Nancy Pelosi appears to have been worn down. She is expected to announce a formal impeachment inquiry later today.
“As soon as we have the facts, we’re ready. Now that we have the facts, we’re ready,” Pelosi said at a forum hosted by The Atlantic. “For later today.”
In the hours before Pelosi’s appearance, support for impeachment among House Democrats surged to more than two-thirds of the caucus, including a key group of vulnerable freshman members and veteran leaders such as Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil-rights icon. “We cannot delay. We must not wait. Now is the time to act,” Lewis said in a speech on the House floor earlier today.
All eyes were on Pelosi, who joked as she joined Goldberg onstage that she had been “in hiding” from reporters seeking to see if her position on impeachment had changed. During the interview, Trump tweeted from New York, where he was delivering a speech to the United Nations, that he would release a declassified, unredacted transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has acknowledged that he pressed Zelensky to launch an investigation into the Biden family’s “corruption” and that he sought to withhold aid to Ukraine, but he has said that it was not a quid pro quo.
Pelosi, however, made clear that might not matter. “There is no requirement there be a quid pro quo in the conversation” for it to have been wrong, the speaker declared.
Trump has announced he has authorized release of the transcript of his phone call with the Ukranian president, but the actual whistleblower complaint that the law said should have been given to Congress some time ago is still being kept hidden.
Back to WaPo:
The acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who held back the whistleblower’s complaint from Congress, is testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday.
That panel’s chairman, Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), said the whistleblower wants to speak to the committee and is seeking guidance from Maguire about how he could do so.
“We‘re in touch with counsel and look forward to the whistleblower’s testimony as soon as this week,” Schiff tweeted.
That the whistleblower is seeking guidance from Maguire is worrisome. This makes me suspect the whistleblower is another creature of the intellligence/military community, possibly Dan Coats himself, who will not step outside the chain of command.
House leaders announced they are preparing a resolution for a vote Wednesday, formally disapproving of the Trump administration’s effort to block the release of a whistleblower’s complaint into Trump’s conversations with the president of Ukraine, information the administration and Trump’s acting director of national intelligence have so far kept from Congress.
Pelosi is also considering setting up up a special committee to formally begin an impeachment inquiry — a move that could spark controversy within the Democratic caucus as the House Judiciary Committee is already pursuing an impeachment inquiry of its own. Pelosi is expected to formally make an announcement at the end of the day on Tuesday, after meeting with the full caucus.
Update: It’s on, folks. I thought Nancy Pelosi’s speech announcing the impeachment inquiry was quite good. And the Senate unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution Tuesday calling for the whistleblower complaint to be released to the ingelligence committes. That’s got to have put some fear into the creature.
If what you say about Pelosi's intentions are true…I love it!
I agree with you that I think the whistleblower is Dan Coats. I think it is good thing because I believe that he will stand up to anything trump will throw at him. I think there is no love lost between Coats and Trump; but, Coats knows what he is doing and trump is too stupid for words. The main difference between the two is that Coats is a Patriot and trump is just evil but stupid.
Am I reading right? The Senate unanimously voted for the whistleblower complaint to be delivered to Congress! WTF??!!!!
Trump this morning offered to release the transcript of the conversation to prevent giving up the complaint.
It was unanimous consent, so no one objected, but no vote was taken. Still a good thing, though.
We're going to revisit US v Nixon before this is over. I do NOT think the USSC will reverse and they may rule so broadly that Trump is prevented from making any objections whatsoever to any witness who is subpoenaed or any evidence demanded.
If the court rules narrowly, on a specific case only, they will have to rule on every piece of evidence that the House wants.
The other interesting fact is Pence's involvement in the extortion. Which leaves the possibility of a President Pelosi, if, god willing, both are convicted in the Senate.
I'm not quite ready to pop the champagne just yet.
But I did put a hold on the cyanide capsules I ordered on Amazon.
Mind you – I didn't cancel it, I just put on hold!
I definitely DO NOT trust the tRUMP mal-administration to hand over the real transcript! I suspect tRUMP will have "Sharpied" the document. He probably took out a red Sharpie to grade his "perfect" conversation, and gave himself an A+++.
As Rachel says, "Stay tuned to this space."
But I did put a hold on the cyanide capsules I ordered on Amazon.
