The sixth House Republican from Texas announced Monday that he will not run for re-election
in 2020 as an unfolding “Texodus” marks a shift in American national
politics as Democrats eye the traditionally red Lone Star as potential
battleground territory.
Rep. Mac Thornberry,
who represented a district in the northern Texas panhandle, said in a
press release Monday, quoting a verse from Ecclesiastes: "We are
reminded ... that 'for everything there is a season,' and I believe that
the time has come for a change. Therefore, I will not be a candidate
for reelection in the 2020 election."
He
served 13 terms in Congress since he was first elected to the U.S.
House in 1994, the same year George W. Bush won the presidency.
Thornberry was one of the longest-serving representatives on either
party in Congress, the Dallas Morning News reported.
His impending departure marks the sixth Texas Republican in Congress since July to announce that they will not seek reelection.
Rep.
Pete Olson started the trend, followed by Reps. Mike Conway, Will Hurd,
Kenny Marchant and Bill Flores. Conway is the top Republican on the
House Agriculture Committee and Hurd is the only African American
Republican in Congress, according to NPR.
"While we steadily
invest in the Lone Star State, Washington Republicans just flew into
Texas to declare they'll win back the majority and jetted away without a
plan to stop the Texodus," Lucinda Guinn, executive director of the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Dallas Morning
News.
Because Thornberry’s district is strongly
Republican---President Trump won by an 80 percent margin there in
2016—the congressman’s resignation does not pose a risk to the GOP
losing the seat to the Dems come 2020, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Some of the other seats are more vulnerable to a Democratic takeover
come Election Day.
Unlike Democrats, the Republican Party sets
term limits on how long representatives can hold committee leadership
positions in the House. Some speculate Thornberry and other Republican
representatives decided against re-election because they don’t want to
return to the status of a rank-and-file member of Congress. The
Republican Party is considering amending that rule to prevent others
from flying to coop, according to Politico.
Others believe
Republicans in Congress no longer want to serve in a chamber as a member
of the minority party. It’s unlikely the GOP will regain the House as a
result of the 2020 election.
According
to the Texas Tribune Washington bureau chief, Abby Livingston, some GOP
Republicans might have been dissuaded by the smaller margins by which
they won re-election the last time. Though Texas remains red, the
Democrats have gradually been seizing influence in a ground up movement
at the state level, as more of the wealthier suburbs in Houston and
Dallas are now represented by Democrats, according to NPR.
The
recent Texodus comes after the Republican Party lost control of the
House for the first time in eight years following the 2018 midterm
elections. Two GOP congressmen lost their re-election bids that year
while six others announced their retirements in 2018, according to the Dallas Morning News.
EXCLUSIVE – WinRed, the new GOP online fundraising platform designed to compete with Democrats in
the battle for small-dollar campaign donations, has raised over $28
million since launching three months ago, with top officials crediting
the Democrats’ impeachment push for a big spike in fundraising over the last week, Fox News has learned.
WinRed
raised $28.1 million in the third fundraising quarter, which began in
July and ended Monday. The online platform is used to raise money for
President Trump’s re-election, campaign committees and various
Republican candidates across the country.
In an interview,
WinRed's president, Gerrit Lansing, said the Democrats’ moves to ramp up
impeachment efforts against Trump “helped a lot,” saying fundraising
numbers “spiked” after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of a
formal inquiry last week.
WinRed has raised over $11.8 million from over 237,000 contributors since the announcement from Pelosi, D-Calif., he said.
“It just poured gas on the situation where there is a ton of money being raised in all levels and all campaigns,” Lansing said.
The
platform has been off to a stronger start than the Democrats’ version
which launched in 2004. FEC records indicated the $30 million raised
through WinRed was more than what ActBlue -- the Dems' big online
fundraising platform -- raised in its first three and a half years. The
records showed that ActBlue raised $99,000 in its first quarter of
operations from June to August 2004.
