Doctor’s report calls 77-year-old Biden ‘healthy, vigorous’

WASHINGTON — Joe Biden is “healthy, vigorous” and “fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency,” according to a doctor’s report released Tuesday by the 77-year-old former vice president.

Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who has been Biden’s primary care physician since 2009, writes in a three-page note that the Democratic presidential candidate is in overall good shape — he’s trim, exercises and keeps his cholesterol at healthy levels with the use of a statin medication.

Since 2003, Biden has had episodes of atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat that’s potentially serious but treatable. His doctor now describes the atrial fibrillation as “persistent.” O’Connor cited a list of tests that show the candidate’s heart is functioning normally and his only needed care is a blood thinner to prevent the most worrisome risk, blood clots or stroke.

Another Democratic candidate, Michael Bloomberg, has the same kind of irregular heartbeat, according to records released last week.

Biden had a brush with death in 1988, requiring surgery to repair two brain aneurysms — weak bulges in arteries, one of them leaking. Biden has never had a recurrence, his doctor said, citing a specific test in 2014 that examined his arteries.

O’Connor’s letter cited only a few other minor ailments. Biden takes medications, as needed, for seasonal allergies and occasional reflux, or heartburn. He has had several small, non-melanoma skin cancers removed over the years. Preventive screenings, including colonoscopies, show no signs of trouble.

“Overall he’s in good health,” said Dr. Mary McLaughlin, director of cardiovascular health and wellness at Mount Sinai Heart in New York, who reviewed Biden’s information.

She noted that he has good blood pressure without needing medication, unusual for his age, and that he exercises five days a week.

“I would say that someone with well-controlled atrial fibrillation on a blood thinner definitely can perform the duties of a stressful job,” McLaughlin added. But she questioned why the records don’t mention a cardiac stress test, which would eliminate any questions about heart function.

Biden is the third Democratic presidential candidate to release his medical records. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 70, released a doctor’s note earlier this month that said she is in “excellent health.” A letter from Bloomberg’s physician said the 77-year-old New York billionaire was in “outstanding health.”

Bernie Sanders, the oldest candidate in the field at 78 years old, said that he’d release his records “probably by the end of the year.” He suffered a heart attack in October that took him off the campaign trail for a few days.


Biden, Sanders and Bloomberg would be the oldest president in history if elected.

Republican Donald Trump, now 73, was the oldest newly inaugurated first-term president. He has been criticized for releasing only cursory details on his health while running for the White House. But he has also mocked Biden, suggesting age has slowed his potential Democratic rival.

Biden’s age has been a lingering shadow on his candidacy, even with other septuagenarians in the race. In one summer debate, Julián Castro suggested, wrongly, that Biden had forgotten details of his own health care proposal. Castro, now 45, denied he was taking a shot at Biden’s age, though that’s how it was widely interpreted.

Earlier this month in Iowa, a voter who said he was 83 told the candidate he is too old to serve as president. Biden challenged the man to a push-up contest and an IQ test.

None of the recent releases of candidates’ health information has mentioned screenings for memory problems, and whether they’re needed or useful – or even what kind is appropriate — in high-functioning adults is an unsettled medical question.When he brings up the matter himself, Biden acknowledges his advancing age but argues that it comes with the “wisdom” and “experience” to manage the hyperpartisan nature of Capitol Hill and calm the international turbulence of Trump’s presidency. The former vice president does have longevity in his family. His father lived to be 86. His mother lived to age 92.

Warren, Sanders and Biden have all showcased their physical activity during the campaign, with Warren frequently jogging to the podium at events and Sanders playing softball with staff.

A Pew Research Center poll from May found that about half of Democrats said it would be best for a president to be in their 50s. A quarter said it would be best for a president to be in their 40s, and 16% preferred a president in their 60s. Just 3% said someone in their 70s would be best — and 6% said the same of a president in their 30s.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Parents of late US hostage chasing North Korean assets

SEOUL — The parents of a former U.S. hostage who died after being released from North Korea in a coma in 2017 have said they are committed to finding and shutting down illicit North Korean business assets around the world in efforts to hold its government accountable for widespread human rights abuses.

In a news conference in Seoul on Friday, Fred and Cindy Warmbier called for the Trump administration to raise North Korea’s human rights problems as it engages in negotiations to defuse the country’s nuclear threat.

“My mission would be to hold North Korea responsible, to recover and discover their assets around the world,” said Fred Warmbier, who was invited to a forum hosted by a Seoul-based group representing the families of South Koreans abducted by the North during the 1950-53 Korean War.

“We feel that if you force North Korea to engage the world from a legal standpoint, then they will have to ultimately have a dialogue. They are not going to come and have a dialogue with us any other way,” he said.

The Warmbiers have claimed that their college student son, Otto, was tortured by North Korea after being convicted in 2016 of trying to steal a propaganda poster and imprisoned for months.

The 22-year-old suffered severe brain damage and died shortly after being returned to the United States in a vegetative state in June 2017.

The North denied that it tortured or cruelly treated the University of Virginia student and accused Washington and Seoul of a smear campaign.

In December last year, a U.S. federal judge ordered North Korea to pay more than $500 million in a wrongful death suit filed by the Warmbiers over their son, although they are unlikely to collect on the judgment.

The Warmbiers are also pushing legal action seeking the closure of a hostel operated on the grounds of the North Korean embassy in Berlin and plan to go after other hostels the North operates in Europe.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Impeachment hearings go live on TV with first witnesses

WASHINGTON — The closed doors of the Trump impeachment investigation are swinging wide open.

When the gavel strikes at the start of the House hearing Wednesday morning, America and the rest of the world will have the chance to see and hear for themselves for the first time about President Donald Trump’s actions toward Ukraine and consider whether they are, in fact, impeachable offenses.

It’s a remarkable moment, even for a White House full of them.

All on TV, committee leaders will set the stage, then comes the main feature: Two seasoned diplomats, William Taylor, the graying former infantry officer now charge d’affaires in Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary in Washington, telling the striking, if sometimes complicated story of a president allegedly using foreign policy for personal and political gain ahead of the 2020 election.


So far, the narrative is splitting Americans, mostly along the same lines as Trump’s unusual presidency. The Constitution sets a dramatic, but vague, bar for impeachment, and there’s no consensus yet that Trump’s actions at the heart of the inquiry meet the threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Whether Wednesday’s proceedings begin to end a presidency or help secure Trump’s position, it’s certain that his chaotic term has finally arrived at a place he cannot control and a force, the constitutional system of checks and balances, that he cannot ignore.

The country has been here just three times before, and never against the backdrop of social media and real-time commentary, including from the president himself.


“These hearings will address subjects of profound consequence for the Nation and the functioning of our government under the Constitution,” said Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee leading the inquiry, in a memo to lawmakers.

Schiff called it a “solemn undertaking,” and counseled colleagues to “approach these proceedings with the seriousness of purpose and love of country that they demand.”

“Total impeachment scam,” tweeted the president, as he does virtually every day.

Impeachments are rare, historians say, because they amount to nothing short of the nullification of an election. Starting down this road poses risks for both Democrats and Republicans as proceedings push into the 2020 campaign.

Unlike the Watergate hearings and Richard Nixon, there is not yet a “cancer on the presidency” moment galvanizing public opinion. Nor is there the national shrug, as happened when Bill Clinton’s impeachment ultimately didn’t result in his removal from office. It’s perhaps most like the partisanship-infused impeachment of Andrew Johnson after the Civil War.

