Republicans are conducting the witch hunt

President Trump is chastising Republicans for not sufficiently having his back as he tries to weather an impeachment inquiry from Democrats.

"Republicans have to get tougher and fight," Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Monday. "We have some that are great fighters, but they have to get tougher and fight because the Democrats are trying to hurt the Republican Party for the election."

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In an interview Sunday on Axios on HBO, [Mitt] Romney said that other senators do have concerns about Trump and his conduct regarding Ukraine, including asking President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Trump's potential 2020 rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. However, they're unwilling to come forward and criticize Trump because they fear the political repercussions.

  NPR

So, what do they do? They play into Trump's worst tendencies. They treat Trump as though Congress is subservient to the executive, and not a check and balance on his authoritarian bid. They stage a security breaching stunt to disrupt impeachment inquiry proceedings. And in those hearings, they press his unhinged agenda.

Republican lawmakers have used the congressional impeachment inquiry to gather information on a CIA employee who filed a whistleblower complaint, press witnesses on their loyalty to President Trump and advance conspiratorial claims that Ukraine was involved in the 2016 election, according to current and former officials involved in the proceedings.

GOP members and staffers have repeatedly raised the name of a person suspected of filing the whistleblower complaint that exposed Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to conduct investigations into his political adversaries, officials said.

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[T]he questions have been interpreted as an attempt “to unmask the whistleblower,” whose identity is shielded under federal law, said several officials with direct knowledge of the depositions.

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Trump has attacked the whistleblower at least 40 times on his Twitter account since the Ukraine scandal broke, including on Friday, when he asked, “Where is the whistleblower and why did he or she write such a fictitious and incorrect account of my phone call with the Ukrainian president?”

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The GOP line of questioning provides the most direct insight to date into the strategy of the president’s defenders in closed-door hearings that have produced powerful testimony about the administration’s attempt to coerce Ukraine into conducting investigations that Trump hoped would yield damaging information on Democrats.

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The accounts, based on interviews with 10 people involved in the depositions, also underscore the extent to which senior Republicans are directly involved in the impeachment inquiry even as party leaders claim they are being excluded from it, depicting it as a secretive — and therefore suspect — attack on the president.

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Among those chiefly involved are Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), one of Trump’s most fervent defenders and the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee.

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A separate senior GOP aide argued that exploring the political leanings of the whistleblower and others testifying before impeachment investigators is a legitimate line of questioning, as their political preferences could taint testimony and findings.

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The first Republican official also argued that Democrats have been asking leading questions and that GOP members feel it is important to highlight facts they believe will be exculpatory for Trump — particularly regarding suggestions that Trump used U.S. aid to Ukraine as an enticement to obtain a political favor.

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“There’s been zero interest [among the GOP] in actually getting to the conduct of the president,” a Democratic lawmaker said. “It’s not the subject of their questioning at all.”

  WaPo

Their aim is to discredit witnesses. Witnesses who will get a public drubbing by Senate Republicans when the impeachment moves into the trial stage.

Nunes has used the depositions to try to link those appearing as part of the impeachment inquiry to other individuals who figured prominently in GOP efforts to discredit previous investigations of Trump’s ties with Russia in 2016, officials said.

Witnesses including former top White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill have been asked whether they had any interactions with Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled a dossier of allegations about Trump’s Russia ties, work that was initially funded by Republicans but was later underwritten by Democrats.

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Hill denied having such connections, according to officials familiar with her testimony.

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Republicans have also asked witnesses whether they had contact with Bruce Ohr, a former Justice Department official whose wife was affiliated with Fusion GPS, the investigative firm that hired Steele.

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A second possible whistleblower has also come forward to bolster the initial complaint. That person’s name has also been raised in depositions on Capitol Hill, officials said.

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Two officials said the committee probably will have to remove [from eventually released transcripts of testimony] “personally identifiable information” about individuals named by members of Congress and witnesses in those sessions to protect those not appearing before the committee from retaliation or exposure.

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One former official said that Republicans “didn’t press much beyond” preliminary questions about contacts between witnesses and the suspected whistleblowers. A second official said, however, that “it’s more nefarious than that,” and that the Republican inquiries are persistent and seen as a “bid to out” those individuals.

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In her Oct. 14 testimony, Hill was also asked about the activities and loyalties of a longer list of current or former employees of the National Security Council, including former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

Republicans seemed to be trying to “tie him” to suspected efforts to undermine Trump by former Obama administration officials who remained in their White House assignments during Trump’s early months in office, officials said.

The questions appeared driven at least in part by Derek Harvey, a senior adviser to Nunes who worked on the National Security Council early in the Trump presidency before being removed by McMaster amid allegations that Harvey was compiling lists of suspected disloyal colleagues.

Sounds like the Republicans are taking their cues from the Joe McCarthy hearings of the 50s, which WAS a witch hunt.

Yovanovitch was asked point-blank whether she had ever spoken disparagingly about Trump while serving in Kyiv or had sought to undermine his policies — a veiled charge that she vehemently denied, officials said.

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Republicans have also spent substantial time in depositions seeking to advance Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine — and not Russia — interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

During several depositions, Republicans touted a Politico article from 2017 that indicated that Ukrainian officials worked with the Clinton campaign to expose the activities of Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chairman for several months in mid-2016.

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Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, was asked repeatedly during his testimony on Thursday about material in that Politico article.

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Republicans appear to be trying to link their concerns about the Steele dossier to Ukraine, a country Trump has said, without evidence, interfered in the election. One Democratic official present for witness testimony said Republicans were asking witnesses things like, “Are you aware that part of the evidence in the Steele Dossier originated in Ukraine?”

“The witnesses are like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ which makes sense, because it’s totally made up,” an official said.

Republicans have also asked witnesses to affirm that the president has publicly stated there was no quid pro quo, officials said, and that it is appropriate for the U.S. government to withhold aid from foreign governments deemed to be corrupt.

Republicans have also used their time to go after Biden, including citing Trump’s unsubstantiated allegation that Biden used his position as vice president to pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who had been investigating the energy company that had employed Biden’s son.

Republicans must be defeated in 2020, along with Trump.

UPDATE: