new policy, which Zuckerberg says is to preserve free speech, has dangerous implications. At a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee last week, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg whether a member of the American Nazi Party running for office could post hate speech that would be taken down if posted by someone who wasn’t a candidate. Zuckerberg dodged the question, but Casten, who pointed out that a Nazi actually ran for Congress in his home state last year, had highlighted how the rule could become a loophole allowing fascist propaganda. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) then asked Zuckerberg if she could purchase Facebook ads falsely accusing her colleagues of taking certain votes. Zuckerberg said “probably.”
Facebook has set some limits to this hands-off policy. In a major speech at Georgetown University defending the rule, Zuckerberg said “there are exceptions, and even for politicians we don’t allow content that incites violence or risks imminent harm—and of course we don’t allow voter suppression.” Those exceptions mean that Facebook has put itself in the position of deciding whether any given post or ad from a politician incites violence, risks imminent harm, or suppresses votes.
Just last week, a state senator in North Dakota posted a picture of what he claimed was Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) hoisting a gun at an Al Qaeda training camp. “She is trying to get this picture blocked,” Republican Oley Larsen wrote on Facebook. “Share it everywhere.” In another post, Larsen called Omar a “terrorist.” While the image has been widely tied to Omar, it actually depicts a 1978 Somali military training exercise. (Omar was born in 1982.) Larsen came under pressure from his own party and ultimately removed the posts after acknowledging they contained falsehoods, but the posts were permissible under Facebook’s rule. A Facebook spokeswoman, Ruchika Budhraja, confirmed that the company would not have deleted the material had it stayed up, but would have factchecked it, labeled it false, and demoted it so that fewer people could view it. Budhraja says the company’s newsworthiness policy requires a case-by-case balancing of what it perceives is important for the public to see and the risk of harm.
Though Facebook didn’t plan to remove Larsen’s post as an imminent threat, Omar disagreed. She tweeted that Larsen’s post is “designed to stir up hate and violence” and was “threatening my life.” Omar, who is among the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, is a frequent target of caustic attacks from President Trump and the far right. That invective has come with multiple death threats, and she has been forced to travel with an increased security detail.
Trump has targeted the representative not just in speeches and tweets, but also in Facebook ads in which Trump’s campaign says that Omar is anti-Semitic and suggests she is sympathetic to terrorists. “The Democratic Party has sunk so low that they’re embracing Anti Semite Ilhan Omar, who recently minimized the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as ‘some people did something,’” a Trump campaign ad this spring said, referring to an out-of-context line from a speech Omar gave about being Muslim in America after 9/11.
“False ads, false speech, misinformation by politicians is not just about a lie: It’s endangering people’s lives,” says Madihha Ahussain of Muslim Advocates, a civil rights group that has been pushing Facebook for years to remove anti-Muslim groups and content. “They’re really missing the boat.”
Advocates have also been critical of Facebook for allowing Trump’s campaign to publish more than 2,000 ads using the word “invasion” to paint a picture of menacing immigrants storming across the Southern border. “That language is used very specifically by the El Paso shooter, and it’s also used by the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh,” says Fernandez, who co-chairs Change the Terms, a coalition pushing tech companies to fight hate speech. According to Fernandez, Facebook’s decision to allow the language means “the standard that they’re using seems to go beyond the standard that’s actually used by mass killers who are anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, or white nationalist, or anti-Latino.”
“This policy allows politicians to use dangerous speech that history has shown leads to mass killings,” warns Fernandez, who points out that leaders from Hitler to Rwanda’s Léon Mugesera have used such language “to dehumanize minorities before mass killings.”
On a practical level, Zuckerberg and top company officials don’t yet appear to fully grasp the difficulty of carrying out the new policy. In 2011, political scientist Jennifer Lawless estimated that there are more than 500,000 elected officials in the United States, from Congress to county sheriffs to local water boards. Add in the candidates who run against them in both general elections and primaries, and there could easily be over a million Facebook users now entrusted with a special ability to spread lies.
On a press call last week, BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz asked Zuckerberg about this very point: “Can anyone just start running for their local school board and then start running ads with misinformation?” The answer was basically yes, as long as they register as a candidate, Facebook will consider that person a candidate under the policy.
“Facebook is saying: If you are a politician who wishes to peddle in lies, distortion and not-so-subtle racial appeals, welcome to our platform,” Vanita Gupta, who runs the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, wrote in a Politico op-ed criticizing the policy. This policy, she argued, sets the stage for politicians to stir up disinformation and racial division as part of their 2020 election strategies. “Free expression is a core principle of our democracy. But so are fair elections.”
For years, Facebook has had a fraught relationship with civil rights groups, which have sued the company for violating federal civil rights laws and lobbied an intransigent Facebook to take discrimination seriously on the platform. Last November, the dialogue deteriorated when the New York Times reported that Facebook had hired a Republican public relations firm to undermine Color of Change. Amid a cascade of bad press, Facebook signaled a renewed dedication to working with civil rights groups. Sandberg took a more visible role in this effort, overseeing an audit of the company’s impact on civil rights, which is scheduled to wrap up in the next few months.
Over the last year, advocates have supported new efforts by the company to tackle voter suppression and hate speech, while cautioning that much more needs to be done. Color of Change has continued to push for Zuckerberg to leave Facebook’s board, where his outsized voting power gives him virtually total control over a company whose user base outnumbers Christianity. Still, with the ice melting, Color of Change and Facebook set out to jointly host the Atlanta forum. “For so many years, all these conversations would happen behind closed doors, they would be off the record, we would be signing NDAs,” says Ahussain, referring to Facebook’s practice of having visitors to its offices sign non-disclosure agreements. “This is the first of its kind with the civil rights community and Facebook coming together in this way in a public setting.”
The decision to allow politicians to publish false information wasn’t the only step by Facebook that threw cold water on the forum. On October 14, Politico revealed that Zuckerberg hosted a series of dinners at his home for conservative personalities, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and podcaster Ben Shapiro. The effort, according to Politico, is an attempt to appease Trump, who believes Facebook censors conservatives—an accusation without evidence—and ward off regulation from his Justice Department. The story revealed that while civil rights advocates were enjoying access to Sandberg, the right was going straight to Zuckerberg, and being wined and dined.
“As far as we know, he hasn’t ever had meetings like this with advocates representing impacted communities,” says Ahussain, adding that at “the town hall, Sheryl Sandberg was there, but Mark Zuckerberg was not.”
Zuckerberg has framed his decision not to factcheck politicians’ ads as in keeping with the free speech afforded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass, both name-checked in his Georgetown speech. But when it comes to the policy, it’s unclear if he discussed it with anyone with civil rights expertise. While Budhraja, the Facebook spokeswoman, would not say whether Zuckerberg has ever met in-person with civil rights advocates, she said the company had weighed civil rights when designing the newsworthiness exception and that Zuckerberg had consulted civil rights advocates on the Georgetown speech, but would not elaborate on either claim. According to the Washington Post, Gupta at the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights expressed concerns about the policies in a call with Zuckerberg before the speech, arguing the company lacked the civil rights expertise to make responsible decisions. Zuckerberg reportedly responded that he had “several people from the Obama White House.” It’s unclear if either this conversation with Gupta or the presence of former Obama employees is what Facebook is referring to when it says it has involved the civil rights community in the creation of these policies.
“Regardless of what Mark Zuckerberg will say about the First Amendment, he is willing to allow politicians to lie, to cheat, and to suppress votes because he’s afraid of the Trump Justice Department and potential regulation,” argues Robinson. “And he’s willing to go down in history that way.”
Advocates argue the new policy will endanger minorities and put racial division front and center in 2020.
PEMA LEVY
On September 26, a handful of Facebook executives joined a large group of civil rights advocates in Atlanta for a forum addressing discrimination in technology. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operations officer, sat in the front row. The event signaled a new level of collaboration between Facebook and activists who had long been at odds.
But shortly before the event, Facebook made a decision that hit the civil rights community like a gut punch. Two days ahead of the gathering, Facebook announced it would allow politicians to publish false information in Facebook posts, arguing that politicians’ lies are newsworthy and deserve protections that other Facebook users do not. The organization also said it would not factcheck politicians’ paid ads.
After years of trying to get Facebook to remove hate speech and voter suppression from its platform, the civil rights advocates saw Facebook’s move as establishing a truck-sized loophole in its content rules just to avoid taking down President Donald Trump’s campaign ads. Ahead of 2020, they fear the new guidelines will allow the free flow of racist content that puts people at risk of harm and suppresses votes.
“We were taken a bit aback that not only would this news come out, but they would break this news right before the forum without giving us a heads up or having a discussion,” says Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights group Color of Change, which organized the event, noting that the decision was made despite previous calls from his organization and others for Facebook to assess the impact of its decisions on minorities before implementation.
The lack of communication over the policy led to tense moments and anger at the gathering, just as advocates felt historic progress was being made. Henry Fernandez, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, accused Facebook from the stage of inventing the policy to avoid a confrontation with Trump. “Because Facebook does not want to say this is really about Trump, it has extended this protection to all elected officials,” Fernandez said. “So now if you are a school board member or sheriff in a small town, you can say the most vile things on Facebook because 300 people voted for you? That’s bad policy, made in fear that conservatives will say Facebook is silencing Trump.”
The reaction from Facebook representatives in Atlanta was that feedback was welcome and that the policy was still evolving, according to advocates who attended. But in the weeks following the forum Zuckerberg has doubled down and defended the new rule multiple times, even as its contours remain hazy and lawmakers and some Facebook employees urge him to reconsider.
Civil rights advocates believe the new policy, which Zuckerberg says is to preserve free speech, has dangerous implications. At a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee last week, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg whether a member of the American Nazi Party running for office could post hate speech that would be taken down if posted by someone who wasn’t a candidate. Zuckerberg dodged the question, but Casten, who pointed out that a Nazi actually ran for Congress in his home state last year, had highlighted how the rule could become a loophole allowing fascist propaganda. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) then asked Zuckerberg if she could purchase Facebook ads falsely accusing her colleagues of taking certain votes. Zuckerberg said “probably.”
Facebook has set some limits to this hands-off policy. In a major speech at Georgetown University defending the rule, Zuckerberg said “there are exceptions, and even for politicians we don’t allow content that incites violence or risks imminent harm—and of course we don’t allow voter suppression.” Those exceptions mean that Facebook has put itself in the position of deciding whether any given post or ad from a politician incites violence, risks imminent harm, or suppresses votes.
Just last week, a state senator in North Dakota posted a picture of what he claimed was Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) hoisting a gun at an Al Qaeda training camp. “She is trying to get this picture blocked,” Republican Oley Larsen wrote on Facebook. “Share it everywhere.” In another post, Larsen called Omar a “terrorist.” While the image has been widely tied to Omar, it actually depicts a 1978 Somali military training exercise. (Omar was born in 1982.) Larsen came under pressure from his own party and ultimately removed the posts after acknowledging they contained falsehoods, but the posts were permissible under Facebook’s rule. A Facebook spokeswoman, Ruchika Budhraja, confirmed that the company would not have deleted the material had it stayed up, but would have factchecked it, labeled it false, and demoted it so that fewer people could view it. Budhraja says the company’s newsworthiness policy requires a case-by-case balancing of what it perceives is important for the public to see and the risk of harm.
Though Facebook didn’t plan to remove Larsen’s post as an imminent threat, Omar disagreed. She tweeted that Larsen’s post is “designed to stir up hate and violence” and was “threatening my life.” Omar, who is among the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, is a frequent target of caustic attacks from President Trump and the far right. That invective has come with multiple death threats, and she has been forced to travel with an increased security detail.
Trump has targeted the representative not just in speeches and tweets, but also in Facebook ads in which Trump’s campaign says that Omar is anti-Semitic and suggests she is sympathetic to terrorists. “The Democratic Party has sunk so low that they’re embracing Anti Semite Ilhan Omar, who recently minimized the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as ‘some people did something,’” a Trump campaign ad this spring said, referring to an out-of-context line from a speech Omar gave about being Muslim in America after 9/11.
“False ads, false speech, misinformation by politicians is not just about a lie: It’s endangering people’s lives,” says Madihha Ahussain of Muslim Advocates, a civil rights group that has been pushing Facebook for years to remove anti-Muslim groups and content. “They’re really missing the boat.”
Advocates have also been critical of Facebook for allowing Trump’s campaign to publish more than 2,000 ads using the word “invasion” to paint a picture of menacing immigrants storming across the Southern border. “That language is used very specifically by the El Paso shooter, and it’s also used by the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh,” says Fernandez, who co-chairs Change the Terms, a coalition pushing tech companies to fight hate speech. According to Fernandez, Facebook’s decision to allow the language means “the standard that they’re using seems to go beyond the standard that’s actually used by mass killers who are anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, or white nationalist, or anti-Latino.”