“They
were starting in a position that didn’t have all the party behind it,”
Lansing said of ActBlue. “The DNC wasn’t on ActBlue until several years
ago. Hillary and Obama weren’t on ActBlue,” he said, referring to former
President Obama and ex-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
But,
ActBlue has grown into a fundraising behemoth since then: it
raised $246 million in the second fundraising quarter of this year.
Lansing
said WinRed has benefitted from top Republican campaigns and
organizations embracing it from the beginning. WinRed launched in late
June, and this was the platform’s first full fundraising quarter.
“We’re
starting off with a big bang where everyone’s on it, everyone’s excited
about, and I think it reflects in that big number in our first three
months,” he said.
Those running WinRed were hoping to raise $20-25
million this quarter but blew through it after last week’s impeachment
drama. The days leading up to the end of the quarter – when campaigns
would ramp up fundraising appeals – also could see increases in
donations. WinRed had over 601,000 donations this quarter.
“Impeachment helped a lot with that,” Lansing said.
Republicans have boasted of increased fundraising
in the wake of the impeachment inquiry announcement. Officials said the
Trump campaign, along with the RNC, brought in $5 million in the 24
hours after Pelosi’s announcement. National Republican Congressional
Committee officials also said its online fundraising soared by 608
percent on the day Pelosi announced the inquiry.
EXCLUSIVE: A photo obtained by Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" shows former Vice President Joe Biden
and his son Hunter golfing in the Hamptons with Devon Archer, who
served on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma
Holdings with Hunter.
Earlier this month, Joe Biden told Fox News in Iowa that he never discussed his son’s foreign business dealings with him.
“I
have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,”
Biden said, pointing the finger at President Trump. “I know Trump
deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a
president. You should be asking him why is he on the phone with a
foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader. You should be
looking at Trump.”
Hunter Biden told The New Yorker previously that he and his father had spoken “just once” about his work in Ukraine.
A source told Fox News the photo was taken in August 2014. Contemporaneous news reports indicated the vice president was in the Hamptons at the time.
Hunter Biden and Archer joined the Burisma Holdings board in April 2014.
Earlier
this month, Trump suggested that despite his claims, Joe Biden
seemingly discussed Ukraine matters with his son. The White House has
sought to point to possible corruption by the Bidens, amid the House
Democrats' formal impeachment inquiry against the president.
Devon Archer, far left, with former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, far right, in 2014.
“And now, he made a lie when he said he never spoke to his son,” Trump said. “Of course you spoke to your son!”
Biden has acknowledged on camera that
in spring 2016, when he was vice president, he successfully
pressured Ukraine to fire top prosecutor Viktor Shokin. At the time,
Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings — where Hunter had a lucrative role on the board despite limited relevant expertise.
The vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.
"Well, son of a b---h, he got fired," Biden joked at a panel two years after leaving office.
Shokin himself had already been widely accused of corruption.
Critics alleged Hunter Biden might have been selling access to his father, who had pushed Ukraine to increase its natural gas production.
"Impossible
to justify $50k/month for Hunter Biden serving on a Ukrainian energy
board w zero expertise unless he promised to sell access," political
scientist Ian Bremmer tweeted.
Trump
attorney Rudy Giuliani, on Sunday, suggested Shokin was the target of
an international smear campaign to discredit his work.
In a combative interview on ABC News' "This Week" on Sunday,
Giuliani presented what he said was an affidavit signed by Shokin that
confirmed Hunter Biden was being investigated when Shokin was fired.
"I
have an affidavit here that's been online for six months that nobody
bothered to read from the gentleman who was fired, Viktor Shokin, the
so-called corrupt prosecutor," Giuliani said. "The Biden people say that
he wasn't investigating Hunter Biden at the time. He says under oath
that he was." The Shokin affidavit purportedly said the U.S.
had pressured him into resigning because he was unwilling to drop the
case.
