Trump news: Republicans attempt to stonewall impeachment hearing as witnesses outline damning evidence to remove president
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump has claimed victory after Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz released his report claiming that the FBI did not pursue a politically motivated investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign — but that agents did tend to favour damaging evidence over exculpatory evidence as the investigation continued.
The report was released as House Judiciary Committee presented and reviewed the evidence accumulated so far in the impeachment inquiry, with charges against the president expected to be drawn up by the end of the week ahead of a potential pre-Christmas vote in the House of Representatives.
During the hearing, Democrats sought to impress upon the American people that the evidence against Mr Trump was nearly undeniable.
Republicans, meanwhile, did their best to throw the hearing off the traicks and raise as many distractions as possible.
The president is meanwhile under fire for hosting pardoned war criminals - army first lieutenant Clint Lorance and major Mathew Golsteyn - at a Florida Republican Party fundraising dinner over the weekend.
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Steve Castor has called the foundation of the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry "bologna". We will try to get video of this moment ASAP.
The House Republican counsel is pointing to a number of quotes from Democrats without context, claiming the House majority is attempting to remove the president solely because they fear he will be re-elected in 2020.
As The Independent's Andrew Feinberg adds: Castor notes that approximately 63 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but he neglects the fact that nearly 66 million people voted for Hillary Clinton that year.
More from The Independent's Andrew Feinberg as he watches the hearings from within the proceedings:
Castor has also once again repeated a partial, out-of-context quote from Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, claiming that Green said that the reason to impeach President Trump is to prevent his reelection.Here’s what he actually said:“I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get reelected. If we don’t impeach him, he will say he has been vindicated. He will say the Democrats had an overwhelming majority in the House and they didn’t take up impeachment.
He will say that we have a constitutional duty to do it if it was there and we didn’t. He will say that he has been vindicated.But here’s what I say. We are confronting a constitutional crisis as I speak to you. As I look the people of America in the eye, I’m telling you we have a constitutional crisis. When the chief executive officer, the president of the United States, refuses to comply with subpoenas and says he will order others to do so, this creates a constitutional crisis.But this isn’t the genesis of it. It started when the president said he would fire Mr. Comey for his failure, pardon me, as a result of his desire not to be investigated. And when he decided to do this — and he went on TV, on national TV at prime time — and indicated he was thinking about this Russia thing, that was the genesis of it.We have a constitutional crisis. I regret that I am the canary in the coal mine. I regret that I was the person who had to first say that there was some obstruction taking place here. I regret that it has to be me, but it has to be somebody. I take my duties seriously. I love my country Mr. Mena and I want you to know this — we must impeach this president. If we don’t, it’s not the soul of the nation that will be at risk only. It is the soul of the Congress that is at risk. Congress has a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, that only it can fulfill, no one else can. No other entity can. It is Congress that will have to act. If we put people above party, we’ll act properly. But if we allow a party to be above principle, we will not. If we allow political expediency to trump moral imperative, we will have created a shameful situation that this Congress will never live down. History won’t be kind to us. We must impeach him.”
As Steve Castor screams "baloney", Donald Trump tweets out claims of a "witch hunt" -
GOP counsel Steve Castor says in his opening remarks that the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry is “an attempt to upend our political system,” and says Democrats “are obsessed with impeaching the president.”
The president is now retweeting himself while attacking the Democrats during the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry -
The White House press secretary is also tweeting out some easily-disputed claims during the latest impeachment hearings:
Some analysis from The Independent's Andrew Feinberg as he watches the hearings from within the proceeding room:
Castor keeps talking about how agency/White House lawyers weren’t allowed to accompany witnesses, even though not allowing them is longstanding practice.
Here’s what former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman told me about this:
“This is exactly what happened in Watergate,” he told me, “…that [White House Counsel] John Dean was actually present for every single FBI interview — so they could coordinate the coverup basically, so they could make sure that people weren’t off the reservation and were sticking with the party line that the White House had nothing to do with the break-in at the Democratic National Committee.
“It just reeks of Watergate and what Nixon did with John Dean in terms of coordinating White House witnesses so that they could keep everybody in line so that they would all lie about what was going on.”
Steve Castor claims Donald Trump "was not asking for a 'favor' that would help with his re-election; he was asking for assistance in helping our country move forward" after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
This, of course, is not accurate. The president was seeking an investigation into the unfounded allegations that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.
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