Trump calls the whole thing a “witch hunt,” a retort that echoes Nixon’s own defense. Republicans say Democrats have been trying to get rid of this president since he first took office, starting with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference to help Trump in the 2016 election.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was initially reluctant to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. As Democrats took control of the House in January, Pelosi said impeachment would be “too divisive” for the country. Trump, she said, was simply “not worth it.”

After Mueller’s appearance on Capitol Hill in July for the end of the Russia probe, the door to impeachment proceedings seemed closed.

But the next day Trump got on the phone.

For the past month, witness after witness has testified under oath about his July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the alarms it set off in U.S. diplomatic and national security circles.

In a secure room in the Capitol basement, current and former officials have been telling lawmakers what they know. They’ve said an earlier Trump call in April congratulating Zelenskiy on his election victory seemed fine. The former U.S. reality TV host and the young Ukrainian comedian hit it off.

But in the July call, things turned.

An anonymous whistleblower first alerted officials to the phone call. “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election,” the person wrote in August to the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Democrats fought for the letter to be released to them as required.

“I am deeply concerned,” the whistleblower wrote.

Trump insisted the call was “perfect.” The White House released a rough transcript. Pelosi, given the nod from her most centrist freshman lawmakers, opened the inquiry.

“The president has his opportunity to prove his innocence,” she told Noticias Telemundo on Tuesday.

Defying White House orders not to appear, witnesses have testified that Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was withholding U.S. military aid to the budding democracy until the new Ukraine government conducted investigations Trump wanted into Democrats in the 2016 election and his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter.

It was all part of what Taylor, the long-serving top diplomat in Ukraine, called the “irregular” foreign policy being led by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, outside of traditional channels.

Taylor said it was “crazy” that the Trump administration was withholding U.S. military assistance to the East European ally over the political investigations, with Russian forces on Ukraine’s border on watch for a moment of weakness.

Kent, the bowtie-wearing State Department official, told investigators there were three things Trump wanted of Ukraine: “Investigations, Biden, Clinton.”

On Friday, the public is scheduled to hear from Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who told investigators she was warned to “watch my back” as Trump undercut and then recalled her.

Eight more witnesses will testify in public hearings next week.

“What this affords is the opportunity for the cream of our diplomatic corps to tell the American people a clear and consistent story of what the president did,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., a member of the Intelligence panel.

“It takes a lot of courage to do what they are doing,” he said, “and they are probably just going to be abused for it.”


Republicans, led on the panel by Rep. Devin Nunes, a longtime Trump ally from California, will argue that none of those witnesses has first-hand knowledge of the president’s actions. They will say Ukraine never felt pressured and the aid money eventually flowed, in September.

Yet Republicans are struggling to form a unified defense of Trump. Instead they often fall back on criticism of the process.

Some Republicans align with Trump’s view, which is outside of mainstream intelligence findings, that Ukraine was involved in 2016 U.S. election interference. They want to hear from Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a gas company in Ukraine, Burisma, while his father was the vice president. And they are trying to bring forward the still-anonymous whistleblower, whose identity Democrats have vowed to protect.

The framers of the Constitution provided few details about how the impeachment proceedings should be run, leaving much for Congress to decide. Democrats say the White House’s refusal to provide witnesses or produce documents is obstruction and itself impeachable.

Hearings are expected to continue and will shift, likely by Thanksgiving, to the Judiciary Committee to consider actual articles of impeachment.

The House, which is controlled by Democrats, is expected to vote by Christmas.

That would launch a trial in the Senate, where Republicans have the majority, in the new year.

/atm

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Arkansas Lawmaker: Civil Rights Attorney John Walker Dies

John Walker, an Arkansas lawmaker and civil rights attorney who represented black students in a long-running court fight over the desegregation of Little Rock area schools, has died. He was 82.

The Pulaski County coroner said Walker died at his Little Rock home Monday morning but the cause of death was not yet known.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Walker, a Democrat, had represented a Little Rock district in the state House since 2011.
He had been involved in some of the state’s most high-profile discrimination and civil rights cases, including the desegregation case, which stemmed from a 1982 lawsuit the Little Rock school district filed against the state and neighboring districts over racial disparities that remained decades after the 1957 integration of Central High School.

“What he did in this state made a difference for everyone in this state,” state Sen. Joyce Elliott, chairwoman of the Legislative Black Caucus.

“I don’t think everyone will realize the full measure of that for quite some time.”

Federal judges have ruled Little Rock and North Little Rock schools substantially complied with a 1998 desegregation plan, and the two remaining districts in the case are seeking release.

Former President Bill Clinton praised Walker as a “devoted public servant who spent his life fighting to allow all Arkansans to succeed.”


“From the courtroom to the Capitol, he never wavered in his pursuit of justice or his belief that a democracy only works when everyone can participate fully,” Clinton said in a statement.
“I’m grateful for his more than 40 years of friendship and the way he lived his life, giving and serving until the very end.”

Walker had also represented former Razorbacks basketball coach Nolan Richardson in his unsuccessful lawsuit against the University of Arkansas challenging his 2002 firing.
Richardson had claimed he was fired because he was black and that his free-speech rights were violated.

“He was always the underdog, but would fight to be on top,” Richardson said Monday.

In recent years, Walker criticized the state’s 2015 takeover of the Little Rock School District because of low test scores at several schools.

A federal judge in 2016 dismissed a lawsuit filed by Walker and other attorneys that claimed the takeover was motivated by racial discrimination.

The state earlier this month voted to return control of the district to a local board that will be elected in November 2020.

“John always was a gentleman and proved every day that you can get along with people even though there may be disagreements,” Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in a statement.
“He worked tirelessly for the causes he championed and for the people he represented.”


Walker spoke out in the House whenever he believed legislation’s impact on African-Americans wasn’t being considered and was an outspoken opponent of voter ID requirements.
A 2013 voter ID law was struck down by the state Supreme Court, but the Republican Legislature passed a reworked version in 2017 and voters last year placed the requirement in the state’s constitution.

“I dare say you’ll find many of your colleagues in this body of my color who will support this,” Walker said from the House floor as he opposed the 2013 measure.

“It doesn’t matter what their leanings are.
What you’re doing in effect is saying we don’t care about what you think, we’re going to do this anyway.”

source: usa.inquirer.net

British PM sends unsigned letter seeking Brexit delay

LONDON, United Kingdom — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reluctantly wrote to Brussels late Saturday asking for a Brexit extension after MPs voted to force him into seeking a delay beyond October 31.

But Johnson, who has pinned his premiership on getting Britain out of the European Union on time, refused to sign the letter he sent to European Council President Donald Tusk.


The Conservative leader also sent a second signed letter insisting he was not seeking an extension to the Brexit deadline, which has already been postponed twice.

In a day of high drama in the House of Commons, MPs declined to give their backing to the revised withdrawal agreement Johnson struck with the EU this week until the legislation needed to ratify it has passed.

Having failed to back a divorce deal, they triggered a law requiring Johnson to write to EU leaders by the end of the day asking to delay Brexit, to avoid the risk that Britain crashes out in less than a fortnight.

Johnson sent a photocopy of the letter that was contained in the law requiring him to ask for the delay, but did not sign it, showed a copy released by his Downing Street office early Sunday.

He wrote and signed another letter which made clear he does not want to delay Brexit beyond the end of this month.

“Regrettably, parliament missed the opportunity to inject momentum into the ratification process,” Johnson wrote in the signed letter, regretting that EU leaders would now have to spend yet more time on Brexit.

“A further extension would damage the interests of the UK and our EU partners, and the relationship between us. We must bring this process to a conclusion.”

Johnson nonetheless said he remained “confident” of completing the ratification process by October 31.

A third cover letter written by Britain’s EU ambassador Tim Barrow made clear that the Brexit delay request letter was only being sent to comply with the law.


Tusk consults EU chiefs

“I will now start consulting EU leaders on how to react,” Tusk said on Twitter.

An EU source told AFP that the process “may take a few days” and declined to comment on the non-signature.

A Downing Street spokeswoman said the prime minister had spoken to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Tusk.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he had discussed the situation with Johnson and “wished him success in the next stages” in the Commons.

Being forced to send the letter after Saturday’s defeat was a blow to Johnson, who has previously said he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than prolong the tortuous process of ending Britain’s 46-year-old membership of the EU.

Brussels urged Britain to explain its plan as soon as possible, while Macron’s office said a new delay to Brexit was “in nobody’s interest”.

Johnson beaten 322-306

Securing the new divorce treaty at Thursday’s EU summit had been a personal victory for the prime minister, a figurehead in the Leave campaign in Britain’s 2016 EU membership referendum.

He had spent 48 hours frantically trying to persuade MPs to back it, and won support from many of the eurosceptic Conservatives who had three times rejected a previous divorce agreement secured by his predecessor Theresa May.


But parliament — like the frustrated public — is still bitterly divided over how and even whether Britain should end decades of integration with its closest trading partner.

MPs voted by 322 to 306 to back a motion by former Conservative minister Oliver Letwin that “withholds approval (of the deal) unless and until implementing legislation is passed”.

They were meeting on a Saturday for the first time since the 1982 Falklands War.

While MPs voted inside parliament, outside, more than 100,000 people marched to demand a new referendum that could reverse Brexit.

Demonstrators erupted into cheers at the news from inside the Commons.

“That’s really good, that’s one step away from Brexit,” demonstrator Philip Dobson told AFP.

“Reject Brexit”, “Put It To The People” and “Stop This Madness” read some of the placards at the mass march, where many protesters also waved EU flags.

Legislation next week

The British government will introduce legislation next week to implement the divorce deal, with a first vote as soon as Tuesday.

The government also wants another vote on the deal on Monday, which may not be possible.


There is a chance the deal could pass, and Britain could still leave the EU on October 31, but there remains strong opposition to the agreement among MPs.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Police Shooting of Black Texas Woman in Her Home Playing Video Games

Police in the Texas city of Fort Worth is investigating an incident in which a white police officer shot and killed a black woman as she sat in her home playing video games with her young nephew.

The shooting of 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson came less than two weeks after a white police officer in another Texas city, Dallas, received a 10year prison sentence for the fatal 2018 shooting of a black man in his apartment, which the officer had mistaken for her own.

The Fort Worth incident sparked immediate protest in that city of nearly 900,000 and fueled fresh anger in black communities across the country after a series of police shootings of African-Americans.


Several hundred people took part in an emotional vigil Sunday in Fort Worth to honor Jefferson and to protest the police action, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

Some shed tears, while others cried out in anger.

The shooting took place in the early hours of Saturday after a neighbor called the police to report that a door in the Jeffersons’ house had been ajar for hours.

Perceiving a Threat

As seen on the body-camera video released by police, two officers with flashlights walked around the perimeter of the house before seeing “a person standing inside the residence near a window,” according to a news release from Fort Worth police.

“Perceiving a threat the officer drew his duty weapon and fired one shot striking the person.”

The officer, who has not been named but who was identified as a white man with the local police since 2018, “did not announce he was a police officer before shooting,” Lieutenant Brandon O’Neil, a police spokesman, acknowledged during a news conference.

In the body-cam video, the officer is heard saying — so rapidly that the words almost run together — “Put your hands up, show me your hands.”

The words are followed immediately by the sound of a gun firing.

The victim ‘s eight-year-old nephew was in the room with her playing a video game at the time of the shooting, said a family lawyer, Lee Merritt.

Jefferson, a college graduate who worked for a pharmaceutical company, died at the scene.

Merritt said Jefferson had heard sounds in the backyard and walked toward a window when she was shot.

A GoFundMe page organized to help the family with funeral expenses said Jefferson’s mother had been ill and Jefferson was “home taking care of the house and loving her life.”

“There was no reason for her to be murdered.
None.
We must have justice.”

Take it to the Streets

The Fort Worth police statement said the department “shares the deep concerns of the public and is committed to completing an extremely thorough investigation.”

It promised to provide the public with “transparent and relevant information.”

The police officer involved was immediately suspended and was to be questioned Monday.

Mayor Betsy Price told reporters she would be hiring an outside agency to launch a separate investigation, the Star-Telegram reported.

The newspaper said Fort Worth police had shot at least seven people — six of them fatally — since June 1.


It quoted one speaker at Saturday’s vigil, local pastor Michael Bell, as urging people to “Take it to the streets.

“We’re not hugging them and giving them a Bible,” he said.

source: usa.inquirer.net

White House and Dems fight over rules for impeachment

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Constitution gives the House “the sole power of impeachment” — but it confers that authority without an instruction manual.

Now comes the battle royal over exactly what it means.

In vowing to halt all cooperation with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, the White House on Tuesday labeled the investigation “illegitimate” based on its own reading of the Constitution’s vague language.

In an eight-page letter, White House counsel Pat Cipollone pointed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s failure to call for an official vote to proceed with the inquiry as grounds to claim the process a farce.


“You have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process,” Cipollone wrote.

But Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee, told a federal judge Tuesday that it’s clear the House “sets its own rules” on how the impeachment process will play out.

The White House document lacked much in the way of legal arguments, seemingly citing cable TV news appearances as often as case law. And legal experts cast doubt upon its effectiveness.

“I think the goal of this letter is to further inflame the president’s supporters and attempt to delegitimize the process in the eyes of his supporters,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.

Courts have been historically hesitant to step in as referee for congressional oversight and impeachment. In 1993, the Supreme Court held that impeachment was an issue for the Congress and not the courts.

In that case, Walter Nixon, a federal district judge who was removed from office, sought to be reinstated and argued that the full Senate, instead of a committee that was established to hear testimony and collect evidence, should have heard the evidence against him.

The court unanimously rejected the challenge, finding impeachment is a function of the legislature that the court had no authority over.


As for the current challenge to impeachment, Vladeck said the White House letter “does not strike me as an effort to provide sober legal analysis.”

Gregg Nunziata, a Philadelphia attorney who previously served as general counsel and policy adviser to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, said the White House’s letter did not appear to be written in a “traditional good-faith back and forth between the legislative and executive branches.”

He called it a “direct assault on the very legitimacy of Congress’ oversight power.”

“The Founders very deliberately chose to put the impeachment power in a political branch rather the Supreme Court,” Nunziata told The Associated Press. “They wanted this to be a political process and it is.”

G. Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the letter appeared to act as nothing more than an accelerant on a smoldering fire.

“It’s a response that seems to welcome a constitutional crisis rather than defusing one or pointing toward some strategy that would deescalate the situation,” Cross said.

After two weeks of a listless and unfocused response to the impeachment probe, the White House letter amounted to a declaration of war.

It’s a strategy that risks further provoking Democrats in the impeachment probe, setting up court challenges and the potential for lawmakers to draw up an article of impeachment accusing President Donald Trump of obstructing their investigations.

Democrats have said that if the White House does not provide the information, they could write an article of impeachment on obstruction of justice.

It is unclear if Democrats would wade into a lengthy legal fight with the administration over documents and testimony or if they would just move straight to considering articles of impeachment.


House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Democrat-California, who is leading the Ukraine probe, has said Democrats will “have to decide whether to litigate, or how to litigate.”

But they don’t want the fight to drag on for months, as he said the Trump administration seems to want to do.

A federal judge heard arguments Tuesday on whether the House had undertaken a formal impeachment inquiry despite not having taken an official vote and whether it can be characterized, under the law, as a “judicial proceeding.”

The distinction matters because while grand jury testimony is ordinarily secret, one exception authorizes a judge to disclose it in connection with a judicial proceeding. House Democrats are seeking grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as they conduct the impeachment inquiry.

/atm

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

How the ground shifted on Trump impeachment

WASHINGTON — After more than two years of jousting over President Donald Trump’s conduct, the ground has shifted in Congress and a move toward impeachment has broken free of constraints.

That does not mean the path ahead is all set.

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who for months had been a powerful brake on restive Democrats wanting to impeach Trump — launched a formal inquiry toward that end, accusing the president of “betrayal of his oath of office,” betrayal of national security and betrayal of the integrity of American elections.

A look at the matter and what’s known about what happens next:



Next steps

Six House committees are investigating various aspects of alleged impropriety by the president, with the intelligence committee taking the lead in examining Trump’s actions with Ukraine.

The investigations are on an expedited basis, though with no specific deadline.

Ultimately, the House Judiciary Committee would be the panel responsible for recommending any articles of impeachment against Trump.

If the panel backs impeachment articles, the matter goes to the full House for a vote. Democrats control the House and its committees.

If a majority of the full House votes for impeachment, the matter goes to the Senate, which is responsible for holding a trial, overseen by Chief Justice John Roberts. It takes a two-thirds vote in the Senate to force a president from office — a daunting challenge for Democrats if the effort goes that far, given Republican control of that chamber.

Impeaching a president is often misunderstood to mean his removal. It actually means the House has voted to bring one or more articles of impeachment and send the process forward. No president has been ousted by impeachment.

Democrats break their impasse

Some Democrats in Congress have long wanted to kick-start the constitutional process to remove Trump, despite the slim odds of success. But they lacked a critical mass and Pelosi’s support.

Trump’s machinations to avoid culpability from the Russia investigation fed into their push, but that inquiry came to an indistinct conclusion. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailed troubling episodes of presidential behavior, but stopped short of recommending charges for obstructing justice or conspiring with Moscow to tip the 2016 U.S. election to Trump.

Trump’s pre-election payment to a porn actress to maintain her silence and apparent Trump Organization profiteering from his presidency also fueled impeachment sentiment from a segment of the party. But it took a whistleblower’s still-secret complaint about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine to change the landscape.

In a nutshell: There’s little doubt Trump pressed Ukraine to conduct a corruption investigation of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son — the president has defiantly stated that he did. He also acknowledged that days before a phone conversation with Ukraine’s leader in July, he ordered military aid to Ukraine to be frozen.

The episode raises the possibility that a president used the power of his office to get a foreign government to help him win reelection.

Trump denies doing or saying anything improper — and even doubled down on Thursday, openly calling on China to investigate the Bidens. He also plans to challenge the legitimacy of the impeachment inquiry because it wasn’t approved in a vote by the full House. Democrats say there is no requirement for a vote to start impeachment.

What has changed

Pelosi’s buy-in on impeachment proceedings is a huge advance for advocates of that approach after the proceedings in the Judiciary Committee were mostly seen as going nowhere. As well, Democrats believe the focus on Trump’s dealings with the Ukrainian leader could resonate more than the Mueller report did.

In terms of congressional process, not much changes, at least at first. The judiciary panel had already begun impeachment hearings and had asked other committees for input. And it’s not clear that Pelosi’s “expedited” timeline will move things along any more quickly. The committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, has said he wants to make a decision on whether to recommend articles of impeachment by the end of the year.


The last time this happened…

You can find partisans during almost every administration who think the president of the opposing party should be thrown out of office between elections. But there hasn’t been a serious effort to do that since the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

In 1998 and 1999, the House under Republican control pursued the impeachment of the Democratic president, primarily based on matters arising from his relationships with women outside his marriage.

The House approved an allegation that Clinton “willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony” before independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s grand jury investigation. And it voted to bring forward the accusation that he “prevented, obstructed and impeded the administration of justice.” The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him.

A rarity in history

Only two presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Clinton. Both won acquittal in the Senate.

Richard Nixon, who was the subject of impeachment proceedings, resigned from office in 1974 when it looked certain that the House would impeach him and his prospects in the Senate appeared dire.

Words from the Constitution

The Constitution gives the House “the sole power of impeachment” and the Senate “the sole power to try all impeachments.”

And it dictates the removal from office of an impeached president who is convicted by the Senate of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” It is left to Congress to define such terms.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

GOP split over impeachment pushback as Dems plow ahead

WASHINGTON — The president’s lawyer insists the real story is a debunked conspiracy theory. A senior White House adviser blames the “deep state.” And a Republican congressman is pointing at Joe Biden’s son.

As the Democrats drive an impeachment inquiry toward a potential vote by the end of the year, President Donald Trump’s allies are struggling over how he should manage the starkest threat to his presidency. The jockeying broke into the open Sunday on the talk show circuit, with a parade of Republicans erupting into a surge of second-guessing.

At the top of the list: Rudy Giuliani’s false charge that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 elections. The former New York mayor has been encouraging Ukraine to investigate both Biden and Hillary Clinton.

“I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again,” said Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser. “That conspiracy theory has got to go, they have to stop with that, it cannot continue to be repeated.”

Not only did Giuliani repeat it Sunday, he brandished pieces of paper he said were affidavits supporting his story.

“Tom Bossert doesn’t know what’s he’s talking about,” Guiliani said. He added that Trump was framed by the Democrats.

Senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, meanwhile, noted that he’s worked in the federal government “for nearly three years.”

“I know the difference between whistleblower and a deep state operative,” Miller said. “This is a deep state operative, pure and simple.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, heatedly said Trump was merely asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to root out corruption. That, Jordan said, includes Hunter Biden’s membership on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either of the Bidens.

Mixed messaging reflects the difficulty Republicans are having defending the president against documents released by the White House that feature Trump’s own words and actions. A partial transcript and a whistleblower complaint form the heart of the House impeachment inquiry and describe Trump pressuring a foreign president to investigate Biden’s family.

In a series of tweets Sunday night, Trump said he deserved to meet “my accuser” as well as whoever provided the whistleblower with what the president called “largely incorrect” information. He also accused Democrats of “doing great harm to our Country” in an effort to destabilize the nation and the 2020 election.

Trump has insisted the call was “perfect” and pushed to release both documents.

“He didn’t even know that it was wrong,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, describing a phone call from Trump in which the president suggested the documents would exonerate him.

But Democrats seized on them as evidence that Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” by asking for a foreign leader’s help undermining a political rival, Democrat Joe Biden. Pelosi launched an impeachment inquiry and on Sunday told other Democrats that public sentiment had swung behind the probe.

By all accounts, the Democratic impeachment effort was speeding ahead with a fair amount of coordination between Pelosi, Democratic messaging experts and its political operation.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Sunday that he expects the whistleblower to testify “very soon,” though details were still being worked out and no date had been set. Hearings and depositions were starting this week. Many Democrats are pushing for a vote on articles of impeachment before the end of the year, mindful of the looming 2020 elections.

Schiff said in one interview that his committee intends to subpoena Giuliani for documents and may eventually want to hear from Giuliani directly. In a separate TV appearance, Giuliani said he would not cooperate with Schiff, but then acknowledged he would do what Trump tells him. The White House did not provide an official response on whether the president would allow Giuliani to cooperate.