“This policy allows politicians to use dangerous speech that history has shown leads to mass killings,” warns Fernandez, who points out that leaders from Hitler to Rwanda’s Léon Mugesera have used such language “to dehumanize minorities before mass killings.”
On a practical level, Zuckerberg and top company officials don’t yet appear to fully grasp the difficulty of carrying out the new policy. In 2011, political scientist Jennifer Lawless estimated that there are more than 500,000 elected officials in the United States, from Congress to county sheriffs to local water boards. Add in the candidates who run against them in both general elections and primaries, and there could easily be over a million Facebook users now entrusted with a special ability to spread lies.
On a press call last week, BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz asked Zuckerberg about this very point: “Can anyone just start running for their local school board and then start running ads with misinformation?” The answer was basically yes, as long as they register as a candidate, Facebook will consider that person a candidate under the policy.
“Facebook is saying: If you are a politician who wishes to peddle in lies, distortion and not-so-subtle racial appeals, welcome to our platform,” Vanita Gupta, who runs the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, wrote in a Politico op-ed criticizing the policy. This policy, she argued, sets the stage for politicians to stir up disinformation and racial division as part of their 2020 election strategies. “Free expression is a core principle of our democracy. But so are fair elections.”
For years, Facebook has had a fraught relationship with civil rights groups, which have sued the company for violating federal civil rights laws and lobbied an intransigent Facebook to take discrimination seriously on the platform. Last November, the dialogue deteriorated when the New York Times reported that Facebook had hired a Republican public relations firm to undermine Color of Change. Amid a cascade of bad press, Facebook signaled a renewed dedication to working with civil rights groups. Sandberg took a more visible role in this effort, overseeing an audit of the company’s impact on civil rights, which is scheduled to wrap up in the next few months.
Over the last year, advocates have supported new efforts by the company to tackle voter suppression and hate speech, while cautioning that much more needs to be done. Color of Change has continued to push for Zuckerberg to leave Facebook’s board, where his outsized voting power gives him virtually total control over a company whose user base outnumbers Christianity. Still, with the ice melting, Color of Change and Facebook set out to jointly host the Atlanta forum. “For so many years, all these conversations would happen behind closed doors, they would be off the record, we would be signing NDAs,” says Ahussain, referring to Facebook’s practice of having visitors to its offices sign non-disclosure agreements. “This is the first of its kind with the civil rights community and Facebook coming together in this way in a public setting.”
The decision to allow politicians to publish false information wasn’t the only step by Facebook that threw cold water on the forum. On October 14, Politico revealed that Zuckerberg hosted a series of dinners at his home for conservative personalities, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and podcaster Ben Shapiro. The effort, according to Politico, is an attempt to appease Trump, who believes Facebook censors conservatives—an accusation without evidence—and ward off regulation from his Justice Department. The story revealed that while civil rights advocates were enjoying access to Sandberg, the right was going straight to Zuckerberg, and being wined and dined.
“As far as we know, he hasn’t ever had meetings like this with advocates representing impacted communities,” says Ahussain, adding that at “the town hall, Sheryl Sandberg was there, but Mark Zuckerberg was not.”
Zuckerberg has framed his decision not to factcheck politicians’ ads as in keeping with the free speech afforded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass, both name-checked in his Georgetown speech. But when it comes to the policy, it’s unclear if he discussed it with anyone with civil rights expertise. While Budhraja, the Facebook spokeswoman, would not say whether Zuckerberg has ever met in-person with civil rights advocates, she said the company had weighed civil rights when designing the newsworthiness exception and that Zuckerberg had consulted civil rights advocates on the Georgetown speech, but would not elaborate on either claim. According to the Washington Post, Gupta at the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights expressed concerns about the policies in a call with Zuckerberg before the speech, arguing the company lacked the civil rights expertise to make responsible decisions. Zuckerberg reportedly responded that he had “several people from the Obama White House.” It’s unclear if either this conversation with Gupta or the presence of former Obama employees is what Facebook is referring to when it says it has involved the civil rights community in the creation of these policies.
“Regardless of what Mark Zuckerberg will say about the First Amendment, he is willing to allow politicians to lie, to cheat, and to suppress votes because he’s afraid of the Trump Justice Department and potential regulation,” argues Robinson. “And he’s willing to go down in history that way.”
Could Be a Nightmare for Orangutan...
How Roger Stone’s Trial Could Be a Nightmare for Donald Trump
Will the proceedings reveal the president lied to Robert Mueller?
DAVID CORN and DAN FRIEDMAN
Impeachment is in the air, as House Democrats focus on the still-growing Ukraine scandal as the reason to move forward with the ultimate political punishment. But the Trump-Russia scandal is about to make its own comeback. On November 5, Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone—the dirty trickster who had for years encouraged Trump to run for president—will go on trial in a federal court in Washington, DC, facing charges that he lied to Congress about his interactions with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, as the organization was publicly disseminating Democratic material stolen by Russian hackers. Stone also was indicted for allegedly obstructing justice and witness-tampering. Though the trial will determine whether Stone tried to bamboozle a congressional investigation, it could answer two bigger questions about the president: Did Trump use (or try to use) Stone as a conduit to WikiLeaks, and did Trump lie to special counsel Robert Mueller? The former might not be illegal; the latter could be a crime.
In the publicly released version of Mueller’s final report, Stone, the flamboyant provocateur and conspiracy theorist, is conspicuously absent. The Justice Department redacted most of the portions of the report that referenced Stone because his trial was pending. So it’s unclear what Mueller had on Stone. But the report contains clues suggesting that the full story of Stone’s involvement in the Trump-Russia scandal goes beyond what’s publicly known—and that it implicates Trump.
As has been already documented, Stone, during the Russian attack on the 2016 election, repeatedly declared he was in contact with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Throughout that stretch, he sent out tweets predicting WikiLeaks would release material that would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s campaign—tweets that reinforced the impression he was in communication with WikiLeaks while it was part of the Russian operation. Stone—who remained in contact with Trump and his campaign after he was ousted from his official role in the Trump 2016 effort—also privately communicated with Guccifer 2.0, an online persona created by the Russian hackers. And Stone repeatedly claimed in public that Moscow had nothing to do with the hack of the Democratic National Committee servers, echoing Moscow’s propaganda. After the Russia scandal exploded, Stone changed his story and insisted that he had not been in direct touch with WikiLeaks and Assange. That is, he has essentially said he was lying and exaggerating during the 2016 campaign. He maintained it had all been “posture, bluff, hype.”
Yet Mueller’s report tantalizingly suggests that, in 2016, Stone directly interacted with Trump about WikiLeaks and its plans to release the documents pilfered by the Russian cyberthieves.
This shows that Trump sought inside information on what material WikiLeaks had and what it intended to do with the stuff. And it’s clear that in this tight campaign circle of Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, and Trump, there was at least one other player—whose name was redacted—whom the campaign was relying on to find out what Assange was up to. At one point, according to the report, Trump apparently spoke to this person or someone else about what WikiLeaks had coming.
Beyond the Mueller report, the New York Times reported that Stone in 2016 traded emails with Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign CEO after Manafort departed. In those emails, Stone purported to have inside information on Assange’s plans for releasing the hacked Democratic emails. WikiLeaks would release “a load every week going forward,” Stone told Bannon on October 4, 2016.
Both Bannon and Gates are expected to testify as prosecution witnesses in Stone’s trial—an indication the proceeding will confirm that Stone was in contact with Trump campaign higher-ups about WikiLeaks during the election. Part of the federal case against Stone is that he lied to lawmakers when he said he had not communicated with the Trump campaign about what he knew (or claimed to know) about WikiLeaks’ plans. Stone’s and Gates’ testimony could address that and show whether the Trump campaign—and Trump himself—saw Stone as a go-between with WikiLeaks or a source of inside skinny on the Russia-WikiLeaks operation against Hillary Clinton. A person familiar with Bannon’s role in the trial says Bannon expects to testify that he communicated with Stone and that Stone “was portraying himself to Bannon as someone who was in touch with Assange.”
Back to the mystery man in the redacted paragraph from the Mueller report. It’s tough to think of anyone else in the Trump-Russia saga who would fit this bill other than Stone. The reason provided for the redactions in this section—the information could harm an “ongoing matter”—is a strong hint that Stone’s name appears under those blacked-out stretches. If so, that would mean Stone had been passing information to Trump and the campaign about WikiLeaks. In that case, one question would be if that information came from WikiLeaks itself—or if Stone had received it from another source or was just pretending to know more than he did.
Why does this matter? There are several reasons. First, if Trump or his senior campaign aides thought Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks—whether or not he actually was—and they were receiving information from him related to WikiLeaks, that would mean they believed then that the Trump campaign had a back-channel contact to WikiLeaks as it participated in the Russian operation. Trump has long shouted there was “no collusion.” But perhaps Trump thought at the time that he and his campaign were colluding. After all, a significant Trump adviser consorting with WikiLeaks at this point could be construed as some sort of collusion.
Stone’s trial could yield evidence (beyond his emails with Bannon) indicating whether Stone was talking to Trump or anyone else in the campaign about WikiLeaks—and whether he was viewed within Trump’s inner circle as a conduit to Assange. If Trump and the campaign in any way had tried to reach out to WikiLeaks through Stone while WikiLeaks was facilitating a Russian assault on an American election, that would be a big deal.
The Stone trial could also produce material that challenges what Trump told the special counsel. The president refused to be interviewed by Mueller, but Trump agreed to answer a set of written questions—as long as the queries only covered what happened during the campaign, not any activity that occurred after he became president (meaning actions related to the allegations that Trump obstructed justice). In the questions Mueller submitted to Trump, he asked several times about Stone, including these three:
Were you told of anyone associated with you or your campaign, including Roger Stone, having any discussions, directly or indirectly with WikiLeaks…regarding the content or timing of released of hacked emails?
Did Mr. Stone ever discuss WikiLeaks with you, or, as far as you were aware, with anyone else associated with the campaign?
Did Mr. Stone at any time inform you about contacts he had with WikiLeaks or any intermediary of WikiLeaks, or about forthcoming release of information?
In his written responses, Trump made these two statements:
I do not recall being told during the campaign that Roger Stone or anyone associated with my campaign had discussions with any of the entities named in the question regarding the content or timing of release of hacked emails.
I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with [Stone], nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign.
Trump acknowledged that he had spoken with Stone “from time to time during the campaign,” but the man who has often boasted he has a great memory added that he had “no recollection of the specifics of any conversations he with Stone between June 1, 2016, and Election Day.”
Go back and read the paragraph from the Mueller report above. Who did Trump speak to on the phone during the ride to the airport? And when Manafort was under pressure to get information on WikiLeaks, who did he turn to? Who was pressing Manafort to find out WikiLeaks’ plans? Could it be someone other than Trump? Unless there’s a character in the story who has yet to be revealed, it seems probable that Stone was the guy trying to gather information from WikiLeaks for the Trump campaign—and that Trump knew about this.
Will the Stone trial provide answers? A lawyer for Stone did not respond to questions from Mother Jones. But any material presented in the courtroom that fills in the redactions would go far toward resolving all this. The evidence could also reveal whether Trump lied to the special counsel—which would be obstruction of justice and a crime. (Mueller’s final report, however, noted that Justice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president.) Throughout the Russia scandal, Trump has been caught in assorted lies, as he has continuously denied or dismissed the Russian attack that helped him become president. That scandal may be taking a back seat to the Ukraine controversy fueling the ongoing impeachment inquiry (though, in a way, the Russia affair led to the Ukraine scandal, with Trump pressing the Ukrainian president to investigate—and prove—a nutty conspiracy theory that claimed Moscow did not hack the 2016 election). This trial of a conniving Trump confidante who specializes in the political dark arts will be a reminder of the original scandal of the Trump administration that has tainted and undermined his presidency, and it could add another big lie—and a possible crime—to Trump’s long record of wrongdoing.
Will the proceedings reveal the president lied to Robert Mueller?
DAVID CORN and DAN FRIEDMAN
Impeachment is in the air, as House Democrats focus on the still-growing Ukraine scandal as the reason to move forward with the ultimate political punishment. But the Trump-Russia scandal is about to make its own comeback. On November 5, Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone—the dirty trickster who had for years encouraged Trump to run for president—will go on trial in a federal court in Washington, DC, facing charges that he lied to Congress about his interactions with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, as the organization was publicly disseminating Democratic material stolen by Russian hackers. Stone also was indicted for allegedly obstructing justice and witness-tampering. Though the trial will determine whether Stone tried to bamboozle a congressional investigation, it could answer two bigger questions about the president: Did Trump use (or try to use) Stone as a conduit to WikiLeaks, and did Trump lie to special counsel Robert Mueller? The former might not be illegal; the latter could be a crime.
In the publicly released version of Mueller’s final report, Stone, the flamboyant provocateur and conspiracy theorist, is conspicuously absent. The Justice Department redacted most of the portions of the report that referenced Stone because his trial was pending. So it’s unclear what Mueller had on Stone. But the report contains clues suggesting that the full story of Stone’s involvement in the Trump-Russia scandal goes beyond what’s publicly known—and that it implicates Trump.