Later,
Giuliani added: "I have another affidavit, this time from another
Ukrainian prosecutor who says that the day after Biden strong-armed the
president to remove Shokin, they show up in the prosecutor’s office --
lawyers for Hunter Biden show up in the prosecutor’s office and they
give an apology for dissemination of false information."
After
anchor George Stephanopoulos expressed skepticism, Giuliani fired
back: "How about if I -- how about if I tell you over the next week four
more of these will come out from four other prosecutors? ... No, no,
no, George, they won’t be [investigated], because they’ve been online
for six months, and the Washington press will not accept the fact that
Joe Biden might have done something like this."
Speaking separately to Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," Giuliani brought up the affidavits and called the situation Clintonesque.
“The
pattern is a pattern of pay for play. It includes something very
similar to what happened to the Clinton Foundation," Giuliani said,
"which goes to the very core of, what did Obama know and when did he
know it?"
Giuliani referred to a December 2015 New York Times article
about Hunter Biden, Burisma and a Ukrainian oligarch, and how the
younger Biden's involvement with the Ukrainian company could undermine
then-Vice President Biden's anti-corruption message.
"The question
is," Giuliani asked, "when Biden and Obama saw that article, about how
the son was pulling down money from the most crooked oligarch in Russia,
did Obama call Biden in and say, 'Joe, how could you be doing this?'" “Tucker Carlson Tonight” producer Alex Pfeiffer contributed to this report.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,
criticized a report by the New York Times that claimed President Trump
"pressed" the prime minister of Australia for information to discredit
the probe conducted by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, calling it an "effort" to shut down Attorney General William Barr's investigation.
"This
New York Times article about Barr talking to Australia is the beginning
of an effort to shut down Barr's investigation to find out how this
whole thing started," Graham said on "Hannity" Monday.
A Justice Department official told
Fox News on Monday that Barr asked Trump to make introductions to
foreign countries that might have had information pertinent to U.S.
Attorney John Durham's ongoing probe into possible misconduct by the
intelligence community at the outset of the Russia investigation.
But,
a person familiar with the situation told Fox News it would be wrong to
say Trump "pressed" the Australian prime minister for information that
could have discredited Mueller's now-completed probe, as the New York Times reported earlier Monday.
Graham
said that Barr should be talking with Australia as well as the U.K. and
Italy in order to do his job properly. He also said he would write a
letter to those three countries asking them to cooperate with Barr and
cited a letter his colleagues sent to Ukraine last year asking them to
cooperate with Mueller or the U.S. would stop sending aid.
"So
here's what I want American people to know: it's OK to cooperate with
Mueller to get Trump but it's not OK to cooperate with Barr to find out
if Trump was the victim of an out-of-control intelligence operation,"
Graham said. "We're not going to have a country like that."
The
senator told host Sean Hannity it "bothered him" that "the left" would
say it was wrong for Barr to talk with other countries.
"This New
York Times article is an effort to stop Barr from looking at how this
whole thing began in 2016 regarding the Trump campaign," Graham said.
"What are they afraid of." Fox News' Gregg Re and Jake Gibson contributed to this report.
LAS
VEGAS (AP) — Like many, Mario Wolthers was lured to Las Vegas a decade
ago from California by cheaper housing costs. But when his apartment
managers tried to raise his rent last spring, he moved in with a
roommate.
“I’m a responsible taxpaying
citizen,” said Wolthers, a 38-year-old elementary school teacher and
Democrat. “I help a lot of kids out. I should at least be able to rent
an apartment on my own or even afford a home.”
As
the Democratic presidential candidates hustle for votes in Nevada, the
third state on the 2020 voting calendar, they have been trying to answer
Wolthers’ complaint. The contenders are cranking out housing plans,
meeting with advocates and pledging to help bring down prices.
Their
proposals have not dominated the campaign in the way that health care
or immigration has. Still, they represent the seeds of a political
debate likely to grow as high rents and home prices spread from
expensive cities such as Los Angeles and New York to once-affordable
pockets like Las Vegas and Reno.
“It’s
affecting the overwhelming majority of the population here,” said Aria
Overli of the housing-focused activist group Actionn, in Reno. Overli
said she has lost track of the number of presidential campaigns she’s
talked with about real estate costs.
It’s not just Nevada.
Houses
cost more than five times the typical household income — meaning
they’re probably out of reach of most families — in one-seventh of the
metro areas in the United States, according to Harvard’s Joint Center
for Housing Studies. Rents are rising at twice the rate of inflation
nationally.
On the West Coast, soaring rents
and home prices have helped trigger a new wave of homelessness and a
debate over solutions. President Donald Trump has used the crisis to
criticize Democratic leadership in California. He’s suggested it may
require federal intervention.
Democratic candidates have their own ideas.
Vermont
Sen. Bernie Sanders recently came out with a plan in Las Vegas to spend
$2.5 trillion over the next decade to improve public housing, combat
homelessness and establish national rent control. Mayor Pete Buttigieg
of South Bend, Indiana, who has proposed letting families “homestead” on
abandoned land in cities, toured Reno with Actionn on Saturday to
discuss housing.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts released a plan in March to spend $500 billion over 10
years to build housing units. California Sen. Kamala Harris is proposing
a tax credit for families spending more than 30 percent on rent. New
Jersey Sen. Cory Booker also backs a renters’ tax credit.
Julian
Castro, housing secretary in the Obama administration, and Minnesota
Sen. Amy Klobuchar are among those proposing more money for federal
housing vouchers. Several candidates want to push local governments to
streamline restrictive zoning laws that prevent the construction of
units. Former Vice President Joe Biden has not released a plan.
The factors driving higher prices are varied.
In
northern Nevada, Reno is a growing technology hub and a refuge for
Californians fleeing that state’s high cost of living. Rents have
increased by 35% in the past two years. A recent study ranked Reno’s
county as the 66th least affordable in the nation, closing in on the
tier that features notoriously expensive places such as San Francisco
and Brooklyn, New York.
Las Vegas, once
known as a place where people priced out of the American dream elsewhere
could afford a house, is statistically more affordable than Reno. But
it is seeing a spike in real estate prices as new residents have moved
in. Home prices rose more than twice as quickly as wages in the past
year, sharper than the national increase.
The
city has among the highest rate of renters in the country, on par with
New York City and San Francisco. That’s a sign that people cannot afford
a first home, according to Jed Kolko, chief economist at the jobs site
Indeed.
“Las Vegas had always been seen as a
transient city but as we’ve grown and we’ve become more established, we
have families staying here,” said Lalo Montoya of the activist group
Make the Road Nevada.
Montoya moved to Las
Vegas in 2016 from Denver, fleeing another once-affordable city that had
become too expensive. He just found a new apartment after hunting
around climbing rents and high move-in fees. “We’re all just one
emergency away, a lot of us,” he said. “If it’s hard for me and that I
have a stable job, then I can’t imagine how it must be for other
hardworking folks.”
Nevada Democrats, who
won control of the Legislature in November, passed laws to restrict late
fees and offer tax credits for builders of low-income housing.
Housing
proposals may play well in a Democratic primary. The party’s base of
younger people, minorities and urban dwellers cares about housing and
bears the brunt of the problem.
Analysts
note that significant swaths of the country don’t have widespread
housing pinches — including politically pivotal Rust Belt states.
Highly
technical solutions for housing also rarely fire up voters, said Jenny
Schuetz of the Brookings Institute in Washington. “I don’t imagine
anyone’s going to get up in the middle of a national debate and say we
need to double HUD’s budget for vouchers,” she said.
But
the signs of a political shift are there. Housing is no longer just a
headache for the poor or big-city dweller, communities that rarely get
attention in presidential campaigns.
“The
problem of housing affordability has been moving up the income scale,”
said Chris Herbert of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “It’s a
problem of the working class who can’t afford housing. It’s taking on a
different political tenor.”