Lawyers for the whistleblower expressed concern about that individual’s safety, noting that some have offered a $50,000 “bounty” for the whistleblower’s identity. They said they expect the situation to become even more dangerous for their client and any other whistleblowers, as Congress seeks to investigate this matter.

On a conference call Sunday, Pelosi, traveling in Texas, urged Democrats to proceed “not with negative attitudes towards him, but a positive attitude towards our responsibility,” according to an aide on the call who shared the exchange on condition of anonymity. Polling, Pelosi said, had changed “drastically” in the Democrats’ favor.

A one-day NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted Sept. 25 found that about half of Americans — 49% — approve of the House formally starting an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

There remains a stark partisan divide on the issue, with 88% of Democrats approving and 93% of Republicans disapproving of the inquiry. But the findings suggest some movement in opinions on the issue. Earlier polls conducted throughout Trump’s presidency have consistently found a majority saying he should not be impeached and removed from office.


House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries of New York urged the caucus to talk about impeachment by repeating the words “betrayal, abuse of power, national security.” The Democrats’ campaign arm swung behind lawmakers to support the impeachment drive as they run for reelection, according to another call participant to spoke on condition of anonymity.

The contrast with the Republicans’ selection of responses was striking.

A combative House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said that nothing in Trump’s phone call rose to the level of an impeachable offense.

“Why would we move forward on impeachment?” the California Republican said. “There’s not something that you have to defend here.”

Bossert, an alumnus of Republican George W. Bush’s administration, offered a theory and some advice to Trump: Move past the fury over the 2016 Russia investigation, in which special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of conspiracy but plenty of examples of Trump’s obstruction.

“I honestly believe this president has not gotten his pound of flesh yet from past grievances on the 2016 investigation,” Bossert said. “If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”

Two advisers to the Biden campaign sent a letter Sunday urging major news networks to stop booking Giuliani on their shows, accusing Trump’s personal attorney of spreading “false, debunked conspiracy theories” on behalf of the president.

The letter to management and anchors of shows at ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News added: “By giving him your air time, you are allowing him to introduce increasingly unhinged, unfounded and desperate lies into the national conversation.”

/atm

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

2020 US polls: No millennial bump for Buttigieg, but hints of broad appeal

DES MOINES, Iowa  –  Pete Buttigieg would like to turn the fight for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination into a contest about generational change. But there’s one looming problem: He has yet to win over his own.

His lack of any ample base of support, even among his fellow millennials, is a central challenge of the 37-year-old’s long shot bid to rise from mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to the nation’s highest office. He plays well across a broad spectrum of Democratic voters, but in small fragments that have left him an intriguing candidate stuck in single digits in national polls.

“You can put groups of candidates into corners. What corner do you put Pete Buttigieg in?” said J. Ann Selzer, longtime director of the Iowa Poll, produced by The Des Moines Register and its partners. “I think that the combination of characteristics that most define Buttigieg fit him rather uniquely. He appears to be a cluster of one.”

As such, he needs to try to leverage that kind of appeal into votes against a field where candidates with clearer ideological positions, such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have more natural core constituencies.

There was hope for Buttigeig in a Register poll in June that showed his overall viability footprint — measuring Iowans listing him as their first or second choice, or merely considering him — closely trailed the survey’s top choices: former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders and Warren.

Biden does better among older voters; Sanders and Warren do better among younger ones. There is no consistent deviation among age groups for Buttigieg, Selzer said.

During Thursday’s presidential debate in Houston, Buttigieg tried to make a virtue of his youth while playing the adult in the room when his rivals bickered on stage.

“This is why presidential debates are becoming unwatchable,” he said after Biden landed a verbal jab during a tense back-and-forth with Julian Castro, housing secretary under President Barack Obama. “This reminds everybody of what they cannot stand about Washington, scoring points against each other, poking at each other.”

Castro shot back: “That’s called the Democratic primary election, Pete. That’s called an election.”

So far, there is no indication that Buttigieg’s next-generation appeal has liftoff. His early summer national buzz, largely the product of his raising a stunning $25 million in the second quarter, gave him plausibility. He enters the autumn stretch to the February caucuses with as robust an Iowa campaign as almost any of his top tier rivals, with more than 100 staff, plans for 20 offices and an aggressive outreach system.

He does so with his sights squarely fixed on capturing that enduring ideal for Democratic primary voters, a next-generation prophet looking deep into the future, like virtually every winning Democratic nominee going back 60 years.

“If you look at the history of successful Democratic nominees, they tend to be younger, they tend to be from outside,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama said, referring to Obama and Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. “The question is whether the overhang of Donald Trump creates a different environment where people are risk-averse and reaching for comfort and stability.”

Buttigieg’s debate moment recalled his increasingly pointed criticism of the Washington establishment during his summer blitz through Iowa.

At a town hall-style event in August, he told a 13-year-old girl who was troubled by school shootings that it is “a failure of the generation that’s in charge.”

It’s “one of the reasons I’m not waiting my turn,” the candidate said, drawing applause from the generationally mixed group.

Buttigieg came of age in the mass shooting era and serving in the country’s first post-9/11 war, but there’s no conclusive evidence that he is resonating more with younger voters.

At the same time, Buttigieg doesn’t register the variances in support from different age groups that the older candidates do. A July poll by the Pew Research Center found that just 7% of Democratic primary voters nationally under the age of 30 supported Biden, compared with 41% of voters 65 and older. Sanders, on the other hand, drew 24% of his support from the younger group and just 4% from the older segment.

Advisers say that Buttigieg’s balanced draw from all age groups in the Pew poll echoes their internal findings in early-voting states, and it manifests in Selzer’s most recent poll. It reflects his attractiveness to that enduring bloc of the Democratic presidential electorate that has sought a break from the past.

Still, that polling collectively has yet to show support that would propel him into the upper tier of the 2020 pack.

That’s not to say young adults with children and college students weren’t drawn to the sense of urgency Buttigieg brought to talk of climate change or gun violence out during his summer swing in Iowa, or older voters to his policy understanding and mild temperament.

“It’s not just that he’s younger. It’s his intellect and his vision at a time when the world is looking to new leadership,” Elizabeth Sauer, a retired high school teacher, said at an event with Buttigieg in Cedar Rapids this month. She was referring to younger Western world leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Buttigieg, in an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” said he thinks the perspective he brings “needs to be at the table right now at a time when around the world we’re seeing more and more elected leaders from France to New Zealand to El Salvador coming from my generation.”

There’s been little reliable public polling in Iowa since Buttigieg broke through in July with his $25 million fundraising for the second Quarter. But evidence suggests opportunity for Buttigieg, who had risen to fourth behind the three older candidates in the Register’s June poll.

Since that poll, Buttigieg reported the prodigious level of contributions, sent 100 staffers across Iowa, began spending $350,000 on digital advertising — some aimed at younger voters on the music app Spotify — and undertook an intricate peer-to-peer contact program in Iowa and New Hampshire. /gsg

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Democrats’ Strategy to Change Criminal Justice Laws

Every top Democratic presidential contender is touting a detailed overhaul of the criminal justice system to end rules and practices that have been blamed for the mass incarceration of a generation of African Americans.

The proposals illustrate the influence of black voters in the primary and reflect Democrats’ refusal to cede any ground with them to President Donald Trump, who has also sought to highlight his efforts to change the justice system.

The ideas from Democrats range from ending requirements that bail is paid in cash which opponents decry as a driver of unnecessary incarceration to an end to the federal death penalty, which Trump recently reinstated.

