President Trump attacked the House impeachment inquiry after refusing to let Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testify.
Said Trump: “I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify, but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away.”
Chris Cillizza: “That last-minute decision by the State Department seems directly at odds with President Trump’s repeated insistence that his phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was ‘perfect’ and that he retained the ‘absolute right’ to ask foreign countries to investigate corruption.”
“If Trump — and, by extension, his State Department — are completely certain they were acting appropriately, why keep Sondland from testifying to that effect? If there is truly nothing to hide here and everything that Trump and his people did was ‘perfect,’ why not let Sondland tell that story?”
Vanity Fair: “Washington keeps asking why the law-and-order attorney general is carrying water for a morally untethered president. The answer may lie in the youthful lessons Barr learned from his father, a combative, provocative New Yorker—not unlike Donald Trump.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) told reporters that the State Department is withholding EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s personal device with relevant messages about the Trump administration’s interactions with the Ukrainian government, Axios reports.
Said Schiff: “Not only is he being deprived of his testimony today, but we’re also aware that the ambassador has text messages or emails on a personal device, which have been provided to the State Department — although we have requested those from the ambassador. And the State Department is withholding those messages as well.”
Gerald Seib: “They are the four Senate Republicans up for re-election next year in swing states, where support for Mr. Trump isn’t as strong as it is in the deep-red states many of their colleagues represent. They are Sens. Martha McSally of Arizona; Cory Gardner of Colorado; Susan Collins of Maine; and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Comments critical of the president from sometimes-renegade Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska are noteworthy, but these four will be far more important leading indicators of GOP sentiments.”
“These four face the toughest re-election races of any Republicans next year. The authoritative Cook Political Report rates the Arizona, Colorado and Maine races as tossups, and the North Carolina race as one that leans Republican. They come from states where opinions of Mr. Trump are deeply divided.”
“Thus, when it comes to rendering judgment on the president, each of these four can be sure they will anger a significant chunk of their constituency no matter what they do.”
“The government ran a budget deficit of just under $1 trillion in the just-closed fiscal year,” the AP reports.
“The $984 billion deficit tally for 2019 came in more than $200 billion more than last year’s, despite very low unemployment and continuing economic growth.”
“The Trump administration directed a top American diplomat involved in its pressure campaign on Ukraine not to appear Tuesday morning for a scheduled interview in the House’s impeachment inquiry,” the New York Times reports.
“The decision to block Gordon Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, from speaking with investigators for three House committees is certain to provoke an immediate conflict with potentially profound consequences for the White House and President Trump.”
Axios: “The Trump administration gave the order just hours before Sondland was scheduled to sit for a deposition in the basement of the Capitol, and House Democrats have warned that they will consider any attempts by the administration to interfere with their investigation as obstruction, possible grounds for impeachment.”
A source close to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the BBC that a Brexit deal is “essentially impossible” after a call between Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Johnson spoke to the German leader about the proposals he put forward to the EU, but the source said she made clear a deal based on them was “overwhelmingly unlikely.”
The Guardian says Johnson “appears to be giving up on hopes of a new Brexit deal” after the call, triggering an angry response from Brussels that he is trying to play a “stupid blame game” over the near-collapse of talks.
Jonathan Bernstein: “Everyone seems to be more or less convinced that Elizabeth Warren is now the leading candidate, or perhaps that Warren and Joe Biden are co-leaders. Pundits are asking whether Biden can survive losing Iowa and New Hampshire, and whether his big polling lead in South Carolina can hold up. Those are fair questions. But I’m going to insist – one more time – that it’s still early.”
“Take Iowa. Yes, Warren now has a slim polling lead over Biden, with everyone else far behind. But a quick check of the historical record suggests things could still change radically. Four years ago, Donald Trump and Ben Carson were locked in a tie in Iowa. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were in third and fourth. Four months later, Cruz rose from 9% to 27% to take first place in the caucuses; Rubio went from 8% to 23%, with Trump narrowly edging him out for second place. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s numbers didn’t change much from October to February – but Bernie Sanders gained about 16 percentage points and almost beat her.”