As has been already documented, Stone, during the Russian attack on the 2016 election, repeatedly declared he was in contact with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Throughout that stretch, he sent out tweets predicting WikiLeaks would release material that would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s campaign—tweets that reinforced the impression he was in communication with WikiLeaks while it was part of the Russian operation. Stone—who remained in contact with Trump and his campaign after he was ousted from his official role in the Trump 2016 effort—also privately communicated with Guccifer 2.0, an online persona created by the Russian hackers. And Stone repeatedly claimed in public that Moscow had nothing to do with the hack of the Democratic National Committee servers, echoing Moscow’s propaganda. After the Russia scandal exploded, Stone changed his story and insisted that he had not been in direct touch with WikiLeaks and Assange. That is, he has essentially said he was lying and exaggerating during the 2016 campaign. He maintained it had all been “posture, bluff, hype.”
Yet Mueller’s report tantalizingly suggests that, in 2016, Stone directly interacted with Trump about WikiLeaks and its plans to release the documents pilfered by the Russian cyberthieves.
This shows that Trump sought inside information on what material WikiLeaks had and what it intended to do with the stuff. And it’s clear that in this tight campaign circle of Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager, and Trump, there was at least one other player—whose name was redacted—whom the campaign was relying on to find out what Assange was up to. At one point, according to the report, Trump apparently spoke to this person or someone else about what WikiLeaks had coming.
Beyond the Mueller report, the New York Times reported that Stone in 2016 traded emails with Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign CEO after Manafort departed. In those emails, Stone purported to have inside information on Assange’s plans for releasing the hacked Democratic emails. WikiLeaks would release “a load every week going forward,” Stone told Bannon on October 4, 2016.
Both Bannon and Gates are expected to testify as prosecution witnesses in Stone’s trial—an indication the proceeding will confirm that Stone was in contact with Trump campaign higher-ups about WikiLeaks during the election. Part of the federal case against Stone is that he lied to lawmakers when he said he had not communicated with the Trump campaign about what he knew (or claimed to know) about WikiLeaks’ plans. Stone’s and Gates’ testimony could address that and show whether the Trump campaign—and Trump himself—saw Stone as a go-between with WikiLeaks or a source of inside skinny on the Russia-WikiLeaks operation against Hillary Clinton. A person familiar with Bannon’s role in the trial says Bannon expects to testify that he communicated with Stone and that Stone “was portraying himself to Bannon as someone who was in touch with Assange.”
Back to the mystery man in the redacted paragraph from the Mueller report. It’s tough to think of anyone else in the Trump-Russia saga who would fit this bill other than Stone. The reason provided for the redactions in this section—the information could harm an “ongoing matter”—is a strong hint that Stone’s name appears under those blacked-out stretches. If so, that would mean Stone had been passing information to Trump and the campaign about WikiLeaks. In that case, one question would be if that information came from WikiLeaks itself—or if Stone had received it from another source or was just pretending to know more than he did.
Why does this matter? There are several reasons. First, if Trump or his senior campaign aides thought Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks—whether or not he actually was—and they were receiving information from him related to WikiLeaks, that would mean they believed then that the Trump campaign had a back-channel contact to WikiLeaks as it participated in the Russian operation. Trump has long shouted there was “no collusion.” But perhaps Trump thought at the time that he and his campaign were colluding. After all, a significant Trump adviser consorting with WikiLeaks at this point could be construed as some sort of collusion.
Stone’s trial could yield evidence (beyond his emails with Bannon) indicating whether Stone was talking to Trump or anyone else in the campaign about WikiLeaks—and whether he was viewed within Trump’s inner circle as a conduit to Assange. If Trump and the campaign in any way had tried to reach out to WikiLeaks through Stone while WikiLeaks was facilitating a Russian assault on an American election, that would be a big deal.
The Stone trial could also produce material that challenges what Trump told the special counsel. The president refused to be interviewed by Mueller, but Trump agreed to answer a set of written questions—as long as the queries only covered what happened during the campaign, not any activity that occurred after he became president (meaning actions related to the allegations that Trump obstructed justice). In the questions Mueller submitted to Trump, he asked several times about Stone, including these three:
Were you told of anyone associated with you or your campaign, including Roger Stone, having any discussions, directly or indirectly with WikiLeaks…regarding the content or timing of released of hacked emails?
Did Mr. Stone ever discuss WikiLeaks with you, or, as far as you were aware, with anyone else associated with the campaign?
Did Mr. Stone at any time inform you about contacts he had with WikiLeaks or any intermediary of WikiLeaks, or about forthcoming release of information?
In his written responses, Trump made these two statements:
I do not recall being told during the campaign that Roger Stone or anyone associated with my campaign had discussions with any of the entities named in the question regarding the content or timing of release of hacked emails.
I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with [Stone], nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign.
Trump acknowledged that he had spoken with Stone “from time to time during the campaign,” but the man who has often boasted he has a great memory added that he had “no recollection of the specifics of any conversations he with Stone between June 1, 2016, and Election Day.”
Go back and read the paragraph from the Mueller report above. Who did Trump speak to on the phone during the ride to the airport? And when Manafort was under pressure to get information on WikiLeaks, who did he turn to? Who was pressing Manafort to find out WikiLeaks’ plans? Could it be someone other than Trump? Unless there’s a character in the story who has yet to be revealed, it seems probable that Stone was the guy trying to gather information from WikiLeaks for the Trump campaign—and that Trump knew about this.
Will the Stone trial provide answers? A lawyer for Stone did not respond to questions from Mother Jones. But any material presented in the courtroom that fills in the redactions would go far toward resolving all this. The evidence could also reveal whether Trump lied to the special counsel—which would be obstruction of justice and a crime. (Mueller’s final report, however, noted that Justice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president.) Throughout the Russia scandal, Trump has been caught in assorted lies, as he has continuously denied or dismissed the Russian attack that helped him become president. That scandal may be taking a back seat to the Ukraine controversy fueling the ongoing impeachment inquiry (though, in a way, the Russia affair led to the Ukraine scandal, with Trump pressing the Ukrainian president to investigate—and prove—a nutty conspiracy theory that claimed Moscow did not hack the 2016 election). This trial of a conniving Trump confidante who specializes in the political dark arts will be a reminder of the original scandal of the Trump administration that has tainted and undermined his presidency, and it could add another big lie—and a possible crime—to Trump’s long record of wrongdoing.
Defeat the Most Powerful Republican
Inside the Campaign to Defeat the Most Powerful Republican in Virginia
Thanks to redistricting and a new interest in gun control, Democrats hope to take back Virginia. And it all starts with the race to unseat the GOP speaker.
MATT COHEN
Sheila Bynum-Coleman is nervous and running late. It’s just before 5 p.m. on a sticky summer evening late in August when we pull up in front of her modest suburban house in Chesterfield, Virginia. “I need a few minutes!” Bynum-Coleman tells Rob Silverstein, her 28-year-old campaign manager, when he calls to say we’re outside. He turns to me after hanging up. “It’s OK to be a little late to your own fundraiser,” he says. “Make an entrance.”
A month earlier, Bynum-Coleman, 47, made her entrance into the political spotlight when national political groups jumped into Virginia’s upcoming statehouse elections with a slew of endorsements and millions of dollars in campaign contributions, including more than $250,000 to her campaign. State elections aren’t usually thrust into the national political conversation—especially in an off-year election when there are no presidential or congressional races—but the upcoming ones in Virginia carry a lot of added weight: If Democrats win control of the state’s legislature, it would be the first time the party controlled the full government since 1993. What voters decide in November won’t just shape the state’s political future for the next decade, but could give the country a hint as to what might happen in the 2020 presidential election. Because of the timing and political history of Virginia’s state elections, analysts often see the state as a political indicator for where the country might go next. And in the wake of several mass shootings this year, the debate over gun control has become a leading issue for voters nationwide and reshaped the political implications of many national and local campaigns. That’s especially true in Virginia, where a shooter entered a municipal building in Virginia Beach in May and killed 12 people.
And at the center of it all is Bynum-Coleman, a real estate agent, developer, and mother of five who has made gun control a central message in her campaign against the most powerful Republican in the state, Kirk Cox.
As speaker of the GOP-controlled House, the 62-year-old Cox, who has represented Virginia’s 66th district since 1990, has thwarted Virginia Democrats’ push to pass several pieces of progressive legislation—even ones with bipartisan support. He’s kept the state’s Equal Rights Amendment in legislative purgatory, blocked measures to ban housing and workplace discrimination for LGBTQ residents, and opposed raising the state’s minimum wage. And, in a move that reinforced Bynum-Coleman decision to run against him, he prevented gun control legislation from passing.
Strengthening gun control laws has long been an uphill climb for Virginia Democrats. The state is home to the National Rifle Association, whose vast financial influence in American politics was on full display during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Historically, the NRA hasn’t had to flex its political muscle much in the Old Dominion state, but that all changed after the Virginia Beach shooting. A month after the shooting, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam convened a special session to pass gun control legislation, but the session lasted all of 90 minutes after the Republican majority of the Assembly—with Cox at the helm—voted to adjourn the session without passing any gun control measures. All day long, the NRA was there, posted up inside Cox’s office.
But now Cox’s reign is under threat. Not just by Bynum-Coleman’s ability to attract more national support than a typical state-level campaign—she’s raised more than a million dollars (though trails Cox’s haul of $1.5 million) and received endorsements from organizations like Moms Demand Action, Brady United Against Gun Violence, the Human Rights Campaign, and EMILY’s List—but because the state’s previous legislative boundaries were tossed out by federal courts due to racial gerrymandering, a decision recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. For Cox’s district, that’s meant a big shift of voters from predominantly white and Republican Richmond suburbs to the more racially and politically diverse communities of Wilkinson Terrace, Matoaca, and Bynum-Coleman’s community of Chesterfield. Using data from the US Census Bureau and the Virginia Division of Legislative Services, the Virginia Public Access Project—a nonpartisan data organization dedicated to Virginia politics—predicts a 32-point shift in Cox’s district, pushing it to 53.2 percent Democratic voters and 46.8 percent Republican.
It is one of six GOP districts that have been redrawn to benefit Democrats, threatening to erase the GOP’s three-seat majority in the House. Cox is feeling the heat: For the first time in decades, he took to the debate stage to convince voters that he should stay in office. “We have gotten to where we are in Virginia, I think, because of very balanced, sound policies,” Cox said during the debate, where he avoided directly answering questions about gun control legislation and climate change. “It’s the Republican majority that’s trying to keep those.”
The aspiration among the state’s well-heeled Democrats to undo that majority was palpable and optimistic at Bynum-Coleman’s August fundraiser, which she eventually arrived at as stragglers were rushing to check in. The venue, in a posh clubhouse in a neighboring district, was packed with dozens of Democratic fundraisers eager to mingle with their party’s new rising star. Bynum-Coleman represents the new face of the state’s resurgent Democratic Party—a young black woman who entered the political arena because she was fed up by a lack of progress she was seeing in her community.
“I’m running against the most powerful Republican in the state of Virginia, and this election is going to impact people’s lives,” Bynum-Coleman said with calm confidence. “There’s some nights I can’t sleep. When I knock on people’s doors and they tell me they need me to win, that’s not something I take lightly. That’s big to me.”
The push to strengthen Virginia’s gun control laws is at the center of the state’s shifting political identity, and there’s a lot of hope that these legislative elections will reflect that. According to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll, gun policy is the top issue for Virginia voters. Other statewide polls show strong bipartisan support for passing gun control measures, including universal background checks, limits on concealed carry, and a ban on assault-style weapons. A poll last year found that 54 percent of voters thought it was more important to control who can buy guns than to protect the rights of gun owners.
“The politics of guns in Virginia is a powerful example of how the state’s political culture has changed very rapidly,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. For decades, he says, Democrats wouldn’t talk about gun control outside of the bluest urban districts because of NRA’s political influence in the state.
But support for gun control has slowly increased in the state since the mass shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech in April 2007 and intensified greatly in the wake of the Virginia Beach shooting. “If the public is moving in a certain direction, you as a politician would be unwise to ignore it,” Farnsworth says.
For Bynum-Coleman, the gun control push is personal. In 2016, her daughter was shot at a party when an argument between two people led to an exchange of gunfire. She survived and made a full recovery, but the experience seriously shook Bynum-Coleman. “Just imagine getting a call in the middle of the night that your child has been shot,” she says with shaky breath when I ask her about the incident. “It was a very traumatic experience.” Earlier, her cousin was shot 23 times in two separate incidents. “Just seeing the gun violence in my community, it’s always been a concern,” she says. “Never knew what I could personally do about it—I just wanted to see something change.”
