Millions playing waiting game over electricity shutoffs

SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — Millions of Californians played a waiting game with the winds Thursday as Pacific Gas & Electric watched the weather before deciding whether to restore power to an enormous portion of the state blacked out on purpose.

The state’s largest utility pulled the plug to prevent a repeat of the past two years when wind-blown power lines sparked deadly wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes.

The unpopular move that disrupted daily life — prompted by forecasts calling for dry, gusty weather — came after catastrophic fires sent PG&E into bankruptcy and forced it to take more aggressive steps to prevent blazes.

The blackouts began Wednesday, hitting more than 500,000 homes and businesses north of San Francisco Bay, in the wine country, the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and virtually incinerated the town of Paradise.

Late Wednesday night, after a full day of delays, PG&E began cutting power in the Bay Area, excluding the city of San Francisco.

Overall, about 734,000 customers and as many as 2 million people could be affected. PG&E has warned that they might have to do without power for days after the winds subside because “every inch” of the power system must be inspected by helicopters and thousands of groundworkers and declared safe before the grid is reactivated.

“It’s just kind of scary. It feels worse than Y2K. We don’t know how long,” Tianna Pasche of Oakland said before her area was powered down. “My two kids, their school situation keeps moving every second. It’s not clear if we need to pack for a week and go out of town or what to do. So I’m just trying to make sure we have water, food, charging stations and gas.”

“For me, this is a major inconvenience in my life as a parent but also, if it saves a life, I’m not going to complain about it,” she said.

Residents of the Oakland Hills, where a wildfire in 1991 killed 25 people and destroyed thousands of homes, spent the morning buying bottled water, getting cash and filling their cars with gas.

In the northern wine country, most of downtown Sonoma was pitch black when Joseph Pokorski, a retiree, showed up for his morning ritual of drinking coffee, followed by beer and cocktails.

The Town Square bar was open and lit by lanterns, but coffee was out of the question and only cash was accepted. Pokorski decided to forgo a 30-minute wait for a cup of joe from the bakery next door and move on to beers and a couple greyhound cocktails of vodka and grapefruit juice.

“I’m not a coffee freak,” Pokorski said. “I can take it or leave. It’s no big thing.”

In the El Dorado Hills east of Sacramento, California, Ruth Self and her son were taking an outage in stride while leaving a Safeway grocery store that had been stripped nearly bare of bottled water and ice.

Self said she wasn’t upset, given the lives lost nearly a year ago in Paradise, invoking images of people who burned in their cars trying to escape.

“I just can’t imagine,” she said. “Hopefully (the outages) are only for a couple days. I think it’s more of a positive than a negative. Ask me again on Friday night when I haven’t had a shower in two days, when I’ve had to spend two days playing card games.”

There was some good news. PG&E also announced that by reconfiguring its power system, it had restored electricity to 44,000 customers who weren’t in areas of high fire risk, and it could bring back power to 60,000 to 80,000 customers in the Humboldt area, where gusty winds had subsided.

Also because of shifting forecasts, the utility said it was reducing the third phase of its blackout plan, set to begin Thursday, to only about 4,600 customers in Kern County — one-tenth of the original estimate.

Unsurprisingly, the unprecedented blackouts sparked anger. A customer threw eggs at a PG&E office in Oroville. A PG&E truck was hit by a bullet that shattered a window in Colusa County before Wednesday’s outages, although authorities couldn’t immediately say whether it was targeted. PG&E put up barricades around its San Francisco headquarters.

“We realize and understand the impact and the hardship” from the outages, said Sumeet Singh, head of PG&E’s Community Wildfire Safety Program. But he urged people not to take it out on PG&E workers.

“They have families that live in your communities, they have friends, they are members of your communities,” he said. “They’re doing this work in the interest of your safety.”

PG&E took drastic action because of hot, dry Diablo winds sweeping into Northern California, said Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s principal meteorologist. They were also part of a California-wide weather system that will produce Santa Ana winds in the south in the next day or so, he said.

“These (weather) events historically are the events that cause the most destructive wildfires in California history,” Strenfel said.

Winds gusting as high as 70 mph in places were forecast to begin hitting Southern California later Thursday. Southern California Edison warned that it might cut power to nearly 174,000 customers in nine counties, including Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. San Diego Gas & Electric has notified about 30,000 customers they could lose power in back-country areas.

While many people said the blackouts were a necessity, others were outraged — the word that Gov. Gavin Newsom used in arguing that PG&E should have been working on making its power system sturdier and more weather-proof.

“They’re in bankruptcy due to their terrible management going back decades,” Newsom said in San Diego. “They’ve created these conditions. It was unnecessary.”

Singh said the utility has more than 8,000 employees and contractors who have been clearing brush, inspecting power lines and putting power lines underground.

But he said the power grid wasn’t built to withstand the changing weather and the previous safety factor “no longer exists.”

Although fire agencies had beefed up their crews because of red-flag conditions of extreme fire danger, very few fires were currently burning in California. Only a tiny fraction of acreage has burned, so far, this year compared with recent years, though no one has attributed that to the power cuts.

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Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Janie Har and Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco, Jocelyn Gecker in Moraga, Don Thompson in El Dorado Hills, Haven Daley in Oakland, and Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

White House aides try disappearing act amid impeachment talk

WASHINGTON (AP) — They’ve skipped the high-profile Sunday TV shows and avoided driveway chat sessions with reporters. Few who are typically eager to defend the president have appeared at all on television so far this month.

White House officials close to President Donald Trump are pulling off a disappearing act, remaining largely absent from public view — in the middle of the storm over impeachment.

“We invited the White House on to answer questions on the show this morning,” CNN’s Jake Tapper explained to his viewers on Sunday’s “State of the Union.” ″They did not offer a guest.”

It’s a well-worn strategy in the Trump White House: Senior officials conveniently manage to be elsewhere when major controversies engulf the building. The frequent absences of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and presidential daughter Ivanka Trump during moments of consequence have long been a running joke among their detractors. Their detours included a trip to Florida during the partial government shutdown.

Plenty of others have jumped town during tense moments.

As Trump struggled with mounting Republican defections over his decision to declare a national emergency to pay for the stalled border wall, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wasn’t at the Capitol cajoling his former colleagues or in the West Wing making calls. Instead, he was in Las Vegas for an annual friends and family getaway.

More recently, embattled national security adviser John Bolton scheduled a trip to Mongolia while Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea, a gesture that didn’t sit well with Bolton, who would leave the administration a few months later.

Indeed, knowing “when to be out of town” was one of the top nuggets of advice that Kevin Hassett, the president’s former top economic adviser, said he’d received from a predecessor and had to offer his successor.

The White House did not respond to questions about the tactic Wednesday. But even when they’re in Washington, many of the White House’s most visible officials have been staying out of public view, letting the president’s indignant Twitter feed and his frequent commentary drive the public conversation.

That includes White House spokesman Hogan Gidley, a frequent guest on Fox News shows and the gaggles with reporters that often follow on the White House driveway. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, an aggressive defender of the president, has not made an appearance on the driveway since a highly contentious Sept. 27 gaggle in which she berated reporters and dismissed a question about whether the White House was organizing an impeachment war room.

“I’m the only person out here taking your questions,” Conway noted then. She did, however, appear at an event with first lady Melania Trump, speaking with teens and young adults about their experiences with electronic cigarettes and vaping.

Appearances have come instead from lower-profile staffers, including the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short; the acting director of Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought; and economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who tried to stay out of the controversy. He’s said repeatedly that questions about Ukraine and the president’s efforts to dig up damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden are way out of his lane.

Adding to the vacuum is the continued lack of White House briefings. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has yet to hold one.

“It’s surprising that they’re not using the many levers on the most powerful communications platform in the world, which is the White House,” said Joe Lockhart, who served as press secretary during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He said that the White House is losing out on effective platforms to try to drive its message.

“Nobody is vouching for him or validating him and filling in the blanks,” Lockhart said of Trump.

Many aides to the president have grown reluctant to speak out on Trump’s behalf for fear the president will then contradict them. Instead, they allow the president to set the day’s message on his Twitter feed and vigorously defend himself.

But one of the reasons Clinton’s impeachment strategy was effective, Lockhart said, was that the president almost never talked about the impeachment drama. He relied on his lawyers, his communications staff and outside allies to make the case for him.

“The president shouldn’t be his own defender,” Lockhart said. “The president should be focused on doing the job of the president.”

