Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Donald Trump has accused Democratic leaders in the House of declaring “open war on American democracy”, on the eve of a historic vote that is likely to make him only the third president in US history to be impeached.
Trump issued the incendiary accusation in an intemperately-worded letter sent to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, on Tuesday.
Judiciary committee approved two articles on party lines, setting up vote for full House next week
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There’s a workers’ strike at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the location of next week’s Democratic debate - which has prompted, at this point, six of the seven candidates who’ve qualified to participate, to threaten to boycott the event.
They say they’ll refuse to cross the picket line. Out of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar, who are the seven who’ve qualified for the debate, all but Klobuchar are saying this afternoon that they stand in solidarity with the workers and won’t cross their picket line. Warren was first to announce her decision.
.@UniteHere11 is fighting for better wages and benefits—and I stand with them. The DNC should find a solution that lives up to our party's commitment to fight for working people. I will not cross the union's picket line even if it means missing the debate.
I take the debate stage to stand up for workers’ rights, not to undermine them.
I stand in solidarity with the workers of @UNITEHERE11 at Loyola Marymount University and I will not cross their picket line.
Representative Ilhan Omar is out campaigning with Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire today, per her Twitter account. They’re doing a town hall together.
In New Hampshire today with the one and only @BernieSanders!
On a straight party-line vote, the House judiciary committee voted on Friday morning to move two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the House floor, in a crucial final stage before impeachment itself.
A full House vote on whether to impeach the president was expected to be taken as early as Wednesday. Trump would be the third president in American history to be impeached.
The Democratic chairman of the House judiciary committee, Jerry Nadler, has not ruled out including evidence from the Mueller report in articles of impeachment against Donald Trump that could be published as early as next week.
On Sunday, Nadler told CNN’s State of the Union evidence showed the president’s conduct in the Ukraine scandal was part of “a pattern”, indicating “that the president put himself above this country several times”.
The House judiciary committee released a report on the constitutional grounds for impeachment on Saturday. Shortly after that, Donald Trump once again insisted the whole thing was a “witch hunt” and “a total hoax”.
President’s allies expected to launch procedural objections during judiciary committee hearings
As round two of public impeachment hearings was set to begin on Wednesday, Republicans were expected to resort to procedural objections and high-temperature harangues in an effort to protect Donald Trump.
With the party-line 13-9 approval on Tuesday night by the House intelligence committee of a 300-page report by congressional Democrats describing how Trump abused the power of his office for personal and political gain, the impeachment inquiry has now moved into the hands of the judiciary committee, the last stop in the process before lawmakers would vote on impeaching Trump.
Republicans’ witness offered opposing view, saying that the impeachment process was being rushed
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Impeachment experts testified before the House judiciary committee on Wednesday that Donald Trump’s misconduct offered a textbook case of impeachable offenses as prescribed by the constitution and applied over the course of US history.
Pre-emptive strike offers blueprint for GOP senators to acquit president, claiming a plot by Democrats
Donald Trump’s actions towards Ukraine were “entirely prudent” and involved “no quid pro quo, bribery, extortion, or abuse of power”, according to a draft Republican report on last month’s impeachment inquiry hearings.
Designed as a pre-emptive strike on an imminent report from the Democratic majority, the GOP document underlines how evidence presented at the hearings failed to shatter Republicans’ united front.
The US president arrives this week from a split nation amid signs of a Democratic revival
Reality. We all used to know what it meant. The world as it is. Objective facts that provide the foundation for rational – not emotional – judgments and actions.
But the old definition of reality has taken a serious beating during the nearly three years Donald Trump, the reality-show president, has been in office. Partly because Trump himself seems to live in a reality separate from the one most of us inhabit. Partly because too many people still can’t accept the objective facts of his presidency.
Ohio introduces one of the most extreme bills to date for a procedure that does not exist in medical science
A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus – a procedure that does not exist in medical science – or face charges of “abortion murder”.
This is the second time practising obstetricians and gynecologists have tried to tell the Ohio legislators that the idea is currently medically impossible.
Danielle Stella, a pro-Trump Republican candidate for Congress, was banned from Twitter after her account published a violent comment about the Democrat she hopes to unseat next year, Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar.
Stella’s campaign Twitter account, @2020MNCongress, featured at least two posts involving the idea of Omar being hanged, according to the Washington Times, which broke the story of her suspension.
The US Navy has thrown out plans to review three officers under scrutiny following Donald Trump’s decision to intervene in a related case.
Trump issued a direct order to halt disciplinary measures against a Navy Seal accused of war crimes in Iraq. On Sunday, defense secretary Mark Esper fired the navy secretary Richard Spencer after Spencer resisted pressure to intervene in the case of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher.
As part of a sting operation, federal agents enticed foreign-born students, mostly from India, to a Detroit school that marketed graduate programs in technology and computer science. The students paid about $12,000 in tuition and fees per year to attend the university, which was created in 2015.
The students had arrived legally in the U.S. on student visas, but since the University of Farmington was later revealed to be a creation of federal agents, they lost their immigration status after it was shut down in January. The school was located on Northwestern Highway near 13 Mile Road in Farmington Hills and staffed with undercover agents posing as university officials...
Attorneys for the students arrested said they were unfairly trapped by the U.S. government since the Department of Homeland Security had said on its website that the university was legitimate. An accreditation agency that was working with the U.S. on its sting operation also listed the university as legitimate...
