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.

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source: newsinfo.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

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

Trump rattles NATO, knocking its value, assailing Germany

BRUSSELS  — Under fire for his warm embrace of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump jolted the NATO summit Wednesday by turning a spotlight on Germany’s ties to Russia and openly questioning the value of the military alliance that has defined American foreign policy for decades.

Trump declared that a joint natural gas pipeline venture with Moscow has left Angela Merkel’s government “totally controlled” and “captive to Russia.” So, in a stroke, he shifted attention away from his own ties to the Kremlin just days before he meets one-on-one with Putin.

With scorching language, the president questioned the necessity of the alliance that formed a bulwark against Soviet aggression, tweeting after a day of contentious meetings: “What good is NATO if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy?”


German Chancellor Merkel hit back immediately, not only denying Trump’s contention but suggesting that his comfortable upbringing in the U.S. gave him no standing to spout off on the world stage about Germany.

Drawing on her own background growing up in communist East Germany behind the Iron Curtain, she said:

“I’ve experienced myself a part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, and I’m very happy today that we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany and can thus say that we can determine our own policies and make our own decisions and that’s very good.”

Trump demanded by public tweet that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “must pay 2% of GDP IMMEDIATELY, not by 2025” for their military efforts. He then rattled U.S. allies further by privately suggesting member nations should spend 4 percent of their gross domestic product on the military — more than even the United States currently pays, according to NATO statistics.

It was just the latest in Trump’s demands and insults that critics fear will undermine a decades-old alliance launched to counter-balance Soviet aggression after World War II. And it came just days before Trump planned to sit down with Putin in Finland at the conclusion of what has become a contentious European trip.

Trump has spent weeks berating members of the alliance for failing to increase military spending, accusing Europe of freeloading off the U.S. and even raising doubts about whether he would come to members’ defense as required if they were ever attacked.

Trump’s tongue-lashing accelerated during a pre-summit breakfast, when he traded his usual long-distance Twitter attacks for a face-to-face confrontation with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

“We’re supposed to protect you against Russia but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia and I think that’s very inappropriate,” Trump said, repeatedly describing Germany as “captive to Russia” because of the energy deal. He urged NATO to look into the issue.


Trump’s harsh words for Merkel, whose country has hosted tens of thousands of U.S. troops that have been key to post-WWII stability in Europe for seven decades, struck at the core of the alliance. West Germany joined NATO in 1955 and was a critical factor in the alliance’s success in facing down the Soviet Union until its collapse. Reunified with the East, Germany became the largest European economy in NATO in 1990.

The president’s beef was with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would bring gas from Russia to Germany’s northeastern Baltic coast, bypassing Eastern European nations like Poland and Ukraine and doubling the amount of gas Russia can send directly to Germany. The vast undersea pipeline is opposed by the U.S. and some other EU members, who warn it could give Moscow greater leverage over Western Europe. It’s expected to be online at the end of 2019.

Environmental-conscious Germany is trying to reduce its reliance on coal and is phasing out nuclear power by 2022, so it hopes to use natural gas to partially fill the gap until the country’s electricity grid can cope with fluctuating levels provided by renewable energy.

Hours after the breakfast, Merkel and Trump appeared to play nice as they met along the summit’s sidelines. Trump told reporters the two had a “very, very good relationship” and congratulated Merkel on her “tremendous success.”



While Trump went after Germany for its ties to Russia, he himself has been accused by critics of being too eager to improve relations with Moscow. He’s also dismissed the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia tried to undermine Western democracy by meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help him win.

Trump also lobbed fresh complaints about allies’ “delinquent” defense spending and suggested at one point that NATO allies commit to spending 4 percent of their GDP on defense — twice the goal they’ve set for 2024.

“I have great confidence they’ll be spending more,” he said.

However, a formal summit declaration issued by the NATO leaders Wednesday reaffirmed their “unwavering commitment” to the 2 percent pledge set in 2014 and made no reference to any effort to go higher.

Trump has repeatedly mischaracterized the spending target, wrongly describing it as a fee that countries pay to NATO or the U.S. rather than their own military. NATO estimates that 15 members, or just over half, will meet the benchmark by 2024 based on current trends.

Back in the U.S., Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer issued a joint statement describing Trump’s “brazen insults and denigration of one of America’s most steadfast allies, Germany,” as “an embarrassment.”

“His behavior this morning is another profoundly disturbing signal that the president is more loyal to President Putin than to our NATO allies,” they wrote.

Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, also criticized Trump’s rhetoric.

“I do believe everybody should get to 2 percent quickly, but the NATO alliance is something that’s very important to the United States and our citizenry, and things that are said to try and create instability, all that it does is strengthen Putin,” Corker said, describing concerns “about conciliatory things that could occur in Helsinki” when Trump sits down with the Russian president.

But Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, a strong supporter of the president, said the pipeline issue strikes at the “heart of NATO unity.”

“The pipeline gets cheap Russian gas to Germany while bypassing smaller Eastern European nations, allowing Russia to pressure them while Germany is held harmless,” he tweeted, adding: “No amount of preening in Berlin will cover this nakedly selfish policy.”  /muf

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net