Let’s be honest, the Democrats need to impeach now because the elections are right around the corner. They haven’t accomplished anything to promote, and they don’t have a strong candidate. In fact, they don’t even have a clear front runner. Which means this party is deeply divided on what it stands for. And after years of trying to remove President Trump from office they have finally concluded they want to impeach Trump on, “abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — pushing toward historic votes over charges he threatened the integrity of the U.S. election system and endangered national security in his dealings with Ukraine.”
But before this annoucement Representative Stephen Lynch, who is on the oversight committee appeared on CNN this morning claiming he hadn’t heard or seen the articles of impeachment. Yet CNN had them? How did CNN have the articles of impeachment before he did? Because they are all in it together.
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats announced two articles of impeachment Tuesday against President Donald Trump — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — pushing toward historic votes over charges he threatened the integrity of the U.S. election system and endangered national security in his dealings with Ukraine.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, flanked by the chairmen of the impeachment inquiry committees, declared at the U.S. Capitol that thy were upholding their solemn oath to defend the Constitution. Voting is expected in a matter of days in the Judiciary Committee and by Christmas in the full House.
Trump swiftly responded in a capital-letters tweet with the words he uses repeatedly to decry the investigations against him: “WITCH HUNT!” The White House said the charges were “baseless,” and his reelection campaign called them “rank partisanship.”
In outlining the charges, Democrats said they had no choice but to act because Trump has shown a pattern of behavior that, if left unchecked, poses risks to the democratic process ahead of the 2020 election.
″ Our president holds the ultimate public trust. When he betrays that trust and puts himself before country, he endangers the Constitution; he endangers our democracy; he endangers our national security,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the Judiciary chairman, announcing the charges before a portrait of George Washington. “Our next election is at risk. … That is why we must act now.”
Nadler said, “No one, not even the president, is above the law.″
Chairman Adam Schiff of the Intelligence Committee said, “We stand here today because the president’s abuse of power leaves us with no choice.”
Trump’s allies immediately plunged into the fight that will extend into the new year. White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said Democrats are trying to “overthrow″ the administration. Campaign manager Brad Parscale said Democrats are “putting on this political theater because they don’t have a viable candidate for 2020 and they know it.” The president’s son, Eric, embraced his father’s penchant for name calling, assailing Pelosi and “her swamp creatures.”
As the House chairmen arrived at a closed-door meeting of the chamber’s Democrats after the announcement, they were greeted with applause.
The outcome appears increasingly set as the House prepares for voting, as it has only three times in history against a U.S. president. Approval of the charges would send them to the Senate in January, where the Republican majority would be unlikely to convict Trump.
Democratic leaders say Trump put his political interests above those of the nation when he asked Ukraine to investigate his rivals, including Democrat Joe Biden, and then withheld $400 million in military aid as the U.S. ally faced an aggressive Russia. They say he then obstructed Congress by stonewalling the House investigation.
Trump insisted in a new tweet that when he asked Ukraine’s president “to do us a favor” with the investigations he was requesting, “‘us’ is a reference to USA, not me!” Democrats, however, say Trump’s meaning could not have been clearer in seeking political dirt on Biden, his possible opponent in the 2020 election.
In drafting the articles of impeachment, Pelosi faced a legal and political challenge of balancing the views of her majority while hitting the Constitution’s bar of “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Some liberal lawmakers wanted more expansive charges encompassing the findings from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Centrist Democrats preferred to keep the impeachment articles more focused on Trump’s actions toward Ukraine.
When asked during a Monday evening event if she had enough votes to impeach the Republican president, Pelosi said she would let House lawmakers vote their conscience.
“On an issue like this, we don’t count the votes. People will just make their voices known on it,” Pelosi said at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council. “I haven’t counted votes, nor will I.”
Trump, who has declined to mount a defense in the actual House hearings, tweeted Tuesday just as the six Democratic House committee chairmen prepared to make their announcement.
“To Impeach a President who has proven through results, including producing perhaps the strongest economy in our country’s history, to have one of the most successful presidencies ever, and most importantly, who has done NOTHING wrong, is sheer Political Madness,” he wrote on Twitter.
The next steps are expected to come swiftly after months of investigation into the Ukraine matter, which followed Mueller’s two-year Russia probe.
Pelosi convened a meeting of the impeachment committee chairmen at her office in the Capitol late Monday following an acrimonious, nearly 10-hour hearing at the Judiciary Committee, which could vote as soon as this week.
“I think there’s a lot of agreement,” Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Affairs committee, told reporters as he exited Pelosi’s office. “A lot of us believe that what happened with Ukraine especially is not something we can just close our eyes to.”
At the Judiciary hearing, Democrats said Trump’s push to have Ukraine investigate Biden while withholding U.S. military aid ran counter to U.S. policy and benefited Russia as well as himself.
“President Trump’s persistent and continuing effort to coerce a foreign country to help him cheat to win an election is a clear and present danger to our free and fair elections and to our national security,” said Dan Goldman, the director of investigations at the House Intelligence Committee, presenting the finding of the panel’s 300-page report of the inquiry.
Republicans rejected not just Goldman’s conclusion of the Ukraine matter; they also questioned his very appearance before the Judiciary panel. In a series of heated exchanges, they said Schiff should appear rather than sending his lawyer.
On December 10, 2019 I was in Washington D.C. to watch the impeachment hearing. The Democrats continued their argument that President Trump should be impeached based on hearsay. Of course, the do-nothing Democrats are not looking for the truth. They only have one goal, and that is to remove the President from office.
