Bellelettres
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The three Democrats who will get Trump
These 3 Democrats Will Finally Have the Power to Investigate the White House. How Far Will They Go?
By Jason Zengerle
Dec. 17, 2018
At noon on Jan. 3, the 435 members of the House of Representatives of the 116th Congress will convene for the first time in the Capitol. The chaplain will offer a prayer, the clerk will lead the chamber in the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll-call vote will be held to elect Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House. Then the new speaker will grasp the gavel and swear in the representatives-elect — their right hands raised, some of them clutching Bibles or Torahs or Qurans in their left. There will be speeches and family photos and, among the Democrats, who will now be in the majority, much celebration. But before any of that happens,
Representative Elijah Cummings will have sent out letters.
One letter will have been jointly addressed to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, demanding the age, gender, country of origin and current location of every child who was separated from his or her parents under the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Another will have gone to Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, asking for the identities of any senior White House officials who have used nongovernment email accounts to conduct official business.
The White House chief of staff will have received a letter, also addressed to the heads of multiple federal agencies, requesting information and documents about the use of government-owned aircraft for personal travel and private aircraft for official travel. Outside the government, the Trump Organization will have received one asking for a complete accounting of all the payments it has received from foreign governments or foreign-government-owned entities since Donald Trump’s election. Each letter will have been written on stationery bearing the seal of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and signed with Cummings’s looping signature over the word: “Chairman-designate.”
One of the top priorities of Adam Schiff, the incoming Intelligence Committee chairman, will be protecting — and assisting — Mueller’s investigation, and one of his first acts in the new Congress will be trying fine out whom Donald Trump Jr. spoke to on his phone in between calls setting up the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton? Trump Jr. claims he can’t remember, and the call appears as a blocked number on his phone records.
Schiff is also interested in examining Trump’s business dealings — including whether Russians laundered money through the Trump Organization — from a counterintelligence perspective. “What would be most compromising to our nation and our national security is if a hostile foreign power has leverage over the president of the United States,” Schiff told me. Or as the senior Democratic Intelligence Committee official says: “Whenever Putin is alone in a room with Trump with just the two of them and their translators, like they were in Helsinki, is Putin reminding him that he has an Excel spreadsheet of how many rubles are parked in Trump Tower?”
Jerry Nadler, incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is endowed with the authority to start impeachment proceedings against a president, as committee Republicans did against Bill Clinton in 1998, and as committee Democrats did against Nixon in 1973. In the days after the election, Nadler began firing off “preservation letters” to the White House, the Justice Department and other agencies warning them that “concealing, removing or destroying” any documents related to Jeff Sessions’s firing or Mueller’s investigation “may constitute a crime.” In January, the committee’s first order of business, Nadler said, will be to call Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general, to testify; Whitaker was tapped by Trump to replace Sessions and will hold the job until the official nominee for attorney general, William Barr, is confirmed by the Senate. When Whitaker comes before the committee, Nadler said, he will ask him: “Have you told Mueller not to follow some line of inquiry? Have you told him not to indict somebody? Have you communicated with the White House about these matters in any way or with the president’s lawyers in any way? What have you told them?”
https://tinyurl.com/ybll8u33
This is a 6,000-word story with the history of these committees and what they have done under previous administrations. Terrific history lesson.
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12/17/2018, 1:06 pm
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Tombstone1881
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Location: Arizona Territory
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Re: The three Democrats who will get Trump
Congress needs to step up an do it's job, and now maybe it will. When Trump got elected, and I got over my initial shock that night, I figured that we still might be alright as Congress would keep Trump in check. Little did I realize that the entire GOP would be completely sycophantic to the total Trump agenda, throwing out generations of established norms of the Republican party, beginning with Law and Order.
But there is one thing that today's GOP have taught us about their "principles". When you see a conservative crying about something, you now know that they are nothing but Crocodile Tears, as they wouldn't be crying about it if the shoe were on the other foot.
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why is it that not one of the Republican officeholders objecting to Biden's victory have objected to their own wins on the same day on the same ballots using the same election systems??!
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12/18/2018, 1:05 pm
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Bellelettres
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Re: The three Democrats who will get Trump
Exactly, TS.
What Trump has done was to strip the Republican Party naked. No more "compassionate conservative" mask. No more coverup anywhere.
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12/18/2018, 1:21 pm
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