It’s no coincidence that the NRA set up shop in Virginia in 1993. For decades, the state has been home to some of the loosest gun control laws in the country. That was especially true before 1993, when the state passed a law limiting the number of handguns an individual could purchase in a month. “People would come to Virginia,” Randy Rollins, the former secretary of public safety under Gov. Doug Wilder, told Virginia Public Media earlier this summer. “They could go to a gun dealer. Buy 25, 30 weapons, put them in the back of their car, take them to DC.” That law was repealed in 2012 by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature and Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican who had voted to approve the original law when he was a member of the state’s House in the ’90s.
In recent years, the GOP-led legislature in Virginia, with Cox at the helm, has used its narrow majority to thwart any gun control legislation. In the aftermath of the Virginia Beach shooting, Cox and his fellow Republicans pulled a Mitch McConnell at the special session and refused to vote on any of the gun control bills introduced by both Democrats and Republicans, ending the proceedings after just 90 minutes.
Outside the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond on the morning of the session, Bynum-Coleman joined hundreds of gun control activists demonstrating outside. She was energized by the size of the crowd gathered in the sweltering July heat to demand gun control laws, which far outnumbered the pro-gun contingent, she recalls. But inside the Capitol, a conference room in Cox’s office turned into a de facto war room for NRA officials, who strategized about counter-protest efforts and distributed hundreds of t-shirts and hats to pro-gun demonstrators. Virginia Democrats were stunned by Cox’s move to end the session after just 90 minutes, but the NRA had spent weeks guiding the GOP leadership on how to handle the session, the Washington Post reported. Virginia voters may want tight gun control laws, but the NRA’s grip on the state’s GOP leadership is tighter. So far this election cycle, the NRA—amid its myriad financial struggles and internal turmoil—has spent $273,000 to help state Republicans stay in control, according to VPAP, much more than it has in any previous state election cycle.
The issue of gun control isn’t just a leading concern for the Virginia state elections, but for the upcoming 2020 presidential election, and many national political groups are looking at Virginia as a bellwether. To that effect, national gun control groups have spent a historic amount of money in Virginia. Everytown for Gun Safety has pumped $2.5 million into the state’s 2019 elections, while Giffords, the gun violence prevention research and advocacy group co-founded by former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, just launched a $300,000 digital ad campaign to help its endorsed candidates—including Bynum-Coleman—get elected. Cox, through his political action committee, has received $1,500 from the NRA thus far.
Cox and his GOP colleagues’ control of the Virginia legislature was by design. The oldest legislative body in the Western Hemisphere has ping-ponged back and forth between the two parties for decades, but for the past 20 years, the GOP has controlled its House of Delegates. The state went for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election by more than 5 points, but in the 2017 midterms, Republicans barely held onto the House because of a race that was so close the winner’s name was literally drawn out of a hat.
Democrats in the state had a banner year in 2017, but they probably would have gained more seats had it not been for the gerrymandered maps that Republicans passed in 2011. Though Democrats won the statewide vote for the Assembly by 9 points in 2017, Republicans narrowly maintained control of the body because of district lines that packed majority-black parts of Richmond and Hampton Roads into overwhelmingly Democratic districts. But in 2018, after a years-long court battle, a federal court ruled that the Assembly map was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered and ordered that 11 districts be redrawn, including Cox’s district.
Cox didn’t take the ruling lightly. “The modules selected by the Court target senior Republicans, myself included, without a substantive basis in the law,” he said at the time. “We are confident that the Supreme Court will not allow the remedial map the court appears to be on its way to adopting to stand.” It did, in a 5-4 ruling.
And so, as the Virginia heads into the next redistricting cycle in 2021, the future of Virginia’s legislative maps—and the state’s politics—for the next decade lies in how well the Democratic candidates in those redrawn districts fare on November 5.
With gun control at the center of the political debate, Virginia’s elections have come to be seen as a sort of referendum ahead of 2020, and it has drawn outsize attention. Progressive political groups continue to funnel millions of dollars to Democratic candidates in tight races, and celebrities like Alec Baldwin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Debra Messing, and Mark Ruffalo have endorsed candidates in swing districts. And Bynum-Coleman has made the issue central to her campaign. In late September, Everytown produced a television ad for Bynum-Coleman that pulled no punches in criticizing Cox’s relationship with the NRA: “Kirk Cox cares more about the gun lobby than our families.”
That’s the message she’s been repeating on the fundraising circuit, where people always introduced her with some version of “the future of the Virginia Democratic Party.” At several fundraisers I attended—near her home district in Virginia and in Washington, DC—she told the same stories. How her son with a learning disability struggled to get resources at school, prompting her first run for the state house in 2015. The myriad challenges she’s faced as a black woman. But the one that always elicited dead silence and solemn stares is when she recalls the horror of getting a phone call in the middle of the night that her child has been shot. And then she would follow up the story with the same talking points about how important it is for Virginia to pass stronger gun control laws and how shameful it was that her opponent punted on doing so. And every time she brought it up, her audiences sternly shook their heads in agreement.
Thanks to redistricting and a new interest in gun control, Democrats hope to take back Virginia. And it all starts with the race to unseat the GOP speaker.
MATT COHEN
Sheila Bynum-Coleman is nervous and running late. It’s just before 5 p.m. on a sticky summer evening late in August when we pull up in front of her modest suburban house in Chesterfield, Virginia. “I need a few minutes!” Bynum-Coleman tells Rob Silverstein, her 28-year-old campaign manager, when he calls to say we’re outside. He turns to me after hanging up. “It’s OK to be a little late to your own fundraiser,” he says. “Make an entrance.”
A month earlier, Bynum-Coleman, 47, made her entrance into the political spotlight when national political groups jumped into Virginia’s upcoming statehouse elections with a slew of endorsements and millions of dollars in campaign contributions, including more than $250,000 to her campaign. State elections aren’t usually thrust into the national political conversation—especially in an off-year election when there are no presidential or congressional races—but the upcoming ones in Virginia carry a lot of added weight: If Democrats win control of the state’s legislature, it would be the first time the party controlled the full government since 1993. What voters decide in November won’t just shape the state’s political future for the next decade, but could give the country a hint as to what might happen in the 2020 presidential election. Because of the timing and political history of Virginia’s state elections, analysts often see the state as a political indicator for where the country might go next. And in the wake of several mass shootings this year, the debate over gun control has become a leading issue for voters nationwide and reshaped the political implications of many national and local campaigns. That’s especially true in Virginia, where a shooter entered a municipal building in Virginia Beach in May and killed 12 people.
And at the center of it all is Bynum-Coleman, a real estate agent, developer, and mother of five who has made gun control a central message in her campaign against the most powerful Republican in the state, Kirk Cox.
As speaker of the GOP-controlled House, the 62-year-old Cox, who has represented Virginia’s 66th district since 1990, has thwarted Virginia Democrats’ push to pass several pieces of progressive legislation—even ones with bipartisan support. He’s kept the state’s Equal Rights Amendment in legislative purgatory, blocked measures to ban housing and workplace discrimination for LGBTQ residents, and opposed raising the state’s minimum wage. And, in a move that reinforced Bynum-Coleman decision to run against him, he prevented gun control legislation from passing.
Strengthening gun control laws has long been an uphill climb for Virginia Democrats. The state is home to the National Rifle Association, whose vast financial influence in American politics was on full display during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Historically, the NRA hasn’t had to flex its political muscle much in the Old Dominion state, but that all changed after the Virginia Beach shooting. A month after the shooting, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam convened a special session to pass gun control legislation, but the session lasted all of 90 minutes after the Republican majority of the Assembly—with Cox at the helm—voted to adjourn the session without passing any gun control measures. All day long, the NRA was there, posted up inside Cox’s office.
But now Cox’s reign is under threat. Not just by Bynum-Coleman’s ability to attract more national support than a typical state-level campaign—she’s raised more than a million dollars (though trails Cox’s haul of $1.5 million) and received endorsements from organizations like Moms Demand Action, Brady United Against Gun Violence, the Human Rights Campaign, and EMILY’s List—but because the state’s previous legislative boundaries were tossed out by federal courts due to racial gerrymandering, a decision recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. For Cox’s district, that’s meant a big shift of voters from predominantly white and Republican Richmond suburbs to the more racially and politically diverse communities of Wilkinson Terrace, Matoaca, and Bynum-Coleman’s community of Chesterfield. Using data from the US Census Bureau and the Virginia Division of Legislative Services, the Virginia Public Access Project—a nonpartisan data organization dedicated to Virginia politics—predicts a 32-point shift in Cox’s district, pushing it to 53.2 percent Democratic voters and 46.8 percent Republican.
It is one of six GOP districts that have been redrawn to benefit Democrats, threatening to erase the GOP’s three-seat majority in the House. Cox is feeling the heat: For the first time in decades, he took to the debate stage to convince voters that he should stay in office. “We have gotten to where we are in Virginia, I think, because of very balanced, sound policies,” Cox said during the debate, where he avoided directly answering questions about gun control legislation and climate change. “It’s the Republican majority that’s trying to keep those.”
The aspiration among the state’s well-heeled Democrats to undo that majority was palpable and optimistic at Bynum-Coleman’s August fundraiser, which she eventually arrived at as stragglers were rushing to check in. The venue, in a posh clubhouse in a neighboring district, was packed with dozens of Democratic fundraisers eager to mingle with their party’s new rising star. Bynum-Coleman represents the new face of the state’s resurgent Democratic Party—a young black woman who entered the political arena because she was fed up by a lack of progress she was seeing in her community.
“I’m running against the most powerful Republican in the state of Virginia, and this election is going to impact people’s lives,” Bynum-Coleman said with calm confidence. “There’s some nights I can’t sleep. When I knock on people’s doors and they tell me they need me to win, that’s not something I take lightly. That’s big to me.”
The push to strengthen Virginia’s gun control laws is at the center of the state’s shifting political identity, and there’s a lot of hope that these legislative elections will reflect that. According to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll, gun policy is the top issue for Virginia voters. Other statewide polls show strong bipartisan support for passing gun control measures, including universal background checks, limits on concealed carry, and a ban on assault-style weapons. A poll last year found that 54 percent of voters thought it was more important to control who can buy guns than to protect the rights of gun owners.
“The politics of guns in Virginia is a powerful example of how the state’s political culture has changed very rapidly,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. For decades, he says, Democrats wouldn’t talk about gun control outside of the bluest urban districts because of NRA’s political influence in the state.
But support for gun control has slowly increased in the state since the mass shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech in April 2007 and intensified greatly in the wake of the Virginia Beach shooting. “If the public is moving in a certain direction, you as a politician would be unwise to ignore it,” Farnsworth says.
For Bynum-Coleman, the gun control push is personal. In 2016, her daughter was shot at a party when an argument between two people led to an exchange of gunfire. She survived and made a full recovery, but the experience seriously shook Bynum-Coleman. “Just imagine getting a call in the middle of the night that your child has been shot,” she says with shaky breath when I ask her about the incident. “It was a very traumatic experience.” Earlier, her cousin was shot 23 times in two separate incidents. “Just seeing the gun violence in my community, it’s always been a concern,” she says. “Never knew what I could personally do about it—I just wanted to see something change.”
It’s no coincidence that the NRA set up shop in Virginia in 1993. For decades, the state has been home to some of the loosest gun control laws in the country. That was especially true before 1993, when the state passed a law limiting the number of handguns an individual could purchase in a month. “People would come to Virginia,” Randy Rollins, the former secretary of public safety under Gov. Doug Wilder, told Virginia Public Media earlier this summer. “They could go to a gun dealer. Buy 25, 30 weapons, put them in the back of their car, take them to DC.” That law was repealed in 2012 by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature and Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican who had voted to approve the original law when he was a member of the state’s House in the ’90s.
In recent years, the GOP-led legislature in Virginia, with Cox at the helm, has used its narrow majority to thwart any gun control legislation. In the aftermath of the Virginia Beach shooting, Cox and his fellow Republicans pulled a Mitch McConnell at the special session and refused to vote on any of the gun control bills introduced by both Democrats and Republicans, ending the proceedings after just 90 minutes.
Outside the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond on the morning of the session, Bynum-Coleman joined hundreds of gun control activists demonstrating outside. She was energized by the size of the crowd gathered in the sweltering July heat to demand gun control laws, which far outnumbered the pro-gun contingent, she recalls. But inside the Capitol, a conference room in Cox’s office turned into a de facto war room for NRA officials, who strategized about counter-protest efforts and distributed hundreds of t-shirts and hats to pro-gun demonstrators. Virginia Democrats were stunned by Cox’s move to end the session after just 90 minutes, but the NRA had spent weeks guiding the GOP leadership on how to handle the session, the Washington Post reported. Virginia voters may want tight gun control laws, but the NRA’s grip on the state’s GOP leadership is tighter. So far this election cycle, the NRA—amid its myriad financial struggles and internal turmoil—has spent $273,000 to help state Republicans stay in control, according to VPAP, much more than it has in any previous state election cycle.