___
Riccardi reported from Denver. AP Economics Writer Joshua Boak in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The president’s lawyer
insists the real story is a debunked conspiracy theory. A senior White
House adviser blames the “deep state.” And a Republican congressman is
pointing at Joe Biden’s son.
As the
Democrats drive an impeachment inquiry toward a potential vote by the
end of the year, President Donald Trump’s allies are struggling over how
he should manage the starkest threat to his presidency. The jockeying
broke into the open Sunday on the talk-show circuit, with a parade of
Republicans erupting into a surge of second-guessing.
At
the top of the list: Rudy Giuliani’s false charge that it was Ukraine
that meddled in the 2016 elections. The former New York mayor has been
encouraging Ukraine to investigate both Biden and Hillary Clinton
“I
am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and
repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind
when he hears it over and over again,” said Tom Bossert, Trump’s former
homeland security adviser. “That conspiracy theory has got to go, they
have to stop with that, it cannot continue to be repeated.”
Not only did Giuliani repeat it Sunday, he brandished pieces of paper he said were affidavits supporting his story.
“Tom Bossert doesn’t know what’s he’s talking about,” Guiliani said. He added that Trump was framed by the Democrats.
Senior
White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, meanwhile, noted that he’s
worked in the federal government “for nearly three years.
“I
know the difference between whistleblower and a deep-state operative,”
Miller said. “This is a deep state operative, pure and simple.”
Meanwhile,
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, heatedly said Trump was merely asking
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to root out corruption. That,
Jordan said, includes Hunter Biden’s membership on the board of a
Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama
administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. There has been no
evidence of wrongdoing by either of the Bidens.
Mixed
messaging reflects the difficulty Republicans are having defending the
president against documents released by the White House that feature
Trump’s own words and actions. A partial transcript and a whistleblower
report form the heart of the House impeachment inquiry and describe
Trump pressuring a foreign president to investigate Biden’s family.
In
a series of tweets Sunday night, Trump said he deserved to meet “my
accuser” as well as whoever provided the whistleblower with what the
president called “largely incorrect” information. He also accused
Democrats of “doing great harm to our Country” in an effort to
destabilize the nation and the 2020 election.
Trump has insisted the call was “perfect” and pushed to release both documents.
“He
didn’t even know that it was wrong,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
describing a phone call from Trump in which the president suggested the
documents would exonerate him.
But Democrats
seized on them as evidence that Trump committed “high crimes and
misdemeanors” by asking for a foreign leader’s help undermining a
political rival, Democrat Joe Biden. Pelosi launched an impeachment
inquiry and on Sunday told other Democrats that public sentiment had
swung behind the probe.
By all accounts, the
Democratic impeachment effort was speeding ahead with a fair amount of
coordination between Pelosi, Democratic messaging experts and its
political operation.
House Intelligence
Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Sunday that he expects the
whistleblower to testify “very soon,” though details were still being
worked out and no date had been set. Hearings and depositions were
starting this week. Many Democrats are pushing for a vote on articles of
impeachment before the end of the year, mindful of the looming 2020
elections.
Schiff said in one interview that
his committee intends to subpoena Giuliani for documents and may
eventually want to hear from Giuliani directly. In a separate TV
appearance, Giuliani said he would not cooperate with Schiff, but then
acknowledged he would do what Trump tells him. The White House did not
provide an official response on whether the president would allow
Giuliani to cooperate.
Lawyers for the
whistleblower expressed concern about that individual’s safety, noting
that some have offered a $50,000 “bounty” for the whistleblower’s
identity. They said they expect the situation to become even more
dangerous for their client and any other whistleblowers, as Congress
seeks to investigate this matter.
On a
conference call Sunday, Pelosi, traveling in Texas, urged Democrats to
proceed “not with negative attitudes towards him, but a positive
attitude towards our responsibility,” according to an aide on the call
who shared the exchange on condition of anonymity. Polling, Pelosi said,
had changed “drastically” in the Democrats’ favor.