But unlike Clinton, Trump has another tool at his disposal: a massive and well-funded campaign operation that has vigorously defended the president on Twitter and cut a series of ads that paint the impeachment inquiry as nothing more than a Democratic “coup” aimed at overturning the results of the 2016 election.

Another ad released Wednesday focuses on allegations against Biden and his son Hunter, which the president and his allies have been pursuing despite lacking evidence of any wrongdoing.

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said the campaign team speaks with its counterparts at the White House every day and work in tandem.

“At all times we take our lead from the White House,” he said. “The president is our boss and we are an extension of him we make made all of our decisions accordingly.”

Biden campaign slams NY Times for running 'Clinton Cash' author's op-ed on ex-VP's Ukraine ties

The deputy manager of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign slammed The New York Times on Wednesday in a letter to the newspaper’s executive editor -- blasting the paper's coverage of the former vice president’s involvement in Ukraine.
The letter, written by Kate Bedingfield to Dean Baquet of the Times, criticizes the paper for “giving top billing" to "Clinton Cash" author Peter Schweizer in a Wednesday op-ed titled, “What Hunter Biden Did Was Legal – That’s the Problem," CNN reported.
In his article, Schweizer asserts Biden was "self-dealing" in Ukraine while vice president.
Bedingfield goes on to criticize The Times' Ukraine coverage at large. She writes that the newspaper had an "outsized hand in a baseless conspiracy theory" promoted by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani that Biden acted inappropriately in helping get rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor.
She then accuses the Times of "active participation" in a "smear campaign" against Biden, citing a May article titled, "Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies."
The Times later pushed back against the Biden campaign official's assertions, according to a statement obtained by CNN.
"Our coverage of the Biden campaign and Hunter Biden has been fair and accurate," the newspaper wrote, adding it "will continue to cover Joe Biden with the same tough and fair standards we apply to every candidate in the race and we’re happy to sit down with Biden advisers anytime to discuss news coverage."
The Times' statement emphasized the Schweizer story was published in the Opinion section, "where their mission is to invite intelligent discussion on a range of opinions and ideas."
The Biden campaign also sent letters to Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday, asking them not to run ads from the Trump campaign that promote what it described as conspiracy theories about the Bidens in Ukraine, according to CNN.

US official charged with leaking secrets to journalists

DiGenova & Toensing's Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova on a report that the FBI referred 14 employees to OPR for leaking classified information and how Democrats are demanding access to records from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s time in George W. Bush’s White House.

A Defense Intelligence Agency official was arrested Wednesday and charged with leaking classified intelligence information to two journalists, the Justice Department said.
Henry Kyle Frese was arrested by the FBI when he arrived at work at a DIA facility in Virginia. He was charged with willfully disclosing national defense information.
Frese is alleged to have accessed at least five classified intelligence reports and provided top secret information about another country’s weapons systems to the reporter with whom he was having a relationship.
Frese has a top secret government security clearance.
The arrest is the latest in a series of prosecutions under the Trump administration of government workers accused of providing nonpublic information to journalists.
In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions pledged to take a stand against leaks.
Neither reporter was identified by name in court documents, but an analysis of news articles and social media posts indicates they are Amanda Macias of CNBC and Courtney Kube of NBC News. Those posts include a photo of Macias and Frese on Instagram from 2017.
The Justice Department declined to provide any additional details about the classified information that was leaked, but the articles focused on China’s missile systems.
“Frese betrayed the trust placed in him by the American people — a betrayal that risked harming the national security of this country,” said Assistant Attorney General John Demers, who leads the Justice Department’s national security division.
Although officials would not rule out the possibility of bringing criminal charges against the journalists, the top prosecutor whose office is prosecuting the case said investigators are “focused on the leaker, not the journalist.”
It was not immediately clear whether Frese had a lawyer who could comment on his behalf. A message left by the associated Press on Frese’s cellphone was not immediately returned. Frese was expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Virginia on Thursday.
Representatives for CNBC, NBC News and the Defense Intelligence Agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.

Elizabeth Warren Cartoons

Better polling means sharper scrutiny. Is Warren ready?

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — When Elizabeth Warren campaigned in Nevada in February, Abbie Peters was there. Energy and enthusiasm for the Massachusetts senator was not.