The issue of gun control isn’t just a leading concern for the Virginia state elections, but for the upcoming 2020 presidential election, and many national political groups are looking at Virginia as a bellwether. To that effect, national gun control groups have spent a historic amount of money in Virginia. Everytown for Gun Safety has pumped $2.5 million into the state’s 2019 elections, while Giffords, the gun violence prevention research and advocacy group co-founded by former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, just launched a $300,000 digital ad campaign to help its endorsed candidates—including Bynum-Coleman—get elected. Cox, through his political action committee, has received $1,500 from the NRA thus far.
Cox and his GOP colleagues’ control of the Virginia legislature was by design. The oldest legislative body in the Western Hemisphere has ping-ponged back and forth between the two parties for decades, but for the past 20 years, the GOP has controlled its House of Delegates. The state went for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election by more than 5 points, but in the 2017 midterms, Republicans barely held onto the House because of a race that was so close the winner’s name was literally drawn out of a hat.
Democrats in the state had a banner year in 2017, but they probably would have gained more seats had it not been for the gerrymandered maps that Republicans passed in 2011. Though Democrats won the statewide vote for the Assembly by 9 points in 2017, Republicans narrowly maintained control of the body because of district lines that packed majority-black parts of Richmond and Hampton Roads into overwhelmingly Democratic districts. But in 2018, after a years-long court battle, a federal court ruled that the Assembly map was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered and ordered that 11 districts be redrawn, including Cox’s district.
Cox didn’t take the ruling lightly. “The modules selected by the Court target senior Republicans, myself included, without a substantive basis in the law,” he said at the time. “We are confident that the Supreme Court will not allow the remedial map the court appears to be on its way to adopting to stand.” It did, in a 5-4 ruling.
And so, as the Virginia heads into the next redistricting cycle in 2021, the future of Virginia’s legislative maps—and the state’s politics—for the next decade lies in how well the Democratic candidates in those redrawn districts fare on November 5.
With gun control at the center of the political debate, Virginia’s elections have come to be seen as a sort of referendum ahead of 2020, and it has drawn outsize attention. Progressive political groups continue to funnel millions of dollars to Democratic candidates in tight races, and celebrities like Alec Baldwin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Debra Messing, and Mark Ruffalo have endorsed candidates in swing districts. And Bynum-Coleman has made the issue central to her campaign. In late September, Everytown produced a television ad for Bynum-Coleman that pulled no punches in criticizing Cox’s relationship with the NRA: “Kirk Cox cares more about the gun lobby than our families.”
That’s the message she’s been repeating on the fundraising circuit, where people always introduced her with some version of “the future of the Virginia Democratic Party.” At several fundraisers I attended—near her home district in Virginia and in Washington, DC—she told the same stories. How her son with a learning disability struggled to get resources at school, prompting her first run for the state house in 2015. The myriad challenges she’s faced as a black woman. But the one that always elicited dead silence and solemn stares is when she recalls the horror of getting a phone call in the middle of the night that her child has been shot. And then she would follow up the story with the same talking points about how important it is for Virginia to pass stronger gun control laws and how shameful it was that her opponent punted on doing so. And every time she brought it up, her audiences sternly shook their heads in agreement.
Demanded a Quid Pro Quo
Did a House Republican Just Admit That Trump Demanded a Quid Pro Quo?
JEREMY SCHULMAN
Since the beginning of the Ukraine scandal, President Donald Trump has insisted that there was “no quid pro quo” involving his demands that Ukrainian officials investigate his political enemies. The president’s defenders have been particularly aggressive in pushing back against the specific allegation that Trump withheld vital military aid to Ukraine in an effort to secure an investigation of an energy company connected to Joe Biden’s son. But on Thursday, as Congress debated a resolution to formalize the impeachment inquiry, one Republican lawmaker appeared to directly contradict Trump’s defense.
In the middle of a fiery speech attacking Democrats, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said that the president “was doing his job, ensuring that if taxpayer dollars from my constituents and yours was going to the other side of the world, that it would be paired with a commitment to crack down on corruption at all levels—no matter who someone’s daddy is or what their political ambitions are.”
That’s a clear reference to Biden and his son Hunter, and the implication seems unavoidable: In Babin’s view, Trump withheld military aid in the hopes of securing a “commitment” from a foreign government to investigate the Democratic presidential frontrunner. Babin isn’t claiming the quid pro quo never happened; instead, he appears to be saying that it did happen and that he’s fine with it.
Babin isn’t the first prominent Trump defender to seemingly acknowledge a quid pro quo involving Ukrainian military aid. White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney did so earlier this month, when he told reporters that Trump withheld the funds in part to secure a Ukrainian investigation into a conspiracy theory about the Democratic National Committee. Mulvaney later tried to retract those comments.
JEREMY SCHULMAN
Since the beginning of the Ukraine scandal, President Donald Trump has insisted that there was “no quid pro quo” involving his demands that Ukrainian officials investigate his political enemies. The president’s defenders have been particularly aggressive in pushing back against the specific allegation that Trump withheld vital military aid to Ukraine in an effort to secure an investigation of an energy company connected to Joe Biden’s son. But on Thursday, as Congress debated a resolution to formalize the impeachment inquiry, one Republican lawmaker appeared to directly contradict Trump’s defense.
In the middle of a fiery speech attacking Democrats, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said that the president “was doing his job, ensuring that if taxpayer dollars from my constituents and yours was going to the other side of the world, that it would be paired with a commitment to crack down on corruption at all levels—no matter who someone’s daddy is or what their political ambitions are.”
That’s a clear reference to Biden and his son Hunter, and the implication seems unavoidable: In Babin’s view, Trump withheld military aid in the hopes of securing a “commitment” from a foreign government to investigate the Democratic presidential frontrunner. Babin isn’t claiming the quid pro quo never happened; instead, he appears to be saying that it did happen and that he’s fine with it.
Babin isn’t the first prominent Trump defender to seemingly acknowledge a quid pro quo involving Ukrainian military aid. White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney did so earlier this month, when he told reporters that Trump withheld the funds in part to secure a Ukrainian investigation into a conspiracy theory about the Democratic National Committee. Mulvaney later tried to retract those comments.
NGC 6960
Lawyer moved transcript after Ukraine adviser raised alarms
White House lawyer moved transcript of Trump call to classified server after Ukraine adviser raised alarms
Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Greg P. Miller
Moments after President Donald Trump ended his phone call with Ukraine's president on July 25, an unsettled national security aide rushed to the office of White House lawyer John Eisenberg.
Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine adviser at the White House, had been listening to the call and was disturbed by the pressure Trump had applied to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals, according to people familiar with Vindman's testimony to lawmakers this week.
Vindman told Eisenberg, the White House's legal adviser on national security issues, that what the president did was wrong, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
Scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad, Eisenberg proposed a step that other officials have said is at odds with long-standing White House protocol: moving a transcript of the call to a highly classified server and restricting access to it, according to two people familiar with Vindman's account.
The details of how the White House clamped down on information about the controversial call comes as the House impeachment inquiry turns its focus to the role of Eisenberg, who has served as deputy White House counsel since the start of Trump's administration. House impeachment investigators on Wednesday evening announced they have asked Eisenberg and a fellow White House lawyer, Mike Ellis, to testify Monday.
On Thursday, the House is scheduled to vote on rules governing the next phase of the inquiry and hear from Tim Morrison, a former deputy to national security adviser John Bolton. Bolton has also been asked to testify next week.
Vindman's account marks the first known instance in which a witness before the impeachment inquiry has provided a firsthand account linking Eisenberg to the decision to move the problematic transcript to a highly classified server.
Eisenberg did not respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesman declined to discuss Eisenberg's role in handling the July 25 transcript or how he addressed the concerns he heard from staff.
"Consistent with the practices of past administrations from both parties, we will not discuss the internal deliberations of the White House Counsel's Office," said deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley.
Eisenberg, who worked in the Washington office of the law firm Kirkland & Ellis before joining the Trump administration, also served in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration. He has been deputy White House counsel overseeing national security issues since Trump's inauguration, serving under both former White House counsel Donald McGahn and his successor, Pat Cipollone.
By the time Vindman came to him in late July, Eisenberg was already familiar with concerns among White House officials about the administration's attempts to pressure Ukraine for political purposes, as The Washington Post previously reported.
Three weeks earlier, Vindman and another senior official had gone to him after a contentious July 10 meeting in which they said European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland had pushed two Ukrainian officials to investigate Trump's political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden, whose son Hunter served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.
Sondland's attorney, Robert Luskin, said Wednesday that his client did not mention the Bidens in the July 10 meeting or any other discussions about Ukraine policy.
"Ambassador Sondland has nothing to add to his prepared testimony in which he makes clear that he did not then or on any other occasion mention any Biden by name and did not then know that Burisma was linked to Biden," Luskin said.
That day, two officials representing the newly elected Ukrainian president had come to the White House hoping to shore up relations with the Trump administration.
Instead, the visitors found themselves caught in a showdown between top White House officials.
The two Ukrainian visitors - Andriy Yermak, a top Zelensky adviser, and Oleksandr Danyliuk, the head of Ukraine's national security and defense council - were first escorted to Bolton's office, where they met with Vindman, Sondland, White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill and Kurt Volker, the State Department's special envoy to Ukraine.
As the group discussed the United States' desire to see Kyiv crack down on corruption, Sondland turned the conversation away from ongoing corruption probes to pursuing specific investigations that were important to Trump, according to testimony from Hill and Vindman.
Bolton was so alarmed by the comments that he cut the meeting short, according to people familiar with the testimony.
Sondland then asked the Ukrainians to accompany him to a previously scheduled debriefing in the Ward Room, a basement conference area used by the national security team.
During that meeting, Sondland "emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma," a reference to a gas company that tapped Biden's son Hunter to be on its board, according to Vindman's opening statement to lawmakers.
Vindman objected, telling Sondland that the request was "totally inappropriate," according to a person familiar with his testimony.
As tensions mounted, Sondland asked the two Ukrainian officials if they would like to step out of the meeting temporarily, the person said.
Hill, whom Bolton had instructed to monitor Sondland, had just entered the Ward Room. She immediately echoed Vindman's objections that the request was counter to national security goals, according to her testimony.
"She was very emotional," one person who heard Vindman's account of the meeting recalled, adding that Hill raised her voice and strongly objected.
Vindman and Hill complained directly to Eisenberg about the episode, according to his testimony and people familiar with their actions. It is unclear whether Eisenberg took any steps in response.
Weeks later, Vindman grew even more alarmed as he sat in the Situation Room listening to Trump speak with Zelensky, according to a person familiar with his testimony. Among the officials present were Morrison, who had just replaced Hill as the senior Russia adviser at the White House, and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Vice President Mike Pence's national security adviser.
"I would like you to do us a favor," Trump told the Ukrainian president, then asked him to look into the debunked conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee server was transported to Ukraine after it was hacked in 2016, according to a rough transcript released by the White House. Trump also asked Zelensky to pursue an investigation into Biden and his son, the transcript shows.
Stunned, Vindman looked up and made eye contact with Morrison, the person said.
In his statement to lawmakers, Vindman said he "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."
After the call, Vindman hurried to Eisenberg's door, bringing with him his twin brother, Yevgeny, an ethics attorney on the National Security Council. Ellis, a deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council, also joined the discussion, the person said.
Vindman read out loud notes he took of the president's call. Eisenberg then suggested that the National Security Council move records of the call to a separate, highly classified computer system, Vindman told lawmakers.
The White House lawyer later directed the transcript's removal to a system known as NICE, for NSC Intelligence Collaboration Environment, which is normally reserved for code word-level intelligence programs and top-secret sources and methods, according to an administration official.
Former Trump national security officials said it was unheard of to store presidential calls with foreign leaders on the NICE system but that Eisenberg had moved at least one other transcript of a Trump phone call there.
On Sept. 25, under mounting political pressure, the White House released the rough transcript of the Zelensky call. Trump has declared it a "perfect call" and proof that he has not done anything wrong.
In his testimony, Vindman recalled that on the call, Zelensky raised Burisma by name in response to Trump's request that the Ukrainians look into the Bidens - a detail not included in the transcript released by the White House.
Carol D. Leonnig, Tom Hamburger and Greg P. Miller
Moments after President Donald Trump ended his phone call with Ukraine's president on July 25, an unsettled national security aide rushed to the office of White House lawyer John Eisenberg.
Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine adviser at the White House, had been listening to the call and was disturbed by the pressure Trump had applied to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals, according to people familiar with Vindman's testimony to lawmakers this week.
Vindman told Eisenberg, the White House's legal adviser on national security issues, that what the president did was wrong, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
Scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad, Eisenberg proposed a step that other officials have said is at odds with long-standing White House protocol: moving a transcript of the call to a highly classified server and restricting access to it, according to two people familiar with Vindman's account.