Here’s a look at how the leading candidates approach some major elements of the nation’s criminal justice system:

MASS INCARCERATION

Bernie Sanders rolled out his plan in South Carolina, a critical early-voting state where the majority of the Democratic primary electorate is black.

The Vermont senator told The Associated Press that his chief priority is significantly reducing the country’s prison population, using a combination of remedies that include a $25 billion investment in combating homelessness and local-level law enforcement reforms that he hopes will create stronger ties and fewer misunderstandings between law officers and the communities that they serve.

“Lethal force must be the last response, not the first response,” Sanders said.

His rivals have their own visions to make a dent in the nation’s incarcerated rate, which ranks as the highest in the world.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, after taking heat from Democratic opponents for championing a hawkish crime bill in the 1990s, pitched a left-leaning plan that declares “no one should be incarcerated for drug use alone,” instead routing those infractions to drug courts or treatment.

California Sen. Kamala Harris, who released a criminal justice plan ahead of Thursday’s presidential debate, is calling for a national commission to study how to reduce mass incarceration and recidivism while still holding offenders accountable.

She calls for ending private prisons, legalizing marijuana and ending the federal sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine.

Harris, Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg all propose removing decisions about using the president’s clemency powers from the Justice Department, while Biden proposes using clemency powers “broadly,” as former President Barack Obama did.

For his part, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker proposes a clemency initiative that his campaign projects would release from prison more than 17,000 individuals, many of them incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes.

All of the five top Democratic candidates also have vowed to slash or end federal mandatory minimum sentencing rules that critics blame for the excessive incarceration of nonviolent offenders.

POLICE MISCONDUCT

The Trump administration has limited the use of consent decrees and other Justice Department tools to enact major change within police departments following allegations of excessive use of force or other incursions on civil rights.

Most of the leading Democratic candidates specifically say they would restore previous policy on consent decrees to empower stronger federal oversight of police departments, while Sanders’ plan goes even further by committing the attorney general to an investigation of any death that occurs in police custody.

Buttigieg does not directly cite consent decrees in his sweeping anti-racism agenda.

The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who faced intense scrutiny back home after the fatal shooting of a black man by a white police officer, proposed crafting legislation that would raise the bar for the use of lethal force by police officers, in addition to multiple other measures designed to increase responsiveness and community involvement by police departments.

Buttigieg’s criminal justice plan, like Sanders’ and Warren’s, directly criticizes the so-called “broken-windows” tactic, which encouraged police departments to pursue punishments for minor crimes that might deter major ones.

Booker hired a police director during his term as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who embraced that theory.

Harris is calling for independent investigations of officer-involved shootings, wants to incentivize police departments to adopt a national standard for the use of force, and would reinstate Obama’s executive order that prohibited sales of certain military equipment to local police departments.

INSIDE THE COURTROOM

Biden, Warren, and Sanders all devote part of their platforms to aiding the nation’s strained corps of public defenders, while Harris has proposed her own $250 million grant program designed to improve working conditions for lawyers who help those who can’t afford representation on their own.

Warren’s criminal justice plan further pitches an expansion of the right of accused individuals to challenge their imprisonment, also known as the right of habeas corpus.
And she joined Sanders and Biden in a commitment to reining in prosecutorial overreach: Warren would create a dedicated Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct, among other changes.

Biden would examine prosecutorial decision-making through an independent task force, while Sanders’ slightly different approach includes a vow to restrain prosecutorial immunity for decisions they make on the job.

___

Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

source: usa.inquirer.net

Shocking News: Trump Impeachment

More than half of House Democrats support launching impeachment proceedings against US President Donald Trump, media tallies showed Friday, a milestone that progressives hope will move Speaker Nancy Pelosi off of her resistance to opening an inquiry.

Of the 235 voting Democrats, 118 have publicly stated their support for beginning the procedures aimed at removing Trump from office, with the symbolic threshold being crossed when congressman Ted Deutch of Florida came out in favor on Thursday.

Momentum has steadily built in the days since former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his two-year investigation of Russian election interference and potential obstruction of justice by Trump.

Deutch became the 23rd Democratic lawmaker to support the proceedings since Mueller went before Congress and, in Deutch’s words, “confirmed the damning conclusions of his report.”
The Mueller report details how Russia interfered in “sweeping and systematic fashion” in Trump’s favor during the 2016 US presidential election campaign.

It sets out how the Trump campaign welcomed that help and repeatedly lied about it.

Democrats argue that Mueller also provided evidence for 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice by the president.

Surpassing the 50 percent threshold could be key because Pelosi has repeatedly stated her opposition to impeachment in part because the bulk of her caucus remained against launching proceedings.

Instead, she prefers letting the several ongoing House investigations of Trump and his administration take their course.

In June, when Pelosi was asked whether she would support an impeachment inquiry if a majority of Democrats backed it, she declined to answer a hypothetical.
“It’s not even close in our caucus,” Pelosi said while adding that impeachment was “not off the table.”

Pelosi has regularly noted that impeaching Trump would almost certainly lead to an acquittal in the Senate, where Republicans hold a majority and allow Trump to claim vindication and fire up his core supporters as he seeks re-election.

Some House Democrats argue that it is their constitutional duty to take action when they see evidence of presidential wrongdoing, regardless of the political ramifications.

Meanwhile, congressman Will Hurd, the only African-American Republican in the House and the only Republican representing a district on the US-Mexico border, announced he will not seek re-election in 2020.

Hurd joins five other Republicans, several of them in swing districts, who announced their retirements in the last two weeks, a blow to party efforts to reclaim the House majority.

source: usa.inquirer.ne

Impeachment unsettled as Democrats enter post-Mueller moment

WASHINGTON — Midway through the first year of their House majority, Democrats have yet to vote to impeach President Donald Trump. And maybe they never will.

The House recessed Friday for a six-week summer break without opening impeachment proceedings, the Democrats no closer to taking a vote than they were when they swept to power at the start of the year, a searing blow to liberals in the aftermath of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s halting testimony on Capitol Hill.


Yet, the House Judiciary Committee filed a fresh lawsuit Friday, its lawyers arguing they need documents from the Trump administration as they pursue questions of impeachment. It mentions the word impeachment 76 times.

The committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, said his panel is pressing ahead with investigating the president, with or without a formal House vote.

“I think too much has been made of the phrase impeachment inquiry,” Nadler said Friday.

“We are using our full Article I powers to investigate the conduct of the president and to consider what remedies there are,” he said, referring to the Constitution. “Among other things we will consider are obviously recommending articles of impeachment.”

The action underscores the tensions among a House majority that’s trying to have it both ways, preserving the idea of impeachment while avoiding a potentially risky vote.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi brushed back criticism that she’s “running out the clock,” as about 100 Democrats in the 435-member House favor opening an impeachment inquiry, according to a tally by The Associated Press.

“We will proceed when we have what we need to proceed, not one day sooner,” Pelosi said Friday during her weekly news conference.

“Everybody has the liberty and the luxury to espouse their own position,” she said, “and to criticize me for trying to go down the path in the most determined positive way.”

Pelosi said she has “no complaints” against those pushing for impeachment. Their advocacy, she said, “only gives me leverage.”

With the House unable, or unwilling, to impeach Trump, it intensifies the pressure on the party to figure out how to defeat the president in the 2020 election.

House Democrats capped their 200th day in the majority with a long list of bills — on raising the minimum wage, strengthening immigration protections — that give voters a view of how their party would govern in the White House. An outside group started running ads, including on Fox News this week, to promote their agenda.

