TPM’s investigative reporters, Tierney Sneed and Josh Kovensky, reflected on what we learned during an intensive week of impeachment hearings and took your questions on what’s next. Watch here.
JoinTPM Reader SS has a good question …
JoinThis is a question I really haven’t seen addressed which given how obvious it is I’m really surprised that no one has addressed it. We know from Cohen that Trump makes a point of never getting himself directly involved in situations that could be illegal or unethical enough to cause himself problems. Instead, he prefers to use intermediaries, and even then he often uses opaque enough language to give himself lots of wiggle room to avoid taking direct responsibility for what happened.
Happy Friday, November 22. Whew. After a packed week of impeachment inquiry hearings — not to mention a Democratic debate — there’s a lot to mull over. Here’s what we’re watching.
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I wanted to share with you a few thoughts about the impeachment hearings which have just concluded.
1. I have grave misgivings about concluding this inquiry without receiving testimony from Mick Mulvaney, Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Lev Parnas and a number of others. This isn’t to say that I don’t understand the argument for not doing so. It is a strong logic. Doing so could lead to months of slow-rolling before a judiciary at best disinclined to get between the President and Congress and at worst reflexively friendly to President Trump. It’s also true that the evidence of the core wrongdoing is already overwhelming. By any reasonable standard we know more than enough to merit removal from office. But the layers of wrongdoing beneath that surface layer are, I suspect, profound. It’s not an easy question. But ending the factual inquiry here worries me greatly.
JoinFormer Trump NSC aide is about to detonate all of Devin Nunes’ bogus conspiracy theories … to his face, no less. Watch here and follow here.
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There’s been a lot of talk today about Gordon Sondland underbusing the President or the Vice President or the Secretary of State. Only that’s not entirely right. Close but not quite. You’ll notice this in his insistence that he had no recollection of telling Kyiv Embassy official David Holmes that all Trump cared about was “Biden.” Perhaps Holmes misremembered it. But I doubt it. When it came to key conversations with the President his memory seemed to fray, though he generally wouldn’t dispute the recollections of others.
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