“It was early and she wasn’t as popular,” said Peters.

Nearly eight months later, Peters, a retiree from California, was back again to see Warren. The message hadn’t changed. But she felt like she was watching a different messenger. The crowd swelled with enthusiastic supporters, and Warren’s status near the top of the Democratic presidential field was affirmed.

“She gave pretty much the same speech, but it’s a good one and it’s authentic,” Peters said.

Still, Warren is quickly finding that her rapid ascent is accompanied by heightened scrutiny and criticism, from both President Donald Trump and her Democratic opponents. Her political allies and foes alike say Warren has appropriately sharp elbows and isn’t afraid to throw them — something she’ll likely increasingly have to do during the Democratic primary and in Twitter combat with Trump.

The latest examples came this week, when Warren was forced to defend a critical portion of the biographical story she tells on the campaign trail and a top Democratic challenger said that her health care plan would potentially alienate half the nation’s population.

With less than four months until the first votes in the Democratic nominating process are cast, Warren can anticipate that those criticisms will sharpen and accelerate.

“It’s a new phase for her, but if you’re the front-runner, all that means is everybody’s behind you and they want to be in front of you,” said Bill Miller, a longtime Texas political strategist who has worked for Republicans and Democrats. “You get their best shots, and you get the most shots.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, Warren’s chief competitor atop the primary polls, has seized on Warren’s support for “Medicare for All” universal health insurance, noting that she “has not indicated how she pays for it.”

So has Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who notes that the plan would eliminate choice for Americans who might prefer to stick with private insurance plans.

“I’m also committed to the idea that we can be bold and unified,” Buttigieg told The Associated Press. “But I also think that boldness doesn’t require jamming half of the American people.”

Buttigieg unveiled a prescription drug cost reduction proposal in a Monday op-ed in The Boston Globe, Warren’s hometown newspaper. He said voters should expect him to continue to make the contrast, likely at an influential union forum coming up in Iowa on Sunday, as well as at next week’s Democratic debate in Ohio.

“I’ve got a job to do to make sure that people understand the differences,” Buttigieg said.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, meanwhile, questioned the legality of Warren’s signature wealth tax, which she’s planning to use to help pay for many of her most ambitious proposals if elected, including Medicare for All and expanded Social Security benefits.

“She’s talked about the wealth tax, but that’s been assigned so many different possible things and it’s not clear that it’s constitutional,” Bennet said in an interview Tuesday.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is competing with Warren for the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party and has refused to go after Warren, but some of his highest-profile supporters have. Actress Susan Sarandon noted that her candidate was “not someone who used to be a Republican,” reminding some of Warren only becoming a Democrat in 1996, when she was in her 40s.

Republicans have willingly joined in.

Warren’s taking a DNA test last year to show Native American ancestry backfired — while it showed distant tribal ancestry, it also sparked a rebuke of Warren from some Native Americans for attributing tribal membership to genetics. The controversy nearly derailed her campaign before it got started and she apologized for her past claims. Trump had derided her with the ethnic slur “Pocahontas” during his 2016 campaign and continues to do so.

On Tuesday, Warren stood by her account of being fired from a New Jersey teaching position five decades ago because she was pregnant. She was put on the defensive after a 2007 video surfaced — and was widely shared in conservative circles — in which she seemed to describe the change in her career more as a choice and without the claim that her pregnancy led to the loss of her job.

Others note that the “Two Income Trap,” the 2004 book Warren wrote with her daughter, argued in favor of allowing parents more freedom to choose the public schools they send their children to rather than being limited to their neighborhood, saying families overreaching to move into more expensive ZIP codes was a key driver for the insurmountable debt many took on. That’s a different kind of “school choice” than the voucher programs that use public funding for private and religious schools cheered by many conservatives — but is a distinction some may miss.

A national audience got a glimpse of Warren’s fighting skills during the Democratic debate in July. After former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland spent much of the evening criticizing Warren and Sanders about using “fairytale economics,” Warren shot back: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do.”

There were also flashes while Warren was running for the Senate in 2012 against Republican incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, who two years earlier won a seat controlled for decades by Ted Kennedy.