The details of how the White House clamped down on information about the controversial call comes as the House impeachment inquiry turns its focus to the role of Eisenberg, who has served as deputy White House counsel since the start of Trump's administration. House impeachment investigators on Wednesday evening announced they have asked Eisenberg and a fellow White House lawyer, Mike Ellis, to testify Monday.
On Thursday, the House is scheduled to vote on rules governing the next phase of the inquiry and hear from Tim Morrison, a former deputy to national security adviser John Bolton. Bolton has also been asked to testify next week.
Vindman's account marks the first known instance in which a witness before the impeachment inquiry has provided a firsthand account linking Eisenberg to the decision to move the problematic transcript to a highly classified server.
Eisenberg did not respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesman declined to discuss Eisenberg's role in handling the July 25 transcript or how he addressed the concerns he heard from staff.
"Consistent with the practices of past administrations from both parties, we will not discuss the internal deliberations of the White House Counsel's Office," said deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley.
Eisenberg, who worked in the Washington office of the law firm Kirkland & Ellis before joining the Trump administration, also served in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration. He has been deputy White House counsel overseeing national security issues since Trump's inauguration, serving under both former White House counsel Donald McGahn and his successor, Pat Cipollone.
By the time Vindman came to him in late July, Eisenberg was already familiar with concerns among White House officials about the administration's attempts to pressure Ukraine for political purposes, as The Washington Post previously reported.
Three weeks earlier, Vindman and another senior official had gone to him after a contentious July 10 meeting in which they said European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland had pushed two Ukrainian officials to investigate Trump's political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden, whose son Hunter served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.
Sondland's attorney, Robert Luskin, said Wednesday that his client did not mention the Bidens in the July 10 meeting or any other discussions about Ukraine policy.
"Ambassador Sondland has nothing to add to his prepared testimony in which he makes clear that he did not then or on any other occasion mention any Biden by name and did not then know that Burisma was linked to Biden," Luskin said.
That day, two officials representing the newly elected Ukrainian president had come to the White House hoping to shore up relations with the Trump administration.
Instead, the visitors found themselves caught in a showdown between top White House officials.
The two Ukrainian visitors - Andriy Yermak, a top Zelensky adviser, and Oleksandr Danyliuk, the head of Ukraine's national security and defense council - were first escorted to Bolton's office, where they met with Vindman, Sondland, White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill and Kurt Volker, the State Department's special envoy to Ukraine.
As the group discussed the United States' desire to see Kyiv crack down on corruption, Sondland turned the conversation away from ongoing corruption probes to pursuing specific investigations that were important to Trump, according to testimony from Hill and Vindman.
Bolton was so alarmed by the comments that he cut the meeting short, according to people familiar with the testimony.
Sondland then asked the Ukrainians to accompany him to a previously scheduled debriefing in the Ward Room, a basement conference area used by the national security team.
During that meeting, Sondland "emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma," a reference to a gas company that tapped Biden's son Hunter to be on its board, according to Vindman's opening statement to lawmakers.
Vindman objected, telling Sondland that the request was "totally inappropriate," according to a person familiar with his testimony.
As tensions mounted, Sondland asked the two Ukrainian officials if they would like to step out of the meeting temporarily, the person said.
Hill, whom Bolton had instructed to monitor Sondland, had just entered the Ward Room. She immediately echoed Vindman's objections that the request was counter to national security goals, according to her testimony.
"She was very emotional," one person who heard Vindman's account of the meeting recalled, adding that Hill raised her voice and strongly objected.
Vindman and Hill complained directly to Eisenberg about the episode, according to his testimony and people familiar with their actions. It is unclear whether Eisenberg took any steps in response.
Weeks later, Vindman grew even more alarmed as he sat in the Situation Room listening to Trump speak with Zelensky, according to a person familiar with his testimony. Among the officials present were Morrison, who had just replaced Hill as the senior Russia adviser at the White House, and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Vice President Mike Pence's national security adviser.
"I would like you to do us a favor," Trump told the Ukrainian president, then asked him to look into the debunked conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee server was transported to Ukraine after it was hacked in 2016, according to a rough transcript released by the White House. Trump also asked Zelensky to pursue an investigation into Biden and his son, the transcript shows.
Stunned, Vindman looked up and made eye contact with Morrison, the person said.
In his statement to lawmakers, Vindman said he "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."
After the call, Vindman hurried to Eisenberg's door, bringing with him his twin brother, Yevgeny, an ethics attorney on the National Security Council. Ellis, a deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council, also joined the discussion, the person said.
Vindman read out loud notes he took of the president's call. Eisenberg then suggested that the National Security Council move records of the call to a separate, highly classified computer system, Vindman told lawmakers.
The White House lawyer later directed the transcript's removal to a system known as NICE, for NSC Intelligence Collaboration Environment, which is normally reserved for code word-level intelligence programs and top-secret sources and methods, according to an administration official.
Former Trump national security officials said it was unheard of to store presidential calls with foreign leaders on the NICE system but that Eisenberg had moved at least one other transcript of a Trump phone call there.
On Sept. 25, under mounting political pressure, the White House released the rough transcript of the Zelensky call. Trump has declared it a "perfect call" and proof that he has not done anything wrong.
In his testimony, Vindman recalled that on the call, Zelensky raised Burisma by name in response to Trump's request that the Ukrainians look into the Bidens - a detail not included in the transcript released by the White House.
Pussy republicans crying like the little bitch they are....
Near party-line vote expected on impeachment ground rules
Alan Fram and Matthew Daly
Democrats have set the stage for certain House approval of the ground rules lawmakers will use when they consider impeaching President Donald Trump as the chamber braced for its first showdown over the inquiry.
There was no doubt that the Democratic-controlled body would approve the eight pages of procedures on Thursday, with each side likely to lose a handful of defectors, if any.
"As much as this president flaunts the Constitution, we are going to protect it," House Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern, D-Mass., said Wednesday as his panel debated the procedures.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told The Associated Press that the package creates "much more of a politically closed system than an open system."
That echoed Republican complaints that the Democratic-run process has been secretive and tilted against them. Democrats say their plan follows how impeachment efforts against Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were run.
The investigation is focused on Trump's efforts to push Ukraine to investigate his Democratic political opponents by withholding military aid and an Oval Office meeting craved by the country's new president.
It is likely to take weeks or more before the House votes on whether to actually impeach Trump. If the House impeaches Trump, the Senate would hold a trial to decide whether to remove him from office.
Both parties' leaders were rounding up votes as Thursday's roll call approached, with each side eager to come as close to unanimity as possible.
Republicans said a solid GOP "no" vote would signal to the Senate that the Democratic push is a partisan crusade against a president they have never liked. McCarthy, R-Calif., said he's unaware of any Republican even "leaning toward voting for it."
Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., a moderate who some thought might be open to backing the Democratic rules, said he would oppose them. He complained about the secrecy that Democrats have used and said he had not been pressured by GOP leaders or Trump, with whom he had a drink at a Republican fundraiser Tuesday night.
"You really can't roll back the clock" from the time the investigation began last month, Upton said.
Democrats were also hoping to demonstrate solidarity from their most liberal elements to their most moderate members. They argued that GOP cohesion against the measure would show that Republicans are blindly defending Trump, whatever facts emerge.
"It will show the other party has become the party of Trump. It's really not the Republican Party any longer," said Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich.
Democrats' chief vote counter, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, said he believed "less than half a dozen" from his party would oppose the package. One Democrat whose vote was unclear, New York freshman Rep. Anthony Brindisi, said he'd not been pressured by party leaders to back the measure and said, "This is a decision I have to make."
Republicans said they'd use the vote to target freshman Democrats and those from districts Trump carried in 2016. They said they would contrast their support for the rules with campaign promises to focus on issues voters want to address, not on impeaching Trump.
The House GOP's campaign arm sent emails to reporters all but taunting some of those Democrats including freshman Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H. "Pappas wants to be a one-termer," one said.
GOP leaders called the rules "Speaker Pelosi's sham process designed to discredit the Democratic process" in their daily impeachment email to lawmakers.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., decided to have the vote following weeks of GOP claims that the inquiry was invalid because the chamber had not voted to formally commence the work.
The rules lay out how the House Intelligence Committee — now leading the investigation by deposing diplomats and other officials behind closed doors — would transition to public hearings.
That panel would issue a report and release transcripts of the closed-door interviews it has been conducting with diplomats and other officials with connections to Trump's interactions with Ukraine.
The Judiciary Committee would then decide whether to recommend that the House impeach Trump — a finding that he should be removed from office.
Republicans could only issue subpoenas for witnesses to appear if the entire panel approved them — in effect giving Democrats veto power over such requests by the GOP.
Attorneys for Trump could participate in the Judiciary Committee proceedings. But in a bid for leverage, panel Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., would be allowed to deny "specific requests" by Trump representatives if the White House continues refusing to provide documents or witnesses sought by Democratic investigators.
The rules also direct House committees "to continue their ongoing investigations" of Trump.
Top Democrats think that language will shield their members from weeks of Republican complaints that the inquiry has been invalid because the House had not formally voted to begin that work.
Democrats have said there is no constitutional provision or House rule requiring such a vote.
Alan Fram and Matthew Daly
Democrats have set the stage for certain House approval of the ground rules lawmakers will use when they consider impeaching President Donald Trump as the chamber braced for its first showdown over the inquiry.
There was no doubt that the Democratic-controlled body would approve the eight pages of procedures on Thursday, with each side likely to lose a handful of defectors, if any.
"As much as this president flaunts the Constitution, we are going to protect it," House Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern, D-Mass., said Wednesday as his panel debated the procedures.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told The Associated Press that the package creates "much more of a politically closed system than an open system."
That echoed Republican complaints that the Democratic-run process has been secretive and tilted against them. Democrats say their plan follows how impeachment efforts against Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were run.
The investigation is focused on Trump's efforts to push Ukraine to investigate his Democratic political opponents by withholding military aid and an Oval Office meeting craved by the country's new president.
It is likely to take weeks or more before the House votes on whether to actually impeach Trump. If the House impeaches Trump, the Senate would hold a trial to decide whether to remove him from office.
Both parties' leaders were rounding up votes as Thursday's roll call approached, with each side eager to come as close to unanimity as possible.
Republicans said a solid GOP "no" vote would signal to the Senate that the Democratic push is a partisan crusade against a president they have never liked. McCarthy, R-Calif., said he's unaware of any Republican even "leaning toward voting for it."
Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., a moderate who some thought might be open to backing the Democratic rules, said he would oppose them. He complained about the secrecy that Democrats have used and said he had not been pressured by GOP leaders or Trump, with whom he had a drink at a Republican fundraiser Tuesday night.
"You really can't roll back the clock" from the time the investigation began last month, Upton said.
Democrats were also hoping to demonstrate solidarity from their most liberal elements to their most moderate members. They argued that GOP cohesion against the measure would show that Republicans are blindly defending Trump, whatever facts emerge.
"It will show the other party has become the party of Trump. It's really not the Republican Party any longer," said Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich.
Democrats' chief vote counter, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, said he believed "less than half a dozen" from his party would oppose the package. One Democrat whose vote was unclear, New York freshman Rep. Anthony Brindisi, said he'd not been pressured by party leaders to back the measure and said, "This is a decision I have to make."
Republicans said they'd use the vote to target freshman Democrats and those from districts Trump carried in 2016. They said they would contrast their support for the rules with campaign promises to focus on issues voters want to address, not on impeaching Trump.
The House GOP's campaign arm sent emails to reporters all but taunting some of those Democrats including freshman Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H. "Pappas wants to be a one-termer," one said.
GOP leaders called the rules "Speaker Pelosi's sham process designed to discredit the Democratic process" in their daily impeachment email to lawmakers.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., decided to have the vote following weeks of GOP claims that the inquiry was invalid because the chamber had not voted to formally commence the work.
The rules lay out how the House Intelligence Committee — now leading the investigation by deposing diplomats and other officials behind closed doors — would transition to public hearings.
That panel would issue a report and release transcripts of the closed-door interviews it has been conducting with diplomats and other officials with connections to Trump's interactions with Ukraine.
The Judiciary Committee would then decide whether to recommend that the House impeach Trump — a finding that he should be removed from office.
Republicans could only issue subpoenas for witnesses to appear if the entire panel approved them — in effect giving Democrats veto power over such requests by the GOP.
Attorneys for Trump could participate in the Judiciary Committee proceedings. But in a bid for leverage, panel Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., would be allowed to deny "specific requests" by Trump representatives if the White House continues refusing to provide documents or witnesses sought by Democratic investigators.
The rules also direct House committees "to continue their ongoing investigations" of Trump.
Top Democrats think that language will shield their members from weeks of Republican complaints that the inquiry has been invalid because the House had not formally voted to begin that work.
Democrats have said there is no constitutional provision or House rule requiring such a vote.