A
one-day NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted Sept. 25 found that
about half of Americans — 49% — approve of the House formally starting
an impeachment inquiry into Trump.
There
remains a stark partisan divide on the issue, with 88% of Democrats
approving and 93% of Republicans disapproving of the inquiry. But the
findings suggest some movement in opinions on the issue. Earlier polls
conducted throughout Trump’s presidency have consistently found a
majority saying he should not be impeached and removed from office.
House
Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries of New York urged the caucus
to talk about impeachment by repeating the words “betrayal, abuse of
power, national security.” The Democrats’ campaign arm swung behind
lawmakers to support the impeachment drive as they run for reelection,
according to another call participant to spoke on condition of
anonymity.
The contrast with the Republicans’ selection of responses was striking.
A
combative House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said that nothing in
Trump’s phone call rose to the level of an impeachable offense.
“Why
would we move forward on impeachment?” the California Republican said.
“There’s not something that you have to defend here.”
Bossert,
an alumnus of Republican George W. Bush’s administration, offered a
theory and some advice to Trump: Move past the fury over the 2016 Russia
investigation, in which special counsel Robert Mueller found no
evidence of conspiracy but plenty of examples of Trump’s obstruction.
“I
honestly believe this president has not gotten his pound of flesh yet
from past grievances on the 2016 investigation,” Bossert said. “If he
continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”
Two
advisers to the Biden campaign sent a letter Sunday urging major news
networks to stop booking Giuliani on their shows, accusing Trump’s
personal attorney of spreading “false, debunked conspiracy theories” on
behalf of the president. The letter to management and anchors of shows
at ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News added: “By
giving him your air time, you are allowing him to introduce increasingly
unhinged, unfounded and desperate lies into the national conversation.”
___
Giuliani
appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and CBS’ “Face the Nation,” while Schiff
was interviewed on ABC and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Bossert spoke on ABC
and Miller on “Fox News Sunday.” Jordan appeared on CNN’s “State of the
Union.” Pelosi and McCarthy appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
___
Associated
Press writers Kevin Freking, Eric Tucker and Mary Clare Jalonick in
Washington; writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta; and AP Polling Director Emily
Swanson contributed to this report.
Joe Biden's presidential campaign requested in a letter on Sunday that major news networks not invite President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani anymore,
after Giuliani spent the morning on a series of talk shows aggressively
highlighting what he called Biden's apparently corrupt dealings in
Ukraine and China.
The Biden campaign wrote to NBC News, CBS News,
Fox News and CNN to voice "grave concern that you continue to book Rudy
Giuliani on your air to spread false, debunked conspiracy theories on
behalf of Donald Trump," according to The Daily Beast, which first reported the existence of the letter.
The
memo, drafted by Biden aides Kate Bedingfield and Anita Dunn,
continued: "While you often fact check his statements in real time
during your discussions, that is no longer enough. By giving him your
air time, you are allowing him to introduce increasingly unhinged,
unfounded and desperate lies into the national conversation."
Should
a network choose to book Giuliani, the Biden campaign called for "an
equivalent amount of time" to be provided "to a surrogate for the Biden
campaign." The letter noted Giuliani was not a public official, but
Trump's lawyer and personal advisor.
Responding to the request, Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted: "Can we request the removal of Democrats on TV that push hoaxes? Wait, but then who would do the interviews?"
Hours earlier, Giuliani made the rounds on several Sunday shows, including "Fox News Sunday," to argue that evidence of Biden's possible corruption has been hiding in plain sight for months.
Biden has acknowledged on camera that,
when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire
that prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the natural gas
firm Burisma Holdings — where son Hunter Biden had a highly lucrative role on
the board paying him tens of thousands of dollars per month, despite
limited relevant expertise. The vice president threatened to withhold $1
billion in critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.
"Well, son of a b---h, he got fired," Biden joked at a panel two years after leaving office.