Warren had just been denied a job running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She was packing up her apartment in Washington when Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List, stopped by and spoke to her for hours about running for office. Schriock recalled at the time that, for any Democrat challenging Brown, “this was not going to be a simple slam dunk.”

“I know folks now look back and go, ‘Massachusetts was an easy race.’ That was not the case in the moment, in that environment,” said Schriock. “We were dealing with the situation where we’d just lost Kennedy’s seat. Scott Brown was this attractive, charismatic Republican senator. Mitt Romney is getting ready to run for president.”

Brown tried to paint his opponent as an elitist from Harvard, calling her “Professor Warren” and arguing that she saw the Senate as a consolation prize.

“We knew that, running as a Republican in a state as blue as Massachusetts, you have to not only make voters like your candidate, you have to give them active reason to dislike your opponent,” said Colin Reed, who was Brown’s campaign spokesman. “It was a hard-fought race.”

Warren ultimately won by 7-plus percentage points.

Jeremy Hasson, a 26-year-old high school career counselor in New York, said Warren’s steady climb from also-ran to formability may leave her in a better position to fend off criticism.

“She’s so good at addressing root causes and not feeding into people’s traps,” said Hasson, who attended a Warren rally last month in Washington Square Park. “Even if she’s in the lead, she still has an underdog message where she can say, ‘I was behind once and I got here.’”

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Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Hunter Woodall in New London, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.

White House, Democrats spar over rules for impeachment

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Constitution gives the House “the sole power of impeachment” — but confers that authority without an instruction manual.

Now comes the battle royal over exactly what it means.

In vowing to halt all cooperation with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, the White House on Tuesday labeled the investigation “illegitimate” based on its own reading of the Constitution’s vague language.

In an eight-page letter, White House counsel Pat Cipollone pointed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s failure to call for an official vote to proceed with the inquiry as grounds to claim the process a farce.

“You have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process,” Cipollone wrote.

But Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee, told a federal judge Tuesday that it’s clear the House “sets its own rules” on how the impeachment process will play out.

The White House document, for its part, lacked much in the way of legal arguments, seemingly citing cable news appearances as often as case law. And legal experts cast doubt upon its effectiveness.

“I think the goal of this letter is to further inflame the president’s supporters and attempt to delegitimize the process in the eyes of his supporters,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.

Courts have been historically hesitant to step in as referee for congressional oversight and impeachment. In 1993, the Supreme Court held that impeachment was an issue for the Congress and not the courts.

In that case, Walter Nixon, a federal district judge who was removed from office, sought to be reinstated and argued that the full Senate, instead of a committee that was established to hear testimony and collect evidence, should have heard the evidence against him.

The court unanimously rejected the challenge, finding impeachment is a function of the legislature that the court had no authority over.

As for the current challenge to impeachment, Vladeck said the White House letter “does not strike me as an effort to provide sober legal analysis.”

Gregg Nunziata, a Philadelphia attorney who previously served as general counsel and policy advisor to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, said the White House’s letter did not appear to be written in a “traditional good-faith back and forth between the legislative and executive branches.”

He called it a “direct assault on the very legitimacy of Congress’ oversight power.”

“The Founders very deliberately chose to put the impeachment power in a political branch rather the Supreme Court,” Nunziata told The Associated Press. “They wanted this to be a political process and it is.”

G. Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the letter appeared to act as nothing more than an accelerant on a smoldering fire.

“It’s a response that seems to welcome a constitutional crisis rather than defusing one or pointing toward some strategy that would deescalate the situation,” Cross said.

After two weeks of a listless and unfocused response to the impeachment probe, the White House letter amounted to a declaration of war.

It’s a strategy that risks further provoking Democrats in the impeachment probe, setting up court challenges and the potential for lawmakers to draw up an article of impeachment accusing President Donald Trump of obstructing their investigations.

Democrats have said that if the White House does not provide the information, they could write an article of impeachment on obstruction of justice.

It is unclear if Democrats would wade into a lengthy legal fight with the administration over documents and testimony — or if they would just move straight to considering articles of impeachment.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is leading the Ukraine probe, has said Democrats will “have to decide whether to litigate, or how to litigate.”

But they don’t want the fight to drag on for months, as he said the administration seems to want to do.

A federal judge heard arguments Tuesday on whether the House had undertaken a formal impeachment inquiry despite not having taken an official vote and whether it can be characterized, under the law, as a “judicial proceeding.”