Will Johnson put out a hardball question to Ted Deutch, and as a result, he runs away.
The hearing shows the deep divide between parties. With Democrats surging on their end goal to impeach President Trump this year, and the Republicans disapproval of the entire process. During the hearing Republican Gohmert (R,TX) said, “Democrats have double standards and without those double standards they wouldn’t have any standards.” Later Democrat Johnson (D,GA) said: “President Trump is a King Pin.” One could argue that the Democrat party is an even greater example of law breakers that think they are above the law.
One of the most passionate lines of questioning came from Representative Jim Jordan (R,OH) who explained how the Democrats are using hearsay for their facts. He blasted themby reminding them there was no quid pro quo, no holding of aid to Ukraine, and Ukraine got their aid. Watch.
Representative Mr. Rattcliffe (R,TX) says, “the whistleblower should be held accountable.” He points out that the whistleblower complaint has not been included in any documents. In fact, the Democrats say that they don’t need it to be included because they have other evidence. Makes one question if there ever was a whistleblower.
I have to say one of the best one-liners of the whole impeachment hearing came from Rep. Gaetz as he said, “everyone would at least have coal for Christmas, but the Democrats don’t like coal either, so that’s out.” The Democrats want to kill as many jobs as possible, and the Coal Miners are on the list.
17 of the 24 Democrat House members have already voted for impeachment before they saw a shred of evidence.
This morning as the House of Representatives started day of hearings Owen Shroyer, of the War Room, stood up and told Congress that “America is sick of the treason committed the Democrat party”. He was quickly escorted out of the room.
Six of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies had a combined “tax gap” of more than $100 billion this decade, according to a new analysis.
Alright liberals here are some of the biggest violators not paying their fair share in taxes, low and behold its Liberal ran companies. Maybe you should be going after your contributors instead of the president.
Six of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies had a combined “tax gap” of more than $100 billion this decade, according to a new analysis.
Fair Tax Mark, a British organization that certifies businesses for good tax conduct, assessed global tax payments from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Microsoft between 2010 and 2019. The companies are sometimes collectively referred to as the “Silicon Six.”
The research, published Monday, analyzed their 10-K filings, which are financial forms submitted by businesses to the U.S. government.
It looked at tax provisions — the amount companies set aside in their financial reports to pay taxes — and compared those to the amounts that were actually handed over to the government, referred to as cash taxes. Over the decade, the gap between the Silicon Six’s provisions and the taxes they actually paid reached $100.2 billion, researchers found.
The report noted that scrutiny of big corporations’ tax payments often focused solely on tax provisions, which was not always the final amount received by governments. It also claimed that profits continued to be “shifted to tax havens, especially Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.”
Researchers said the bulk of the shortfall “almost certainly arose outside the United States,” with foreign tax charges amounting to just 8.4% of the profit the companies made overseas during the decade.
Speaking to CNBC via telephone on Monday, Paul Monaghan, CEO of Fair Tax Mark, said there was an enormous difference between what companies accounted for and what they actually handed over in taxes.
“The amount of tax being paid by these businesses is $100 billion less than reported in their accounts,” he said.
She made the announcement in a call with staff on Tuesday.
Thank God Kamala Harris is out of the race!! Her campaign has been gripped with turmoil from the start. If she can’t even lead a small group of people how would she possibly lead our country.
Kamala Harris dropped her presidential campaign on Tuesday after months of failing to lift her candidacy from the bottom of the field — a premature ending for a California senator once heralded as a top-tier contender for the nomination.
Harris told aides of her intentions in an all-staff call. A person familiar with the call said she sounded distraught. While Harris had qualified for the December debate in her home state, she was running dangerously low on cash — lacking the resources to air TV ads in Iowa — and her staff was gripped by long-running internal turmoil.
Still, the news came as a shock to some of her biggest supporters. Just as Harris was announcing the news internally, a super PAC had cleared more than $1 million in TV ads in Iowa to boost her struggling campaign. The ad, which argued she was the best-equipped candidate to take on Trump, was canceled.
“Eleven months ago at the launch of our campaign in Oakland I told you all: ‘I am not perfect.’ But I will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect. I will lead with integrity. I will speak the truth. And that’s what I have tried to do every day of this campaign. So here’s the truth today,” Harris wrote in a note to supporters. “I’ve taken stock and looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life. My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue .”
Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 campaign chief Kevin Sheekey defended the former New York City mayor’s decision to skip early nominating states after his late entry into the
Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 campaign chief Kevin Sheekey defended the former New York City mayor’s decision to skip early nominating states after his late entry into the crowded primary field.
“Mike is getting in this race because he thinks that Donald Trump is an existential crisis and he thinks he’s on a path to victory and he’s getting in to alter that dynamic,” Sheekey said Monday in an interview with CNN.
Sheekey said the general election is only about six states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona.
“That’s the whole general election. And right now Donald Trump is winning, he is winning that election. It’s very tough for people who don’t live in New York or California to understand that, but that is what’s happening,” Sheekey said.
Sheekey pointed to a set of New York Times and Siena College polls released earlier this month that showed Trump beating leading Democratic candidates in some of the six states he mentioned.
The polls showed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) defeating Trump only in Arizona; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) doing so in three of the states and former Vice President Joe Biden doing so in four. All of the Democrats lost to Trump in North Carolina, which former President Obama carried narrowly in 2008.