Shokin himself had been widely accused of corruption, while critics charged that
Hunter Biden essentially might have been selling access to his father,
who had pushed Ukraine to increase its natural gas production. Giuliani,
on Sunday, suggested Shokin was the target of an international smear
campaign to discredit his work.
In a combative interview on ABC News' "This Week" on Sunday,
Giuliani presented what he said was an affidavit signed by Shokin that
confirmed Hunter Biden was being investigated when Shokin was fired.
"The Washington press will not accept the fact that Joe Biden might have done something like this." — Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani
"I
have an affidavit here that's been online for six months that nobody
bothered to read from the gentleman who was fired, Viktor Shokin, the
so-called corrupt prosecutor," Giuliani said. "The Biden people say that
he wasn't investigating Hunter Biden at the time. He says under oath
that he was." The Shokin affidavit purportedly said the U.S.
had pressured him into resigning because he was unwilling to drop the
case.
Later, Giuliani added: "I have another affidavit, this time
from another Ukrainian prosecutor who says that the day after Biden
strong-armed the president to remove Shokin, they show up in the
prosecutor’s office -- lawyers for Hunter Biden show up in the
prosecutor’s office and they give an apology for dissemination of false
information."
After anchor George Stephanopoulos expressed
skepticism, Giuliani fired back: "How about if I -- how about if I tell
you over the next week four more of these will come out from four other
prosecutors? ... No, no, no, George, they won’t be [investigated],
because they’ve been online for six months, and the Washington press
will not accept the fact that Joe Biden might have done something like
this."
When Stephanopoulos called it "not true" that Hunter Biden
had taken more than $1 billion from China while the U.S. was negotiating
with the country, Giuliani again said the former Clinton administration
official was being too dismissive.
"There's evidence that they
got $1 billion directly from China, specific date, 12 days after they
returned from a trip to China," Giuliani asserted. "There's evidence
that another $500 million went in, and there are three partners."
Giuliani
went on: "Can I -- can I make a contrast? Can I just make a slight
contrast with the so-called whistleblower? The whistleblower says I
don’t have any direct knowledge, I just heard things. Up until two weeks
before he did that, that wouldn't even [have] been a complaint, would
have been dismissed."
That was a reference to an explosive report in The Federalist
showing that the intelligence community recently changed its form for
reporting improper conduct. Earlier this year, the intelligence
community's form for whistleblowers explicitly stated that complaints
based on secondhand information were not actionable.
But,
that admonition was removed sometime afterward -- around the time that
an unnamed whistleblower filed a complaint, based on secondhand
information, alleging misconduct in the White House. Although there has
been no strict legal requirement for whistleblower complaints to contain
only firsthand information, the previous intelligence community form
made it clear that such secondhand complaints would not be investigated
as a matter of procedure.
Twitter user Stephen McIntyre originally spotted the change in the whistleblower form.
Trump
and top Republicans called for answers over the weekend as to when and
why the form was changed -- and whether the change was made specifically
to allow the whistleblower's complaint to proceed.
Before
Giuliani's interview, former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Thomas
Bossert criticized Trump's communications with Ukraine, but said he did not see any evidence of an impeachable offense.
Giuliani said Bossert was wrong to imply that Giuliani had ever alleged
Ukraine directly participated in the hacking of Democrats' servers in
2016.
Speaking separately to Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," Giuliani brought up the affidavits and called the situation Clintonesque.
“The
pattern is a pattern of pay for play. It includes something very
similar to what happened to the Clinton Foundation," Giuliani said,
"which goes to the very core of, what did Obama know and when did he
know it?"
Giuliani referred to a December 2015 New York Times article
about Hunter Biden, Burisma and a Ukrainian oligarch, and how the
younger Biden's involvement with the Ukrainian company could undermine
then-Vice President Biden's anti-corruption message.