No one has filed a lawsuit or claim against the U.S. government for collecting the money or for allegedly entrapping the students.
Attorneys for ICE and the Department of Justice maintain that the students should have known it was not a legitimate university because it did not have classes in a physical location. Some CPT programs have classes combined with work programs at companies.
When the FiveThirtyEight polling average on impeachment dipped by a few points last week, Trump’s allies rushed to claim that the slight decline was evidence of the American public turning against the inquiry.
But additional polls appear to have debunked that claim. It seems the recent damning testimony from current and former Trump officials like Gordon Sondland and Fiona Hill has not moved the needle much, with around half of Americans supporting the impeachment of the president.
Finally getting a few more impeachment polls and the notion that the numbers are moving against Democrats isn't looking so hot. +4 spread on supporting impeachment/removal, which is similar to the peak in October.https://t.co/Tj71WyGT4xpic.twitter.com/S7iUHaRdlX
Secretary of state Mike Pompeo has announced he will deliver remarks to the media at 11 a.m. ET. It’s unclear whether Pompeo will also take questions from reporters, who would inevitably ask about the cabinet member’s role in the Ukraine controversy.
A federal judge has ruled that former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify before the House Judiciary Committee, a decision that could have major implications for the House’s impeachment probe.
BREAKING: A federal judge on Monday ordered Don McGahn must testify to Congress about his time as the Trump WH's top lawyer, a ruling that will add pressure on other Trump officials tied to the impeachment probe. Decision here: https://t.co/6FeuuCrO5gpic.twitter.com/sQ0PubTxqW
MONEY QUOTE: Jackson indicates that any "current or former" senior WH aide subpoenaed by a House committee must at least appear for testimony -- even if they claim privilege while testifying. pic.twitter.com/7DEYdItZLG
In the response to a freedom of information lawsuit by the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism nonprofit, a federal judge has ordered the release of hundreds of pages of communications between Defense Department officials and others over stalled American aid to Ukraine.
Judge orders release of documents of communications between the Pentagon’s comptroller, DOD and White House OMB over the delay in stalled Ukraine aid. Must turn over 106 pages to Center for Public Integrity by Dec. 12. Another 100 by Dec. 20 in FOIA suit https://t.co/HuVEZOj3OG
Trump’s ex-press secretary says: ‘I was attacked for everything’
Sanders admitted Comey statement was ‘founded on nothing’
Sarah Sanders, the former White House press secretary who admitted to Robert Mueller that she lied to reporters, told the New York Times: “I don’t like being called a liar.”
Congressional Republicans dug deep in defense of Donald Trump over the weekend, frustrating Democratic hopes that the impeachment inquiry would build bipartisan support following weeks of testimony laying out how Trump attempted to extract a political “favor” from Ukraine in exchange for official acts.
House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff blasted former national security adviser John Bolton on Sunday, for failing to appear for testimony in the impeachment inquiry while teasing a forthcoming memoir.
Joe Biden had harsh words for his former Senate colleague Lindsey Graham, who has emerged as one of the president’s most prominenet defenders against the House impeachment inquiry.
“Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he’s going to regret his whole life,” Biden in a CNN interview. “I say Lindsey, I just -- I’m just embarrassed by what you’re doing, for you. I mean, my Lord.”
Biden tells @donlemon he's "embarrassed by" Graham's actions after senator asks Pompeo to turn over docs related to Hunter and Ukraine
"Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he’s going to regret his whole life," Biden says, adding Trump is "holding power" over him pic.twitter.com/sjNjQV7Ogp
John Hendrickson, who wrote the incredible Atlantic article on Joe Biden’s history with stuttering, said in an MSNBC interview that he has received dozens of emails thanking him for exploring the topic.
Hendrickson, who also stutters, said it was his “nightmare” to be doing a television interview and acknowledged he admired Biden for for participating in presidential debates despite his history of stuttering. “I admire his courage,” Hendrickson said.
.@JohnGHendy thought this conversation would be his nightmare. He explained to me why his new piece in @TheAtlantic about how Joe Biden is handling the challenge of stuttering is so personal to him. Watch this: pic.twitter.com/lNlqpovnJI
Maybe you’ve heard Biden talk about his boyhood stutter. A non-stutterer might not notice when he appears to get caught on words as an adult, because he usually maneuvers out of those moments quickly and expertly. But on other occasions, like [the July debate] in Detroit, Biden’s lingering stutter is hard to miss. He stutters—if slightly—on several sounds as we sit across from each other in his office. Before addressing the debate specifically, I mention what I’ve just heard. ‘I want to ask you, as, you know, a … stutterer to, uh, to a … stutterer. When you were … talking a couple minutes ago, it, it seemed to … my ear, my eye … did you have … trouble on s? Or on … m?’
Biden looks down. He pivots to the distant past, telling me that the letter s was hard when he was a kid. ‘But, you know, I haven’t stuttered in so long that it’s hhhhard for me to remember the specific—’ He pauses. ‘What I do remember is the feeling.’
A former White House official has criticised politicians for advancing discredited conspiracy theories about Ukraine during impeachment hearings.
'I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimise an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine – not Russia – attacked us in 2016,' said Fiona Hill in her opening statement.
Republicans have used the hearings to push the idea that Donald Trump was rightly suspicious of Ukraine because of allegations it attempted to meddle in the 2016 election – a widely debunked claim pushed by some of Trump's closest advisers including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.