“These people are clowns,” Trump said Friday in remarks at the White House. “The Democrats are clowns.”

As if to shore up the left flank, Pelosi met earlier Friday with liberal firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in an apparent easing of tensions with the “squad” of newcomers as they pursue shared goals.

Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman called it a “very positive and productive meeting about progressive priorities.”

Pelosi said, “What we’re advocating for is a progressive agenda for our country.”

Yet no sooner had Pelosi stepped away from the podium than members of the Judiciary Committee stepped up to declare they were essentially well on their way to impeachment proceedings.

“This is an impeachment investigation,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., “whether we should recommend articles of impeachment to our caucus.”

Freshmen Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, said, “I think especially as folks go home, my hope is that, in addition to talking about all the important kitchen table things that we all came here to work on, that there is an honest discussion within our own communities about whether we can continue to tolerate a lawless president.”

Asked whether he favored impeachment, Nadler took a long pause. 



“We may decide to recommend articles of impeachment at some point, we may not, it remains to be seen,” Nadler said.

The committee’s court filing Friday was an effort to obtain secret grand jury material underlying Mueller’s report.

The court petition is among a half-dozen legal actions the House is taking against the Trump administration as part of Pelosi’s step-by-step strategy of building a case against the president. The Democrats contend that Trump is obstructing Congress’s constitutional ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch by withholding documents and preventing witnesses from testifying.

Democrats, including Pelosi, often note that the third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon was his obstruction of Congress.

Next week, Nadler is expected to file a lawsuit to try to enforce a subpoena against Donald McGahn, the former White House counsel and a key Mueller witness. It challenges the administration’s claim that its former employees have “absolute immunity” from testifying before Congress.

So in some ways the House is well on its way to impeachment without having to vote on it, as it conducts investigations and files lawsuits to build its case.

“Impeachment isn’t a binary thing that you either are or you aren’t,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa.

“What we’ve been saying and what we’ve been doing is starting a process where we’re engaging in an investigation to see if we should recommend articles of impeachment,” she said. “It’s a process. We started it some months ago in some ways.”

Catering to centrist Democrats, the dozens of lawmakers who helped secure the House majority, the strategy protects those who come from districts where Trump is popular and may not want to have to take a vote on impeachment. Yet it infuriates the liberal flank, the core of the party’s activists.

After Mueller testified, Pelosi assembled Democrats behind closed doors and offered the path forward. 



Pelosi told them that if they wanted to come out publicly in favor of impeachment, to do it in a way that did not make it a moral imperative. The next morning, she delivered a similar message, telling lawmakers to say what they want about impeachment, but to do it in way that doesn’t challenge other Democrats’ views.

The comments were relayed by three people familiar with the private meetings. They were unauthorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some Democrats grumbled that the investigations were becoming “endless,” according to one of the people.

But others say Democrats were elected to the House in large part because voters want them to stand up to Trump. If they don’t, they say their majority faces potential blowback in 2020.

“I think the ramifications are simply that we will have the ball and we fumbled it,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. “I think we need to do the appropriate thing regardless of the outcome.”

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

China tells India: Let’s fight together against Trump’s unilateralism, protectionism

NEW DELHI — China says it values India’s concerns on the bilateral trade imbalance between the two Asian giants and is willing to discuss new approaches to address the issue, and has asked New Delhi to join Beijing in its fight against “unilateralism and protectionism” amidst a bruising trade war with the United States.

India for long has been pressing China to open its pharmaceutical market for Indian pharma exports to address the yawning trade deficit which last year according to Chinese figures, crossed US$ 57 billion in a $ 95.5 billion trade.

China’s new Ambassador to India Sun Weidong said: “China highly values India’s concerns on trade imbalance. But I have to point out that we have never deliberately pursued a trade surplus against India.”

China for its part, Sun said, has taken measures to increase import of rice and sugar and accelerated the process of review and approvals of Indian pharmaceuticals and agricultural goods.

He said latest figures show that China’s imports of Indian goods grew by 15 per cent and more Indian goods have found their way to the Chinese market.

India’s export of agricultural goods to China last year actually doubled, he said. “According to the statistics in the first half this year, India’s trade deficit against China is down by five per cent. So, I am convinced that with the concerted efforts the issue of trade imbalance between India and China will be gradually addressed,” he said.


“China and India have various channels for dialogue to talk about issues like trade imbalance. We are willing to discuss and find new approaches to address the trade imbalances with our Indian friends,” he said.

Sun also asked India to join China in the fight against unilateralism and protectionism, a reference to US President Donald Trump’s policy using tariffs as a weapon to assert his America first policy.

Trump kicked off a trade war with China last year by slapping 25 per cent duties on more than $ 250 billion of Chinese imports, demanding Beijing to reduce massive trade deficit which climbed to over $ 539 billion.

There has been a trade friction between India and the US on several issue. India wants foreign companies to store data locally and announced a review of the rules around e-commerce, moves that alarmed U.S. technology and financial giants.

Without directly referring to China’s current trade war with the US and India’s trade frictions with America, Sun said: “We are facing unprecedented challenge that is unseen in a century”. “We are both faced with the challenges from unilateralism and protectionism. So, we have to resolutely defend the multilateralism and economic globalization and stand against unilateralism and protectionism,” he said.

Without directly referring to concerns in India over China’s big push into South Asia with huge investments in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Sun referred to Beijing’s proposal in the past for a China-India Plus approach to address the issues involving these countries.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Trump sends racist tweet against Dem lawmakers

WASHINGTON— Starkly injecting race into his criticism of liberal Democrats, President Donald Trump said four congresswomen of color should go back to the “broken and crime infested” countries they came from, ignoring the fact that all of the women are American citizens and three were born in the U.S. His attack drew a searing condemnation from Democrats who labeled the remarks racist and breathtakingly divisive.

Following a familiar script, Republicans remained largely silent after Trump’s Sunday morning broadsides against the four women. But the president’s nativist tweets caused Democrats to set aside their internal rifts to rise up in a united chorus against the president.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trump wants to “make America white again.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, after jousting for days with Pelosi, said Trump “can’t conceive of an America that includes us.”

Trump, who has a long history of making racist remarks, was almost certainly referring to Ocasio-Cortez and her House allies in what’s become known as “the squad.” The others are Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Only Omar, from Somalia, is foreign-born.

Ocasio-Cortez swiftly denounced his remarks . “Mr. President, the country I ‘come from,’ & the country we all swear to, is the United States,” she tweeted, adding that “You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.” Omar also addressed herself directly to Trump in a tweet, writing: “You are stoking white nationalism (because) you are angry that people like us are serving in Congress and fighting against your hate-filled agenda.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, summed up the Democratic response: “Racial arsonist strikes again. Shut. Your. Reckless. Mouth.”


With his tweet, Trump inserted himself further into a rift between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, just two days after he offered an unsolicited defense of the Democratic speaker. Pelosi has been seeking to minimize Ocasio-Cortez’s influence in the House Democratic caucus in recent days, prompting Ocasio-Cortez to accuse Pelosi of trying to marginalize women of color.

“She is not a racist,” Trump said of Pelosi on Friday.

On Sunday, Trump’s tone took a turn.

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” he tweeted.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”

He added: “These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”

The attacks may have been meant to widen the divides within the Democrat caucus, which has been riven by internal debate over how far left to go in countering Trump and over whether to proceed with impeachment proceedings against the president. Instead, the president’s tweets, which evoked the trope of telling black people to go back to Africa, brought Democrats together.

“Let’s be clear about what this vile comment is: A racist and xenophobic attack on Democratic congresswomen,” tweeted Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate.