"The question
is," Giuliani asked, "when Biden and Obama saw that article, about how
the son was pulling down money from the most crooked oligarch in Russia,
did Obama call Biden in and say 'Joe, how could you be doing this?'"
Giuliani was not the only attorney trying to get damaging information on Joe Biden from Ukrainian officials,
and President Trump’s decision to withhold aid from Ukraine this summer
was made in spite of several federal agencies supporting the aid, Fox
News’ Chris Wallace reported on "Fox News Sunday."
In
addition to Giuliani, Washington, D.C., lawyers Joe DiGenova and his
wife, Victoria Toensing, worked alongside the former New York City
mayor. According to a top U.S. official, the three attorneys were
working "off the books" -- not within the Trump administration -- and
only the president knows the details of their work.
In a tweet Sunday, Toensing called the report "false" and embarrassing." Wallace, in a statement, responded, "We stand by our reporting."
For
his part, Giuliani insisted he "didn't work with anybody to get dirt on
Joe Biden," again saying that the information "was handed to me by the
Ukrainians."
Giuliani stated that so far House Democrats have not
subpoenaed him to testify about his work with Ukraine, but if they did
he would have to run it by Trump first.
"I'm his attorney, there's
something called attorney-client privilege," he said. "That has to be
considered even if they don't think he should have attorney-client
privilege."
Democrats have focused on the whistleblower's complaint,
released last week, which cited information from White House officials
who alleged there'd been efforts to secure Trump's July phone call with
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among other conversations. The
Trump administration reportedly began
placing transcripts of Trump's calls with several foreign leaders in a
highly classified repository only after anonymous leakers publicly
divulged the contents of Trump's private calls with the leaders of
Mexico and Australia in 2017.
Trump suggested during a phone call
with Zelensky that Ukraine look into Biden's boast about firing Shokin,
after Zelensky first mentioned Ukraine's corruption issues, and
after Trump separately requested as a "favor" that Ukraine help investigate foreign interference in the 2016 elections, including the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server involving CrowdStrike.
The
call came not long after Trump had frozen millions of dollars in
military aid to Ukraine. However, the U.S. later released the aid to
Ukraine, and the Ukrainians were unaware the money was frozen in the first place until more than a month after Trump's call with Zelensky, The New York Times reported.
Zelensky has said he felt no pressure from Trump during the phone call to do anything.
The whistleblower complaint contained several apparent factual inaccuracies,
prompting some Republicans to call for an inquiry into the
whistleblowers' sources -- and why they didn't make the complaint
themselves. Fox News' Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.
President Trump
on Sunday said he wants to meet the whistleblower who filed a complaint
about his July phone call with the Ukrainian president and to have
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., questioned for “fraud and treason.”
“Like
every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this
accuser, the so-called ‘Whistleblower,’ represented a perfect
conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and
fraudulent way,” Trump tweeted. “Then Schiff made up what I actually
said by lying to Congress.”
He
continued: “His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister
manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible
things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United
States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud &
Treason.”
Trump last week released a transcript of the call with
President Volodymyr Zelensky, which along with the complaint, detailed
how he urged his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Democratic
presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The incident has set off a formal impeachment inquiry.
But
Schiff opened Thursday’s hearing on Capitol Hill with Acting Director
of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire with an exaggerated reading of
the phone call, which he later walked back as a “parody.”
Trump on Friday blasted Schiff for the fictional summary and demanded his immediate resignation.
In
the series of tweets on Sunday, Trump not only doubled down on meeting
his accusers, both the whistleblower and the person who supplied the
information, but also questioned whether he was being spied on.
“In
addition, I want to meet not only my accuser, who presented SECOND
& THIRD HAND INFORMATION, but also the person who illegally gave
this information, which was largely incorrect, to the ‘Whistleblower,’”
Trump tweeted. “Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big
Consequences!”
Devon Archer, far left, with former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, far right, in 2014.
CNN’s Scott Jennings once again took liberals to the cleaners on the Abrego Garcia case, the ‘Maryland man...
