Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that he is sending a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) warning that Senate Republicans won’t impeach President Trump over his call with Ukraine, The Hill reports.
Said Graham: “They’re about to destroy the nation for no good reason. And I want Nancy Pelosi to know that Republican senators are not going to impeach this president based on this transcript so she can stop now before she destroys the country.”
Jonathan Swan: “President Trump, while nervous about the historic stain of impeachment, is throwing everything he has into this fight: refusing all cooperation, running ads to profit politically, and torching every person who stands in opposition to him.”
“When it all boils down, Trump really only trusts his own instincts. And his instincts here are the same as they were with the Mueller investigation: Fight like hell.”
The strategy: “No nuance or apology — not a hint of it. Turn the leader of the investigation (in this case, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff) into a conservative media villain. Condemn Trump enemies in the most incendiary and exaggerated language possible (treason, traitors, coup, etc.).”
“I’ve read the constitution a number of times and am having a hard time remembering where in the constitution it says that there has to be any formal vote by committee or by the Congress or the House to commence an investigation whether it might lead to or be motivated by the possibility of an impeachment. The problem for the White House is that there really is no appealing the process of impeachment the House uses.”
— Former White House counsel Jack Quinn, quoted by the Washington Post.
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Variety: “Ronan Farrow’s new book Catch and Kill recounts his investigation of Harvey Weinstein; the hurdles his then-employer NBC News put in his way that caused him to publish the story in the New Yorker instead; and how Weinstein hired Black Cube, an investigative firm that employs ex-Mossad officers, to stop him.”
“But Farrow’s most explosive interview in the book is with Brooke Nevils, the former NBC News employee whose complaint about Matt Lauer led to the co-anchor’s firing from the Today show in 2017… Nevils alleges that at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Lauer anally raped her in his hotel room.”
In an interview with Axios. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) condemned President Trump in his harshest language yet for deciding to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, suggesting Trump is violating his oath of office by allowing Turkey to move in and attack the Kurds.
Said Graham: “I think he’s putting the nation at risk, and I think he’s putting his presidency at risk. And I hope he will adjust his policies like he did before. That would actually be a sign of real leadership.”
Axios: “Trump’s campaign has poured millions of ad dollars into issues that resonate with his base. Immigration was the driver. Now, it’s impeachment.”
“It’s not just Trump — this is a party-wide effort to cash in. The House and Senate Republican committees are also putting the majority of their digital ad dollars behind impeachment.”
“Facebook denied a request from Joe Biden’s campaign to take down a video ad by President Trump’s reelection campaign that falsely accuses the former vice president of corruption for his role in Ukraine policy during the Obama administration,” CNN reports.
Playbook: “OK, so now we see for sure what the White House strategy is. It’s not only to refuse to cooperate in the impeachment probe, but it’s also practically to deny that Congress has any legitimate right to impeach President DONALD TRUMP — period. This shouldn’t be surprising. We’ve been headed in this direction for a while now. It basically ensures the president will be impeached for interfering with the work of Congress.”
New York Times: “But in refusing to cooperate with what Mr. Trump on Tuesday called a ‘kangaroo court,’ the president risked ensuring the very outcome he would rather avoid.”
The AP on the White House letter yesterday declaring no cooperation with the House impeachment probe: “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.”
Washington Post: “The White House letter, which lacked substantive legal arguments and echoed Trump’s political broadsides, capped a day of defiance and challenges as House Democrats have tried to force recalcitrant administration officials to divulge potentially incriminating information over Republican objections.”
“Mick Mulvaney has gone noticeably quiet over the past week, just as the president’s impeachment fight picks up. The White House’s acting chief of staff has not appeared on any major TV shows to defend President Trump, nor has he had any success in setting up an internal White House war room to respond to Democrats’ impeachment inquiry,” Politico reports.
“Instead, the president’s top aide has found his influence dwindling inside the West Wing as Trump faces the greatest threat to his presidency to date. It’s the same place where Reince Priebus and Gen. John Kelly found themselves, despite each having a wildly different management style and philosophical approache to the chief of staff job. Trump sidelined all three of them, even after Mulvaney made nice with his family and adopted his ‘let Trump be Trump’ ethos.”
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows that 50% of registered voters surveyed would support the Senate’s removing President Trump from office, while 43% oppose the president’s removal. Seven percent of voters were undecided.
“One of Donald Trump’s most prominent Christian supporters will argue in a book due out before the 2020 general election that American evangelicals ‘have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back’ the president,” Politico reports.
“The book’s author, Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed, became a loyal foot soldier for Trump immediately after he nabbed the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 — commanding hordes of white evangelical voters from his perch on the candidate’s religious advisory board to trust that the New York businessman would grow the economy, defend religious freedom and dismantle federal protections for abortion, if elected.”
“The original title for the book was Render to God and Trump, a reference to the well-known biblical verse, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” The message from Jesus in Matthew 22, has been used in contemporary politics to justify obedience to government — or in the case of Reed’s book, to Trump.”
“Syrian Kurds issued a ‘general mobilization’ call in northeastern Syria along the border with Turkey on Wednesday, as Ankara poised for an imminent invasion of the area in the latest major escalation in the war-ravaged country,” the AP reports.
“Turkey has long threatened an attack on the Kurdish fighters in Syria whom Ankara considers terrorists allied with a Kurdish insurgency within Turkey. A Syrian war monitoring group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported Wednesday that people were fleeing the border town of Tal Abyad, which Turkey is expected to attack first.”
Jonathan Chait: “Advising President Trump on the law, and formally expressing his views thereof, is a pitiable task. Trump’s worldview is almost wholly incompatible with the law. The latter is premised on neutral rules, mediated by precedent and constructed with the goal of some notion of abstract fairness. The latter is rooted in an entitlement to absolute domination regardless of circumstance.”
“The White House letter rejecting the House impeachment inquiry is an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable. At the level of tone, it reads like an extended Trumpian rally diatribe lightly edited by an attorney. At the level of substance, it is almost pure, uncut Trump. It repeats a series of immaterial, laughably false claims, surrounding the audacious thesis that impeaching Trump is literally illegal.”
“President Trump directed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and two top State Department officials to deal with his private attorney Rudy Giuliani when the Ukrainian President sought to meet Trump, in a clear circumvention of official channels,” CNN reports.
“Trump’s push to have Giuliani as gatekeeper is more direct than what was previously disclosed by one of the meeting’s participants in his statement to the House last week.”
“Donald Trump has enlisted former Rep. Trey Gowdy to work with the White House team combating the U.S. House’s impeachment inquiry into the president,” Bloomberg reports.
“Gowdy, a former prosecutor from South Carolina, is not formally joining the White House staff.”
Although earlier reports suggested Gowdy turned down the offer, CNN reports he agreed to do it after meeting with acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
“Democrats pursuing an impeachment inquiry of President Trump want to take a fresh look at whether the sale of anti-tank missiles to Kiev last year was in any way connected to Ukraine’s decision to halt investigations into Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort,” Politico reports.
“It raises the prospect that the president, or his aides, may have been pressuring the Ukrainian government in exchange for political favors far earlier than previously known.”
“Donald Trump has raised record amounts of money as a presidential candidate. But he’s still left a slew of unpaid bills in his wake,” Politico reports.
“In city after city, across the nation, Trump has failed to pay local officials who provide thousands of dollars’ worth of security assistance to the president’s campaign during his Make America Great Again rallies.”
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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