The distinction matters because while grand jury testimony is ordinarily secret, one exception authorizes a judge to disclose it in connection with a judicial proceeding. House Democrats are seeking grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as they conduct the impeachment inquiry.

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Mustian reported from New York. Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed.

White House announces it will not comply with 'illegitimate and unconstitutional' impeachment inquiry

The White House outlined in a defiant eight-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democrats on Tuesday why it will not participate in their “illegitimate and unconstitutional” impeachment inquiry, charging that the proceedings have run roughshod over congressional norms and the president's due-process rights.
Trump administration officials called the letter, which was written by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and obtained by Fox News, perhaps the most historic letter the White House has sent. The document tees up a head-on collision with Democrats in Congress, who have fired off a slew of subpoenas in recent days concerning the president's alleged effort to get Ukraine to investigate political foe Joe Biden during a July phone call with Ukraine's leader.
"President Trump and his administration reject your baseless, unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process," the letter stated. "Your unprecedented actions have left the president with no choice. In order to fulfill his duties to the American people, the Constitution, the Executive Branch, and all future occupants of the Office of the Presidency, President Trump and his administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances."
The document concluded: "The president has a country to lead. The American people elected him to do this job, and he remains focused on fulfilling his promises to the American people."
Responding to the letter, Pelosi accused Trump of "trying to make lawlessness a virtue" and added, "The American people have already heard the President’s own words – ‘do us a favor, though.’" (That line, from a transcript of Trump's call with Ukraine's leader, in reality referred to Trump's request for Ukraine to assist in an investigation into 2016 election interference, and did not relate to Biden.)
Pelosi continued: "This letter is manifestly wrong, and is simply another unlawful attempt to hide the facts of the Trump Administration’s brazen efforts to pressure foreign powers to intervene in the 2020 elections. ... The White House should be warned that continued efforts to hide the truth of the President’s abuse of power from the American people will be regarded as further evidence of obstruction. Mr. President, you are not above the law.  You will be held accountable.”
Substantively, the White House first noted in its letter that there has not been a formal vote in the House to open an impeachment inquiry -- and that the news conference held by Pelosi last month was insufficient to commence the proceedings.
"In the history of our nation, the House of Representatives has never attempted to launch an impeachment inquiry against the president without a majority of the House taking political accountability for that decision by voting to authorize such a dramatic constitutional step," the letter stated.
It continued: "Without waiting to see what was actually said on the call, a press conference was held announcing an 'impeachment inquiry' based on falsehoods and misinformation about the call."
Despite Pelosi's claim that there was no “House precedent that the whole House vote before proceeding with an impeachment inquiry,” several previous impeachment inquiries have been launched only by a full vote of the House -- including the impeachment proceedings concerning former Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
White House officials told Fox News the vote opening the proceedings was a small ask, considering the implications of potentially overturning a national election.
The letter went on to note that "information has recently come to light that the whistleblower" who first flagged Trump's call with Ukraine's president "had contact with [House Intelligence Committee] Chairman [Adam] Schiff's office before filing the complaint."
And Schiff's "initial denial of such contact caused The Washington Post to conclude that Chairman Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false," the letter observed.
Multiple reports surfaced this week that the whistleblower had a prior "professional relationship" with one of the 2020 Democratic candidates for president. On Friday, lawyers for the whistleblower did not respond to questions from Fox News about the whistleblower's possible previous relationship with any currently prominent Democrat.
The letter added: "In any event, the American people understand that Chairman Schiff cannot covertly assist with the submission of a complaint, mislead the public about his involvement, read a counterfeit version of the call to the American people, and then pretend to sit in judgment as a neutral 'investigator.'"
The White House was dinging Schiff for reciting a fictional version of Trump's call with Ukraine's leader during a congressional hearing. Schiff later called his statements a "parody."
ence that there was no wrongdoing on the call is the fact that, after the actual record of the call was released, Chairman Schiff chose to concoct a false version of the call and to read his made-up transcript to the American people at a public hearing," the letter stated. "The chairman's action only further undermines the public's confidence in the fairness of any inquiry before his committee."Ukraine's president has said he felt Trump did nothing improper in their July call, and DOJ lawyers who reviewed the call said they found no laws had been broken. The White House released a transcript of the conversation last month, as well as the whistleblower's complaint, which seemingly relied entirely on second-hand information.
Separately, the letter asserted multiple alleged violations of the president's due-process rights. It noted that under current impeachment inquiry proceedings, Democrats were not allowing presidential or State Department counsel to be present.
Democrats' procedures did not provide for the "disclosure of all evidence favorable to the president and all evidence bearing on the credibility of witnesses called to testify in the inquiry," the letter noted, nor did the procedures afford the president "the right to see all evidence, to present evidence, to call witnesses, to have counsel present at all hearings, to cross-examine all witnesses, to make objections relating to the examination of witnesses or the admissibility of testimony and evidence, and to respond to evidence and testimony."
Democrats also have not permitted Republicans in the minority to issue subpoenas, contradicting the "standard, bipartisan practice in all recent resolutions authorizing presidential impeachment inquiries."