Russia ambassador pick
Trump's Russia ambassador pick breaks with him over Ukraine phone call
Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan was questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
By NAHAL TOOSI
Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan implicitly broke with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, telling lawmakers that it would not be “in accord with our values” for a president to ask a foreign government to investigate a political rival.
Sullivan was speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is vetting his nomination as the next U.S. ambassador to Russia. His appearance has offered Senate Democrats a rare chance to quiz a top Trump administration official on issues related to the House-led impeachment inquiry into Trump — and they took full advantage.
Sullivan was grilled in particular by New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the committee’s ranking Democrat, on impeachment-related topics, including the propriety of what Trump is accused of doing: pressuring Ukraine’s government to investigate a political rival, former vice president Joe Biden.
On that aspect, Sullivan was fairly direct. “Soliciting investigations into a domestic political opponent — I don’t think that would be in accord with our values,” he said.
But at certain points, Sullivan also said that his understanding of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president, in which Trump repeatedly asked Ukraine to investigate Biden, was that it was part of broader U.S. concerns about ending corruption in Ukraine.
The president has “denied that there was any quid pro quo,” Sullivan noted.
Throughout his testimony, Sullivan frequently reverted to what Menendez criticized as a “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” approach, basically stating that he was unaware of much of what was happening involving Ukraine policy.
The diplomat acknowledged that he was the one who informed Foreign Service veteran Marie Yovanovitch that she was being pulled out early from her post as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. But he said that despite trying to find out why, he was never given any reason other than Trump had lost confidence in her.
Yovanovitch was the victim of a drumbeat of allegations led by allies of Trump, according to documents turned over to Congress by the State Department inspector general. Sullivan said he was aware of the smear campaign and believed that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, was involved.
He also said he was looped in when the State Department was given a packet of material that appeared to be aimed at denigrating Yovanovitch. “It didn’t provide to me a basis for taking action against our ambassador,” said Sullivan of the packet, which Giuliani is suspected of helping put together.
Sullivan said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had tried to find out exactly why Trump was unhappy with Yovanovitch, but that after several months, the reason — which Sullivan said he was never told — became irrelevant because it was clear the president wanted her out.
Sullivan said he thought Yovanovitch was an excellent diplomat. She testified before House impeachment investigators earlier this month, sharing that he’d told her she’d “done nothing wrong,” but was being pulled out early anyway, just weeks after being asked to extend her stay.
Sullivan said he was not aware of all of the machinations involving Ukraine policy, but made clear that he did know Giuliani was playing an outside role in shaping it. He stressed that his focus, though, was largely limited to Giuliani’s attacks on Yovanovitch.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut pressed Sullivan as to why — based on their own testimonies to House investigators — U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland had gone beyond pushing Ukraine to end its internal corruption and asking for probe that would have damaged Biden and his son, Hunter.
Sullivan essentially pleaded ignorance of these other activities, and admitted he did not press for more information. Murphy said his lack of curiosity was “concerning.”
There’s no evidence that the Bidens have done anything illegal, but Idaho Sen. James Risch, the Republican chairman of the committee, tried to throw Sullivan a lifeline. He said that if a U.S. president’s domestic political rival was involved in corruption in a foreign country, that could be an unusual case that might require a rethink of what the president could demand of that country.
Sullivan is a relatively well-regarded figure on Capitol Hill, and his nomination to serve as the U.S. envoy in Moscow is expected to make it through the Senate. One of the people who introduced him on Wednesday was Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, a member of the committee.
Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan was questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
By NAHAL TOOSI
Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan implicitly broke with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, telling lawmakers that it would not be “in accord with our values” for a president to ask a foreign government to investigate a political rival.
Sullivan was speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is vetting his nomination as the next U.S. ambassador to Russia. His appearance has offered Senate Democrats a rare chance to quiz a top Trump administration official on issues related to the House-led impeachment inquiry into Trump — and they took full advantage.
Sullivan was grilled in particular by New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the committee’s ranking Democrat, on impeachment-related topics, including the propriety of what Trump is accused of doing: pressuring Ukraine’s government to investigate a political rival, former vice president Joe Biden.
On that aspect, Sullivan was fairly direct. “Soliciting investigations into a domestic political opponent — I don’t think that would be in accord with our values,” he said.
But at certain points, Sullivan also said that his understanding of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president, in which Trump repeatedly asked Ukraine to investigate Biden, was that it was part of broader U.S. concerns about ending corruption in Ukraine.
The president has “denied that there was any quid pro quo,” Sullivan noted.
Throughout his testimony, Sullivan frequently reverted to what Menendez criticized as a “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” approach, basically stating that he was unaware of much of what was happening involving Ukraine policy.
The diplomat acknowledged that he was the one who informed Foreign Service veteran Marie Yovanovitch that she was being pulled out early from her post as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. But he said that despite trying to find out why, he was never given any reason other than Trump had lost confidence in her.
Yovanovitch was the victim of a drumbeat of allegations led by allies of Trump, according to documents turned over to Congress by the State Department inspector general. Sullivan said he was aware of the smear campaign and believed that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, was involved.
He also said he was looped in when the State Department was given a packet of material that appeared to be aimed at denigrating Yovanovitch. “It didn’t provide to me a basis for taking action against our ambassador,” said Sullivan of the packet, which Giuliani is suspected of helping put together.
Sullivan said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had tried to find out exactly why Trump was unhappy with Yovanovitch, but that after several months, the reason — which Sullivan said he was never told — became irrelevant because it was clear the president wanted her out.
Sullivan said he thought Yovanovitch was an excellent diplomat. She testified before House impeachment investigators earlier this month, sharing that he’d told her she’d “done nothing wrong,” but was being pulled out early anyway, just weeks after being asked to extend her stay.
Sullivan said he was not aware of all of the machinations involving Ukraine policy, but made clear that he did know Giuliani was playing an outside role in shaping it. He stressed that his focus, though, was largely limited to Giuliani’s attacks on Yovanovitch.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut pressed Sullivan as to why — based on their own testimonies to House investigators — U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland had gone beyond pushing Ukraine to end its internal corruption and asking for probe that would have damaged Biden and his son, Hunter.
Sullivan essentially pleaded ignorance of these other activities, and admitted he did not press for more information. Murphy said his lack of curiosity was “concerning.”
There’s no evidence that the Bidens have done anything illegal, but Idaho Sen. James Risch, the Republican chairman of the committee, tried to throw Sullivan a lifeline. He said that if a U.S. president’s domestic political rival was involved in corruption in a foreign country, that could be an unusual case that might require a rethink of what the president could demand of that country.
Sullivan is a relatively well-regarded figure on Capitol Hill, and his nomination to serve as the U.S. envoy in Moscow is expected to make it through the Senate. One of the people who introduced him on Wednesday was Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, a member of the committee.
Closing ranks
House Democrats closing ranks behind impeachment inquiry vote
“Taking this vote tomorrow is a very big deal,” said one Democratic lawmaker.
By SARAH FERRIS and HEATHER CAYGLE
House Democrats on Wednesday declared they are confident that they would achieve near-unity on a measure formalizing the next steps of their impeachment push that had divided the caucus just a day earlier.
Top Democrats are expecting few defections on the resolution — the House’s first formal vote on impeachment — on Thursday, in a critical sign of support for the caucus as it enters uncharted territory with their rapidly moving probe into President Donald Trump’s potential abuse of power.
“Every member of the House of Representatives tomorrow will have to decide, ‘Are we going to put principle over party, the Constitution over corruption and democracy over dereliction of duty?’” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries told reporters after a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning. “I expect the overwhelming majority of Democrats are going to support this resolution and it's going to pass.”
Few, if any, Republicans are expected to vote for the resolution, which was finalized in a late-night markup by the House Rules Committee at which Republicans spent nearly four hours attempting to pitch their own changes to the measure. All of the GOP amendments — which focused entirely on process — were rejected on party lines.
On substance, however, congressional Republicans have struggled to respond to the mounting pile of evidence — including damning testimony this week — showing Trump sought to persuade Ukrainian leaders to investigate his political rivals.
The kumbaya moment for Democrats follows two days of internal consternation and squabbles over both the substance of the resolution and timing of the vote.
Several moderate members were upset about the surprise rollout of the resolution Monday — some even said they found out about it from watching TV — and the disjointed messaging from leadership that followed.
Meanwhile, the multiple House committee chairmen involved in the probe were working behind the scenes to ensure they weren’t elbowed out of the process once the investigation turns public and is more firmly in the domain of the House Intelligence Committee.
The resolution, which spells out certain powers for congressional committees and the White House in future impeachment hearings, is primarily procedural. But it has taken on greater political weight with GOP campaign operatives salivating at Democrats’ first floor vote on a measure that touches on any aspect of impeachment.
In the meeting Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated to her caucus that the measure was not a vote for impeachment. Still, she acknowledged it was a solemn moment for the caucus, and asked Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), a Methodist pastor, to lead the caucus in a prayer.
“It was just ... taking a moment to say, ‘This is a big deal for our democracy in the arc of our history,’” Rep. Ann McLane Kuster of New Hampshire said as she left the meeting. “‘Gather yourself, be ready.”
“Taking this vote tomorrow is a very big deal,” Kuster added.
Only five House Democrats have not come out in support of the impeachment inquiry. So far, just one vulnerable Democrat, Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, has said that he is leaning against the resolution on the floor. And no one expressed concerns during Wednesday’s meeting, according to multiple attendees.
“I’m sure there are some, that wasn’t expressed [today]. I think most of us recognize transparency and articulation of process is in the best interest of the country and for the institution,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who is one of several freshman who captured a previously GOP-held seat last fall.
Rep. Ben McAdams (D-Utah), one of the most endangered Democrats, said Wednesday he plans to support the measure and downplayed the significance of the vote.
“This feels like just a formalization of the process we’ve been in for some time now,” McAdams said as he left the meeting. “It’s a perfunctory vote to grant the authorization for those secure briefings to be made public to other members of Congress.”
Some vulnerable Democrats have privately worried that the Thursday floor vote could carry some risk because it marks the final vote before the House leaves for a weeklong recess during which they could face sharp questions back home about where Democrats stand on impeachment.
Pelosi and her top deputies have worked to equip Democrats with additional talking points as they depart Washington, including a fact sheet that compares the ongoing probe to past impeachments to rebut GOP criticism of an unfair process. And top Democrats have repeatedly stressed that Democrats are moving ahead only with their investigations — making no conclusion about the president’s conduct.
House investigators are continuing to question senior administration officials behind closed-doors about Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to open investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden, a top political rival in the 2020 election.
Two State Department officials were testifying Wednesday as part of the impeachment inquiry, revealing new details about the unusual intrusion into the U.S. foreign policy apparatus by Trump-aligned consultants.
According to copies of their opening statements obtained by POLITICO, Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson described the unconventional efforts — which cut against the official U.S. policy toward Ukraine — in addition to Trump’s “long-held view of Ukraine as a corrupt country.”
And Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the first current White House official to testify, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he was so disturbed by Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he reported his concerns to the National Security Council’s top lawyer. It was the second time Vindman reported concerns about efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden and his family.
In addition, Vindman told lawmakers that the White House transcript of the call omitted key details and his effort to restore the missing words to the memo were ignored. The New York Times first reported the omissions.
No specific timeline for shifting to the public portion of the impeachment investigation was outlined in Democrats’ meeting, although several lawmakers have privately speculated that public hearing could start sometime before Thanksgiving, even if closed-door depositions are still ongoing.
“Taking this vote tomorrow is a very big deal,” said one Democratic lawmaker.
By SARAH FERRIS and HEATHER CAYGLE
House Democrats on Wednesday declared they are confident that they would achieve near-unity on a measure formalizing the next steps of their impeachment push that had divided the caucus just a day earlier.
Top Democrats are expecting few defections on the resolution — the House’s first formal vote on impeachment — on Thursday, in a critical sign of support for the caucus as it enters uncharted territory with their rapidly moving probe into President Donald Trump’s potential abuse of power.
“Every member of the House of Representatives tomorrow will have to decide, ‘Are we going to put principle over party, the Constitution over corruption and democracy over dereliction of duty?’” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries told reporters after a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning. “I expect the overwhelming majority of Democrats are going to support this resolution and it's going to pass.”
Few, if any, Republicans are expected to vote for the resolution, which was finalized in a late-night markup by the House Rules Committee at which Republicans spent nearly four hours attempting to pitch their own changes to the measure. All of the GOP amendments — which focused entirely on process — were rejected on party lines.
On substance, however, congressional Republicans have struggled to respond to the mounting pile of evidence — including damning testimony this week — showing Trump sought to persuade Ukrainian leaders to investigate his political rivals.
The kumbaya moment for Democrats follows two days of internal consternation and squabbles over both the substance of the resolution and timing of the vote.
Several moderate members were upset about the surprise rollout of the resolution Monday — some even said they found out about it from watching TV — and the disjointed messaging from leadership that followed.