Another 2020 contender, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, tweeted at the president: “This is racist. These congresswomen are every bit as American as you — and represent our values better than you ever will.”

Few Republicans weighed in on the president’s comments. Congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Sen. Tim. Scott of South Carolina, the only Republican black senator.

Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in a previously scheduled appearance on “Face the Nation” on CBS, said only: “You’re going to have to ask the president what he means by those specific tweets.”

Shortly after the tweets, and a later presidential post defending the harsh scenes at a border detention facility where hundreds of migrant men are being held in sweltering, foul-smelling conditions, Trump left the White House to go golfing at his Virginia club.

Trump appeared unbowed Sunday night when he returned to Twitter to say it was “so sad” to see Democrats sticking up for the women. “If the Democrat Party wants to continue to condone such disgraceful behavior,” he tweeted, “then we look even more forward to seeing you at the ballot box in 2020!”

It was far from the first time that Trump has been accused of holding racist views.

In his campaign kickoff in June 2015, Trump deemed many Mexican immigrants “rapists.” In 2017, he said there good people on “both sides” of the clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, between white supremacists and anti-racist demonstrators that left one counter-protester dead. Last year, during a private White House meeting on immigration, Trump wondered why the United States was admitting so many immigrants from “shithole countries” like African nations.

Repeatedly, Trump has painted arriving immigrants as an “infestation” and he has been slow in condemning acts of violence committed by white supremacists. And he launched his political career with false claims that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Despite his history of racist remarks, Trump has paid little penalty in his own party.

Though a broad array of Republicans did speak out against his reaction to Charlottesville, they have largely held their tongues otherwise, whether it be on matter of race or any other Trump provocation. Fearful of his Twitter account and sweeping popularity among Republican voters, GOP lawmakers have largely tried to ignore the provocative statements.

Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential hopeful from California, tweeted, “Let’s call the president’s racist attack exactly what it is: un-American.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, was born in the Bronx, New York, and raised in suburban Westchester County.

Pressley, the first black woman elected to the House from Massachusetts, was born in Cincinnati.

Omar, the first Somali native elected to Congress and one of its first Muslim women, was born in Somalia but spent much of her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp as civil war tore apart her home country. She immigrated to the United States at age 12, teaching herself English by watching American TV and eventually settling with her family in Minneapolis.

Tlaib was born in Detroit.

source: usa.inquirer.net

Mueller concludes Russia-Trump probe; no new indictments

WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday turned over his long-awaited final report on the contentious Russia investigation that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump’s presidency, entangled Trump’s family and resulted in criminal charges against some of the president’s closest associates.

The comprehensive report, still confidential, marks the end of Mueller’s probe but sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trump’s attorney general, to Congress and, in all likelihood, federal courts.

The Justice Department said the report was delivered by a security officer Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and then it went to Attorney General William Barr. Word of the delivery triggered reactions across Washington, including Democrats’ demands that it be released publicly before long and Republicans’ contentions that it ended two years of wasted time and money.

Barr released a letter noting his plans to write his own account of Mueller’s findings. The White House released a statement saying it had not seen or been briefed on the special counsel’s document.

What happens next is “up to Attorney General Barr,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

Barr said he could send his account to Congress quickly.

“I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,” Barr said in his letter the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees. He pledged a commitment to transparency.

The attorney general said the Justice Department had not denied any request from the special counsel, something Barr would have been required to disclose to Congress to ensure there was no political inference in the independent probe.

With no details released at this point, it’s not known whether Mueller’s report answers the core questions of his investigation: Did Trump’s campaign collude with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of the celebrity businessman? Also, did Trump take steps later, including by firing his FBI director, to obstruct the probe?

But the delivery of the report does mean the investigation has concluded without any public charges of a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, or of obstruction by the president. Mueller is not recommending any further indictments in the Russia probe, a Justice Department official confirmed Friday. That person, who described the document as “comprehensive,” was not authorized to discuss the probe and asked for anonymity.

It’s unclear what steps Mueller will take if he uncovered what he believes to be criminal wrongdoing by Trump, in light of Justice Department legal opinions that have held that sitting presidents may not be indicted.


The mere delivery of a confidential report set off immediate demands from Democrats for full release of Mueller’s findings.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared it “imperative” to make the full report public.

The top congressional Democrats said, “The American people have a right to the truth.”

Democrats also expressed concern that Trump would try to get a “sneak preview” of the findings.

“The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,” they said in a joint statement.

Barr has said he wants to make as much public as possible, and any efforts to withhold details will prompt a tussle between the Justice Department and lawmakers who may subpoena Mueller and his investigators to testify before Congress. Such a move by Democrats would likely be vigorously contested by the Trump administration.

The conclusion of Mueller’s investigation does not remove legal peril for the president. Trump faces a separate Justice Department investigation in New York into hush money payments during the campaign to two women who say they had sex with him years before the election. He’s also been implicated in a potential campaign finance violation by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who says Trump asked him to arrange the transactions. Federal prosecutors, also in New York, have been investigating foreign contributions made to the president’s inaugural committee.

No matter the findings in Mueller’s report, the investigation has already illuminated Russia’s assault on the American political system, painted the Trump campaign as eager to exploit the release of hacked Democratic emails and exposed lies by Trump aides aimed at covering up their Russia-related contacts. Over the 21-month investigation, Mueller has brought charges against 34 people, including six aides and advisers to the president, and three companies.

The special counsel brought a sweeping indictment accusing Russian military intelligence officers of hacking Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and other Democratic groups during the 2016 election. He charged another group of Russians with carrying out a large-scale social media disinformation campaign against the American political process that also sought to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Closer to the president, Mueller secured convictions against a campaign chairman who cheated banks and dodged his taxes, a national security adviser who lied about his Russian contacts and a campaign aide who misled the FBI about his knowledge of stolen emails. 


Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, pleaded guilty in New York to campaign finance violations arising from the hush money payments and in the Mueller probe to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal. Another Trump confidant, Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges that he lied about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails ultimately released by WikiLeaks. It’s unclear whether any of the aides who have been convicted, all of whom have pleaded guilty and cooperated with the investigators, might angle for a pardon. Trump has left open the idea of pardons.

Along the way, Trump lawyers and advisers repeatedly evolved their public defenses to deal with the onslaught of allegations from the investigation. Where once Trump and his aides had maintained that there were no connections between the campaign and Russia, by the end of the probe Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was routinely making the argument that even if the two sides did collude, it wasn’t necessarily a crime. The goalpost shifting reflected the administration’s challenge in adopting a singular narrative to fend off allegations.

Equally central to Mueller’s work is his inquiry into whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation. Since the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017, Trump has increasingly tried to undermine the probe by calling it a “witch hunt” and repeatedly proclaiming there was “NO COLLUSION” with Russia. But Trump also took certain acts as president that caught Mueller’s attention and have been scrutinized for possible obstruction.

One week before Mueller’s appointment, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, later saying he was thinking of “this Russia thing” at the time.

He mercilessly harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing from the Russia investigation two months before Mueller was named special counsel, a move that left the president without a perceived loyalist atop the probe. And he helped draft a misleading statement on Air Force One as a Trump Tower meeting between his eldest son and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was about to become public.

The meeting itself became part of Mueller’s investigation, entangling Donald Trump Jr. in the probe. Mueller’s team also interviewed the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, multiple times.

Even as Trump blasted Mueller’s team, his White House and campaign produced thousands of documents for the special counsel, and dozens of his aides were interviewed. The president submitted written answers to Mueller regarding the Russia investigation, but he refused to be interviewed.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net