I'm glad to hear that!
I agree that Trump may doctor the released transcript to deceive how many times or how explicit he was demanding a hit from Ukraine on Biden.
With the Senate voting to advance the whistleblower complaint, the transcript might be honest because the whistleblower is in a position to recognize and remember if stuff has been left out.
IMO, pontificating from my belly button, McConnell is going yo try to 1) fast track the impeachment and 2) limit the scope of the inquiries to exclude Trump's tax returns. There's no legal basis for McConnel to say ANYTHING about how the House proceeds, but the vote today makes me think (opinion) MoscowMitch wants this over this year.
Doctored, edited, either way, I agree. The conversation lasts a half hour, (9:03-9:33) but if you read it aloud, it takes maybe 15 minutes. There's evidence of missing content where ellipses occur. It's not a pause because you can read that the content of the sentence is incomplete.
The transcript is nothing, a red herring, especially if Trump is fine with releasing it. The thing he's worried about is the whistleblower's testimony, which his flunkies have prevented from reaching Congress, despite the clear language of the law.
Glad Pelosi finally got off the dime. Read somewhere today that what we need is "a brawler", not an old, overly cautious woman. Most of us have standard, stereotypical ways to react to situations (for example, always being Nice) and we're unable to react to situations in any other way.
For example, if you can't fight when a fight is what's called for, that's bad. I am glad that Pelosi is finally moving off Square Zero, but she was starting to look like someone who is incapable of brawling, when that's what's called for.
Worn down, was she? Do you think Pelosi is incapable of making informed calculations, Barbara? That could be construed as an excess of cynicism.
In the weeks to come we'll probably see why her decision was not as easy as might be imagined. The Republicans as a whole, unlike Trump, are not deficient. They'll pull out every political and legal stop to neutralize this and spin it to their own advantage. We have to trust Democrats have an overwhelming case in both political and legal dimensions. This could still blow up in their faces.
"That could be construed as an excess of cynicism." I'd call it a standard amount of realism.
And I wouldn't argue. After all, who's to say?
Maybe I should apply as an interpreter/translator for Trump's code talking. I'm well versed in New York criminal code talking and could easily decipher Trump's shakedown attempt of Zelensky. I got my start back in 1967 when I worked in Manhattan as an office boy. My first introduction to criminal code talking occurred one day while I was returning back to the office after making a run to several banks to get some checks certified and delivered.
So, when I returned back to the office building and got on the elevator there was just one other guy and myself alone on the elevator. This guy turned to me and said, Hey, you look like an nice kid, And because of that I'll offer you this deal on this beautiful watch, it's off the truck. He told me he'd let me have it for $25.00, a give away. I told him I didn't have $25.00 ( in those days $25.00 was big money) so he replied with a what do ya got? I told him I only had $10.00. He thought about it for a minute and then reluctantly said OK and that he wouldn't normally let such a high quality and beautiful watch go for a song, but being that I seemed like a decent kid he was willing to part with it for ten bucks. Wow, I got a big score…or so I thought.
Come to find out that the watch, even though it looked like a million bucks, was a one jewel piece of junk that I could have bought down on 34th St for less than $2.00.
The point was that my seemingly innate ability to decipher code talking by understanding what off the truck meant lead me to be swindled. Since that experience I've devoted a lot of effort to become almost bilingual in criminal code talking. So I feel up to the game to offer my services in interpreting Trump's underworld criminal code talking. As a matter of fact I'm thinking about changing my online nom de plume to Enigma.
Se habla extorsión aqui.
I don't think my level of expertise in deciphering Trump's extortion of Zelensky is even necessary after seeing excerpts of the transcript.True to his form Trump just spit out his want from Zelensky in elementary wording. " I want you to work with Barr and Guiliani to take Joe Biden down" " I predict your economy will improve"
WOW!
Trump certainly is plain in his extortion. Apparently he really is the only person in the White House with any control. It's hard to imagine anyone with a significant number of functioning brain cells thinking the memo would clear him.
It's still weird to see that Trump doesn't just talk the way he does on TV to ingratiate his base of Yahoos. He talks that way to foreign leaders. Zelensky responds with the now routine flattery.
Happily, the memo directly implicates Giuliani and Barr. The Democrats should be able to have us see them squirm during testimony.