Meanwhile, the multiple House committee chairmen involved in the probe were working behind the scenes to ensure they weren’t elbowed out of the process once the investigation turns public and is more firmly in the domain of the House Intelligence Committee.
The resolution, which spells out certain powers for congressional committees and the White House in future impeachment hearings, is primarily procedural. But it has taken on greater political weight with GOP campaign operatives salivating at Democrats’ first floor vote on a measure that touches on any aspect of impeachment.
In the meeting Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated to her caucus that the measure was not a vote for impeachment. Still, she acknowledged it was a solemn moment for the caucus, and asked Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), a Methodist pastor, to lead the caucus in a prayer.
“It was just ... taking a moment to say, ‘This is a big deal for our democracy in the arc of our history,’” Rep. Ann McLane Kuster of New Hampshire said as she left the meeting. “‘Gather yourself, be ready.”
“Taking this vote tomorrow is a very big deal,” Kuster added.
Only five House Democrats have not come out in support of the impeachment inquiry. So far, just one vulnerable Democrat, Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, has said that he is leaning against the resolution on the floor. And no one expressed concerns during Wednesday’s meeting, according to multiple attendees.
“I’m sure there are some, that wasn’t expressed [today]. I think most of us recognize transparency and articulation of process is in the best interest of the country and for the institution,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who is one of several freshman who captured a previously GOP-held seat last fall.
Rep. Ben McAdams (D-Utah), one of the most endangered Democrats, said Wednesday he plans to support the measure and downplayed the significance of the vote.
“This feels like just a formalization of the process we’ve been in for some time now,” McAdams said as he left the meeting. “It’s a perfunctory vote to grant the authorization for those secure briefings to be made public to other members of Congress.”
Some vulnerable Democrats have privately worried that the Thursday floor vote could carry some risk because it marks the final vote before the House leaves for a weeklong recess during which they could face sharp questions back home about where Democrats stand on impeachment.
Pelosi and her top deputies have worked to equip Democrats with additional talking points as they depart Washington, including a fact sheet that compares the ongoing probe to past impeachments to rebut GOP criticism of an unfair process. And top Democrats have repeatedly stressed that Democrats are moving ahead only with their investigations — making no conclusion about the president’s conduct.
House investigators are continuing to question senior administration officials behind closed-doors about Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to open investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden, a top political rival in the 2020 election.
Two State Department officials were testifying Wednesday as part of the impeachment inquiry, revealing new details about the unusual intrusion into the U.S. foreign policy apparatus by Trump-aligned consultants.
According to copies of their opening statements obtained by POLITICO, Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson described the unconventional efforts — which cut against the official U.S. policy toward Ukraine — in addition to Trump’s “long-held view of Ukraine as a corrupt country.”
And Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the first current White House official to testify, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he was so disturbed by Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he reported his concerns to the National Security Council’s top lawyer. It was the second time Vindman reported concerns about efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden and his family.
In addition, Vindman told lawmakers that the White House transcript of the call omitted key details and his effort to restore the missing words to the memo were ignored. The New York Times first reported the omissions.
No specific timeline for shifting to the public portion of the impeachment investigation was outlined in Democrats’ meeting, although several lawmakers have privately speculated that public hearing could start sometime before Thanksgiving, even if closed-door depositions are still ongoing.
Shadow diplomacy with Ukraine
State Dept. officials offer new details about Trump’s shadow diplomacy with Ukraine
Catherine Croft also testified that lobbyist Robert Livingston pushed to get the ambassador to Ukraine fired.
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and KYLE CHENEY
Two veteran foreign service officers revealed new details to House impeachment investigators on Wednesday about the unconventional efforts by President Donald Trump’s associates to influence U.S. policy toward Ukraine, according to copies of their opening statements obtained by POLITICO.
Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson, State Department officials who served as senior advisers on Ukraine, described to investigators the unusual intrusion into U.S. foreign policy by Trump-aligned consultants, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Robert Livingston, a lobbyist and former GOP congressman.
The officials’ opening statements also implicitly criticized Trump’s posture toward Ukraine, with Croft singling out Trump’s “long-held view of Ukraine as a corrupt country,” which she and her colleagues hoped to reverse.
Croft and Anderson served separately under Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and witnessed an unusual effort by non-government officials to influence U.S. foreign policy toward the besieged country as it was facing intensifying aggression from Russia.
The impeachment inquiry centers on Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s leaders to investigate his political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden, and allegations that Trump added to that pressure by withholding critical military aid to Ukraine. Democrats have zeroed in on what appears to be a shadow diplomacy effort, spearheaded by Giuliani, aimed at sparking such investigations and stiff-arming U.S. officials who stood in their way.
In his opening statement, Anderson said that John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser until recently, told him during a June meeting that “Mr. Giuliani was a key voice with the president on Ukraine which could be an obstacle to increased White House engagement” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Croft wrote in her opening statement that she heard Trump, both directly and indirectly, “describe Ukraine as a corrupt country.”
Anderson described how Giuliani’s involvement became an obstacle earlier this year, forcing the State Department to scramble to contain fallout after the abrupt removal of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine whom Trump recalled after a smear campaign by the president’s allies.
“Before [Zelensky’s] inauguration in May, my colleagues and I saw a tweet by Rudolph Giuliani alleging that President-elect Zelensky was surrounded by enemies of President Trump,” he said, according to his opening statement. “In an effort to counter the negative narrative sparked by Ambassador Yovanovitch’s withdrawal and Giuliani’s statements, we pushed for a high-level delegation to attend Zelensky’s inauguration.”
Anderson also told lawmakers that “senior officials in the White House” blocked the State Department from issuing a statement condemning Russia after Moscow seized Ukrainian ships in November 2018. Instead, Anderson recalls, “Ambassador Volker drafted a tweet condemning Russia’s actions, which I posted to his account.”
Croft, who also served as a Ukraine adviser on the National Security Council, told investigators that she received “multiple calls” from Livingston, a lobbyist, who told her that Yovanovitch should be fired. She also said she never met Giuliani but was aware that Volker spoke to him at times.
Trump ousted Yovanovitch in May after Giuliani and others had launched a coordinated effort to undermine her, according to Yovanovitch’s testimony before impeachment investigators earlier this month.
“[Livingston] characterized Ambassador Yovanovitch as an ‘Obama holdover’ and associated with George Soros,” Croft said. “It was not clear to me at the time—or now—at whose direction or at whose expense Mr. Livingston was seeking the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.”
Livingston, a former Republican lawmaker, is registered as a foreign agent to represent an association of steel companies that acts as a liaison between the industry and the Ukrainian government. His filing with the Justice Department indicates his work for the association includes maintaining “contact, as necessary, with members of Congress and their staff, and with executive branch officials.”
Trump later criticized Yovanovitch during his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, according to a White House memorandum of the call, and several other senior State Department officials have told impeachment investigators that they were alarmed by the push to remove Yovanovitch.
Croft testified that she told her supervisor on the National Security Council, Fiona Hill, about the calls from Livingston. Hill, Trump’s former top Russia aide, told investigators earlier this month that she was so concerned with Giuliani’s involvement that she reported it to an NSC lawyer.
Croft also revealed that she learned of an effort by Trump to withhold military aid to Ukraine — approved by Congress and the Pentagon — prior to July 18, when it was officially announced to agency officials during a video conference.
“The only reason given was that the order came at the direction of the president,” she said.
Mark MacDougall, the lawyer representing Croft and Anderson, said in separate statements that the State Department sought to block his clients’ testimony, adding that both were served with subpoenas to compel their appearance Wednesday morning.
MacDougall also said he would push back against what he characterized as Republican lawmakers’ efforts to identify the whistleblower who first raised concerns about Trump’s posture toward Ukraine.
“[To] the extent we reasonably conclude that any questions directed to [Croft and Anderson] this afternoon are intended to assist anyone in establishing the identity of the Whistleblower, we will make the necessary objections and will give the witness appropriate instructions,” MacDougall said.
Underscoring the peril of operating in Ukraine at a precarious time in its relationship with the U.S., Anderson told lawmakers that his work “has at times led to harassment and intimidation by hostile intelligence services, death threats, and other significant challenges for my family and I.”
Catherine Croft also testified that lobbyist Robert Livingston pushed to get the ambassador to Ukraine fired.
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and KYLE CHENEY
Two veteran foreign service officers revealed new details to House impeachment investigators on Wednesday about the unconventional efforts by President Donald Trump’s associates to influence U.S. policy toward Ukraine, according to copies of their opening statements obtained by POLITICO.
Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson, State Department officials who served as senior advisers on Ukraine, described to investigators the unusual intrusion into U.S. foreign policy by Trump-aligned consultants, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Robert Livingston, a lobbyist and former GOP congressman.
The officials’ opening statements also implicitly criticized Trump’s posture toward Ukraine, with Croft singling out Trump’s “long-held view of Ukraine as a corrupt country,” which she and her colleagues hoped to reverse.
Croft and Anderson served separately under Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and witnessed an unusual effort by non-government officials to influence U.S. foreign policy toward the besieged country as it was facing intensifying aggression from Russia.
The impeachment inquiry centers on Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine’s leaders to investigate his political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden, and allegations that Trump added to that pressure by withholding critical military aid to Ukraine. Democrats have zeroed in on what appears to be a shadow diplomacy effort, spearheaded by Giuliani, aimed at sparking such investigations and stiff-arming U.S. officials who stood in their way.
In his opening statement, Anderson said that John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser until recently, told him during a June meeting that “Mr. Giuliani was a key voice with the president on Ukraine which could be an obstacle to increased White House engagement” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Croft wrote in her opening statement that she heard Trump, both directly and indirectly, “describe Ukraine as a corrupt country.”
Anderson described how Giuliani’s involvement became an obstacle earlier this year, forcing the State Department to scramble to contain fallout after the abrupt removal of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine whom Trump recalled after a smear campaign by the president’s allies.
“Before [Zelensky’s] inauguration in May, my colleagues and I saw a tweet by Rudolph Giuliani alleging that President-elect Zelensky was surrounded by enemies of President Trump,” he said, according to his opening statement. “In an effort to counter the negative narrative sparked by Ambassador Yovanovitch’s withdrawal and Giuliani’s statements, we pushed for a high-level delegation to attend Zelensky’s inauguration.”
Anderson also told lawmakers that “senior officials in the White House” blocked the State Department from issuing a statement condemning Russia after Moscow seized Ukrainian ships in November 2018. Instead, Anderson recalls, “Ambassador Volker drafted a tweet condemning Russia’s actions, which I posted to his account.”
Croft, who also served as a Ukraine adviser on the National Security Council, told investigators that she received “multiple calls” from Livingston, a lobbyist, who told her that Yovanovitch should be fired. She also said she never met Giuliani but was aware that Volker spoke to him at times.
Trump ousted Yovanovitch in May after Giuliani and others had launched a coordinated effort to undermine her, according to Yovanovitch’s testimony before impeachment investigators earlier this month.
“[Livingston] characterized Ambassador Yovanovitch as an ‘Obama holdover’ and associated with George Soros,” Croft said. “It was not clear to me at the time—or now—at whose direction or at whose expense Mr. Livingston was seeking the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.”
Livingston, a former Republican lawmaker, is registered as a foreign agent to represent an association of steel companies that acts as a liaison between the industry and the Ukrainian government. His filing with the Justice Department indicates his work for the association includes maintaining “contact, as necessary, with members of Congress and their staff, and with executive branch officials.”
Trump later criticized Yovanovitch during his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, according to a White House memorandum of the call, and several other senior State Department officials have told impeachment investigators that they were alarmed by the push to remove Yovanovitch.
Croft testified that she told her supervisor on the National Security Council, Fiona Hill, about the calls from Livingston. Hill, Trump’s former top Russia aide, told investigators earlier this month that she was so concerned with Giuliani’s involvement that she reported it to an NSC lawyer.
Croft also revealed that she learned of an effort by Trump to withhold military aid to Ukraine — approved by Congress and the Pentagon — prior to July 18, when it was officially announced to agency officials during a video conference.
“The only reason given was that the order came at the direction of the president,” she said.
Mark MacDougall, the lawyer representing Croft and Anderson, said in separate statements that the State Department sought to block his clients’ testimony, adding that both were served with subpoenas to compel their appearance Wednesday morning.
MacDougall also said he would push back against what he characterized as Republican lawmakers’ efforts to identify the whistleblower who first raised concerns about Trump’s posture toward Ukraine.
“[To] the extent we reasonably conclude that any questions directed to [Croft and Anderson] this afternoon are intended to assist anyone in establishing the identity of the Whistleblower, we will make the necessary objections and will give the witness appropriate instructions,” MacDougall said.
Underscoring the peril of operating in Ukraine at a precarious time in its relationship with the U.S., Anderson told lawmakers that his work “has at times led to harassment and intimidation by hostile intelligence services, death threats, and other significant challenges for my family and I.”
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