“As House Democrats push forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, Republicans have largely rushed to Mr. Trump’s defense, or at least tempered their criticism to avoid his furious reprisals,” the New York Times reports.
“Among the handful of exceptions, though, there has been none louder or more prominent than Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a figure who once embodied the essence of the Republican Party before Mr. Trump commandeered it, and is now in a lonely category of his own.”
Rudy Giuliani claimed he’s the real whistleblower” and claimed to possess more damaging information and insisted that he, too, should be entitled to whistleblower protections, Politico reports.
Said Giuliani: “If I get killed now, you won’t get the rest of the story.”
“This is a strain of cat that I don’t have the medical credentials to analyze nor the religious credentials to judge.”
— Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a New Yorker interview about President Trump.
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President Trump on Friday demanded House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) “immediately” resign from Congress for reading what the congressman described as a parody of the president’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader that is at the center of a whistleblower complaint, The Hill reports.
Tweeted Trump: “He was supposedly reading the exact transcribed version of the call, but he completely changed the words to make it… sound horrible, and me sound guilty.”
He added: “He was desperate and he got caught. Adam Schiff therefore lied to Congress and attempted to defraud the American Public. He has been doing this for two years. I am calling for him to immediately resign from Congress based on this fraud!”
Amy Walter: “The mythology surrounding the 1998 impeachment still drives a lot of the conventional wisdom today. That thinking goes like this: Republicans pushed an unpopular impeachment and paid for it at the polls. But, it’s not 1998 anymore. We are a much more polarized country than we were back then. Partisans are less willing to give the opposite party credit for things going well, and more willing to support their own party when things turn sour. We also know that this president is more unpopular than President Clinton was at any point during his impeachment.”
“We are a deeply divided, deeply polarized country. Almost everything we do — from choosing where to eat lunch (Chick-fil-A vs. Whole Foods), to picking where to live (urban/suburban vs. rural/small town) is filtered through the lens of how we identify politically. As such, we shouldn’t expect views of impeachment to be any different. Opinions won’t swing wildly from day to day or week to week. We also shouldn’t expect to see Americans overwhelming support or overwhelmingly oppose impeachment. Like everything in this era, the final verdict on impeachment is likely to be decided on the margins by voters who are holding conflicting views on the president and the process of impeachment. It will be decided by those who may dislike Trump, but are also frustrated by the paralysis in Washington, or those who may like the agenda of the president, but are troubled by his behavior.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Morning Joe that she believes Attorney General Bill Barr has “gone rogue” with his handling of the controversy regarding the Trump administration’s interactions with Ukraine.
“Mike Pence privately counseled President Trump against releasing the rough transcript of the president’s call with his Ukrainian counterpart, but eventually sided with others in the White House arguing in favor of its release,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The vice president raised concerns about the precedent the release would set, but ultimately fell in line behind Trump, who felt he had no choice but to release it. Trump told aides he felt the messaging had gotten away from the White House and that releasing the document was his only option in the battle for public opinion.”
“More than 300 former U.S. national security and foreign policy officials have signed a statement warning that President Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine are a ‘profound national security concern’ and supporting an impeachment inquiry by Congress to determine ‘the facts,'” the Washington Post reports.
From the statement: “To be clear, we do not wish to prejudge the totality of the facts or Congress’ deliberative process. At the same time, there is no escaping that what we already know is serious enough to merit impeachment proceedings.”
“Many of the signers are former Obama officials. But the list includes others who served as career officials in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s national security division under President George W. Bush and director of the National Counterterrorism Center under President Barack Obama.”
Sen. Michael Bennet may not be registering high in the polls, but he told CBS News that he will be campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency through the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary in the hopes of outperforming expectations.
“Russia hopes the U.S. doesn’t release transcripts of President Donald Trump’s conversations with Vladimir Putin as it did this week with his talks with the Ukrainian leader,” Bloomberg reports.
Said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov: “We would like to hope that things won’t come to such situations in our bilateral relations, which already have plenty of quite serious problems.”
NPR: “The gap between the richest and the poorest U.S. households is now the largest it’s been in the past 50 years — despite the median U.S. income hitting a new record in 2018, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.”
“U.S. income inequality was ‘significantly higher’ in 2018 than in 2017, the federal agency says in its latest American Community Survey report. The last time a change in the metric was deemed statistically significant was when it grew from 2012-2013.”
Wall Street Journal: “The confirmation of President Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is in jeopardy as some Republican senators expressed concern that he would restrict the rights of gun owners.”
“Chuck Canterbury, the head of the national Fraternal Order of Police, doesn’t have enough Republican support to advance beyond the Senate Judiciary Committee, the people said, and a Thursday vote on his nomination was indefinitely postponed.”
“We should be focused and not overthink this. The guy has copped to this. If you are running an investigation, it is usually made a lot easier when the person admits to the crime. You can cross a lot of witnesses off the list that you might otherwise talk to.”
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), quoted by the New York Times, on impeaching President Trump.
“Advisers to presidential candidate Joe Biden are weighing the introduction of a new tax on Wall Street, as the former vice president now stands alone among the Democratic presidential front-runners in not backing a multitrillion-dollar ‘wealth tax’ on the richest Americans,” the Washington Post reports.
“The plan under consideration from Biden’s advisers could tax financial transactions such as the sale of stocks and bonds.”
“Allies of Joe Biden, concerned about his slipping poll numbers in the Democratic presidential primary and an onslaught of attacks from President Trump, are weighing whether to mobilize a super PAC supporting Mr. Biden and have held conversations with wealthy donors to gauge their interest in contributing money,” the New York Times reports.
“The White House has taken extraordinary steps over the past two years to block details of President Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders from becoming public, following embarrassing disclosures early in his administration that enraged the president and created a sense of paranoia among his top aides,” the Washington Post reports.
“The number of aides allowed to listen on secure “drop” lines was slashed. The list of government officials who could review a memo of the call’s contents was culled. Fewer copies of transcripts went to agencies, and they were stamped with ‘EYES ONLY DO NOT COPY.’ And some officials who deliver call memos had to sign for the records to create a custody record if they were to leak.”
“President Trump on Thursday excoriated an unidentified whistleblower and the White House aides who informed their complaint as “almost a spy” and likened their work to treason — part of a scorched-earth strategy he is directing for the Republican Party at the outset of an impeachment showdown,” the Washington Post reports.
“Trump has acted impulsively and indignantly as he wages an all-out political war to defend himself from allegations that he abused his power to solicit foreign interference in his 2020 reelection bid.”
“The coming weeks will test whether Trump’s familiar blame-the-accuser-and-counterattack playbook — while floating dark conspiracies to divert attention — will be successful in the face of mounting evidence that he asked Ukraine to dig up dirt on potential 2020 Democratic opponent Joe Biden.”
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA’ old MSNBC that President Trump “reeks of corruption” and “sounds like a criminal.”
Said Harris: “I was a prosecutor, and in a court I would be arguing that this is evidence of consciousness of guilt. The guy is scared because he knows he is going to be defeated in this election.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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