As House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump keeps going, this past Monday, they heard from former top Trump team Russia adviser Fiona Hill. She’s one of a number of current and former Trump officials who’ve either recently testified or will soon, but apparently, investigators hit a jackpot. According to Axios’ Mike Allen, who was discussing the situation on MSNBC, Congress tapped into a “gusher” of information via getting her testimony and the White House is “frantic” while trying to figure out how to respond.
Responding would no doubt be a lot easier if they didn’t have so much to hide, but that ship sailed.
Allen explained:
‘House Democrats tell us that every witness who has appeared before them has bolstered their case against President Trump and they say there’s very little contradiction in the testimony. House Democrats are now going for the Pentagon — we’ve seen this reach into the State Department and the intelligence community.’
Watch:
Prominent upcoming witnesses include E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland and former top Pompeo adviser Michael McKinley, who resigned just recently after a lengthy career in the State Department. Investigators have also recently demanded that longtime Trump official and current acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney come testify as well.
Allen explains that in Hill’s case, Congressional Democrats already got a good deal of intelligence, and in response:
‘We’re hearing [the White House] is tense to frantic. Administration officials recognize they have no control over all this information that’s coming out… We’re reporting infighting in the White House, real skepticism by some about the strategy.’
Some of the high points of Hill’s testimony include a revelation that apparently even noted war hawk John Bolton was concerned about the Ukraine scheme that Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and others (including Mulvaney, apparently) were carrying out while he was still on the job as national security adviser. The revelation adds another layer to Bolton’s abrupt departure — apparently, Bolton himself asked Hill to let the chief counsel at the National Security Council know what Giuliani and the others were doing. There’s been previous reporting about a number of high profile security officials who sounded internal alarms about the scheme — that may include Bolton.
The news about John Bolton leaves no doubt: Trump’s defense in the Ukraine scandal is collapsing.
Trump keeps saying his pressure on the Ukrainian president was totally fine.
But we now know that just about *everyone* around him was horrified by it:https://t.co/gvEYzEiqWG
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) October 15, 2019
Giuliani worked as a middle-man in the president’s effort to get Ukraine to cough up dirt on the Bidens that could be useful for Trump’s re-election campaign, although the president’s personal lawyer has never seemed to get any kind of actual security clearance, let alone any kind of broader approval for secretly representing the U.S. president and federal government in dealings with other countries.
Giuliani met with former and current Ukrainian officials like their former prosecutor Viktor Shokin and current Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak. Trump, meanwhile, pushed for the dirt through means like a highly scrutinized July phone conversation with the current Ukrainian president in which he said they should get in touch with Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr to carry out that Biden investigation. In the wake of revelations, Trump has found it in himself to insist that there’s nothing wrong with him demanding more foreign election help.
Featured Image via screenshot
