To say that at this point, the scandal that’s surrounding a whistleblower complaint about President Donald Trump’s communications with Ukrainian authorities has reached a fever pitch would be an understatement. Besides the announcement this Tuesday from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that she supports a formal impeachment inquiry against the president and one is now proceeding, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has successfully led the unanimous passage of a Senate resolution demanding that the Trump administration release the original complaint in full. At present, the Trump administration is actively breaking the law by so far refusing to hand the material over to Congress, although they may soon.
Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis reports:
‘The Senate has *unanimously* agreed to Schumer’s resolution calling for the whistleblower complaint to be turned over the intelligence committees immediately. That’s every Senate Republican plus every Democrat now via unanimous consent agreeing to call on the Trump administration to cough up the whistleblower complaint, not just the phone call transcript. This is rare, folks.’
Indeed the move is rare — Senate Republicans have broken with the Trump administration on extremely sparse occasions in the past. One occasion was the time when a number of them voted against him using national emergency powers to procure money for his planned southern border wall, and another occasion was the resolution the Senate (and House) passed demanding that the U.S. withdraw support for the Saudi-led coalition operating in the Yemeni civil war. Trump vetoed both measures.
Dennis notes that according to the terms of the law and the resolution that Schumer led the Senate in passing this Tuesday, the complaint doesn’t necessarily ever become available to the public. However, there is public testimony from acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire to the House Intelligence Committee planned for this Thursday. Pelosi has insisted that Maguire personally is in active violation of the law because of his compliance with demands from higher-ups in the administration for him to keep the complaint material from Congress — so his pending appearance before Congress should be interesting.
Trump has already announced that he’s approving the release of a transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president at the center of the scandal, but that doesn’t provide the full portrait of the situation in the whistleblower complaint. The whistleblower themselves apparently wants to speak with Congress too.
Check out Twitter’s response…