“What about 2012? Early October polling had Mitt Romney on top, followed by three candidate – Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry – who never went anywhere. Rick Santorum was in seventh place in the polls at 4%. He eventually surged to narrowly beat Romney in Iowa with almost 25% of the vote.”
For members: The Democratic Race Is Far From Settled
Playbook: “House Republicans held a conference call Monday to discuss new polling commissioned by Team McCarthy and the NRCC, and the headline for the GOP is this: Just 37% of voters believe Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president is impeachable, while 59% say it was appropriate and not worthy of impeachment. 39% of independents say it is impeachable. (Republicans say this is strong polling for them, but Democrats would argue they haven’t publicly started prosecuting the case.)”
“In Trump districts represented by Democrats, 62% of those polled think it was appropriate and just 33% say it’s impeachable.”
Of course, this is quite different than the new Washington Post poll out this morning.
“The escalating impeachment drama between Congress and the White House that has all but doomed hopes of most legislative progress this fall has instead enhanced the prospects for approval, within weeks, of one major initiative: a sweeping new trade agreement among the United States, Canada and Mexico,” the New York Times reports.
“Top lawmakers in both parties and others closely following the talks said that substantial progress had been made in resolving the sticking points, and that a decisive House vote on the accord to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement could occur before Congress departed for Thanksgiving.”
Ron Brownstein: “This pattern of results signals that Trump’s vituperative response to the threat of impeachment — with his cries of ;treason,’ ‘coup’ and ‘civil war’ — may be energizing his supporters but is failing to persuade voters outside that core coalition. That’s a familiar pattern from other issues in his presidency, from his advocacy of a border wall to his push to repeal the Affordable Care Act. In all those confrontations, Trump displayed very little capacity to move public opinion in general toward his position.”
“So to generate more opposition to his possible impeachment, the President faces a tough assignment: He must convert people who disapprove of his overall job performance or don’t have an opinion about it.”
“President Trump has compared White House leakers to spies and mused obliquely to other officials about executing them. He’s attacked individual reporters by name. He rails frequently against press accounts of his administration, dismissing them as ‘fake news,'” Politico reports.
“But privately, the president is so obsessed with the leaks about him that he has frequently discussed whether to order polygraphs of White House staffers after major disclosures, according to four former White House officials — in what would be a stark and politically risky departure from past practice.”
A new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds that, by a margin of 58% to 38%, Americans say the House was correct to begin an impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
Among all adults, 49% say the House should take the more significant step to impeach the president and call for his removal from office. Another 6% say they back the start of the inquiry but do not favor removing Trump from office, with the remainder undecided about the president’s ultimate fate. The results among registered voters are almost identical.
CBS News: “On the campaign trail, Elizabeth Warren often tells the story of how she was fired from her first teaching job in 1971 because she was pregnant, a pivotal moment that ultimately put her on a path to Harvard, the United States Senate, and quite possibly the presidency. But recently, several media outlets have questioned the veracity of these claims.”
Said Warren: “‘All I know is I was 22 years old, I was 6 months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my job.”
Associated Press: “As House Democrats fire off more subpoenas, the White House is finalizing a high-stakes strategy to counter the impeachment threat to President Donald Trump: Stall. Obfuscate. Attack. Repeat.”
“Trump aides are honing their approach after two weeks of what allies have described as a listless and unfocused response to the impeachment probe. One expected step is a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejecting the inquiry because Democrats haven’t held a vote on the matter and moving to all but cease cooperation with Capitol Hill on key oversight matters.”
Los Angeles Times: “Beneath the heated argument of whether the House should have a formal resolution to open an impeachment inquiry is a potential benefit for Republicans, if they can force a vote: the chance to subpoena their own witnesses and information.”
“In both the Nixon and Clinton impeachment inquiry resolutions, the minority party on the investigating committee was granted the power to subpoena — something the minority party does not normally have. Subpoenas were still subject to a vote of the committee, giving the majority party a way to block them.”
Playbook: “Politically, the GOP believes a floor vote for impeachment is damaging for Democrats because it forces them to go on the record in a dramatic vote. But the White House is playing with fire by not complying here, since Democratic leaders say that in and of itself could be considered part of a cover-up.”
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.