"President Trump and his Administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances."
— Pat Cipollone, counsel to President Trump

The letter claimed that House committees have "resorted to threats and intimidation against potential Executive Branch witnesses," by raising the specter of obstruction of justice when administration employees seek to assert "long-established Executive Branch confidentiality interests and privileges in response to a request for a deposition."
"Current and former State Department officials are duty bound to protect the confidentiality interests of the Executive Branch, and the Office of Legal Counsel has also recognized that it is unconstitutional to exclude agency counsel from participating in congressional depositions," the letter stated.
Additionally, the letter noted that Democrats reportedly were planning to interview the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment inquiry at an undisclosed location -- contrary, the White House said, to the constitutional notion of being able to confront one's accuser.
According to a White House official, the bottom line was: "We are not participating in your illegitimate exercise. ... If you are legitimately conducting oversight, let us know. But all indications are this is about impeachment."
The document came as the White House aggressively has parried Democrats' inquiry efforts. One of the administration's first moves: the State Department on Tuesday barred Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, from appearing before a House panel conducting the probe into Trump.
"I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify, but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican's rights have been taken away, and true facts are not allowed out for the public to see," Trump tweeted.
The strategy risked further provoking Democrats in the impeachment probe, setting up court challenges and the potential for lawmakers to draw up an article of impeachment accusing Trump of obstructing their investigations. Schiff said Sondland's no-show would be grounds for obstruction of justice and could give a preview of what some of the articles of impeachment against Trump would entail.
But, as lawmakers sought to amass ammunition to be used in an impeachment trial, the White House increasingly has signaled that all-out warfare was its best course of action.
"What they did to this country is unthinkable. It's lucky that I'm the president. A lot of people said very few people could handle it. I sort of thrive on it," Trump said Monday at the White House. "You can't impeach a president for doing a great job. This is a scam."
House Democrats, for their part, issued a new round of subpoenas on Monday, this time to Defense Secretary Mark Esper and acting White House budget director Russell Vought. Pelosi's office also released an open letter signed by 90 former national security officials who served in administrations from both parties, voicing support for the whistleblower who raised concerns about Trump's efforts to get Ukraine to look into Biden's business dealings in Ukraine.
"A responsible whistleblower makes all Americans safer by ensuring that serious wrongdoing can be investigated and addressed, thus advancing the cause of national security to which we have devoted our careers," they wrote. "Whatever one's view of the matters discussed in the whistleblower's complaint, all Americans should be united in demanding that all branches of our government and all outlets of our media protect this whistleblower and his or her identity. Simply put, he or she has done what our law demands; now he or she deserves our protection."
The House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees were investigating Trump's actions alleging he pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son, potentially interfering in the 2020 election. The former vice president, for his part, has accused Trump of "frantically pushing flat-out lies, debunked conspiracy theories and smears against me." And, Biden's campaign has sought to have Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has accused Biden of possible corruption, removed from the airwaves.
Biden has acknowledged on camera that in spring 2016, when he was vice president and spearheading the Obama administration's Ukraine policy, 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. Critics have suggested Hunter Biden's salary bought access to Biden.
The vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in critical U.S. aid if Shokin, who was widely accused of corruption, was not fired.
"Well, son of a b---h, he got fired," Biden joked at a panel two years after leaving office.
Fox News' Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.