Impeachment witness case thrown out

Judge Richard J. Leon, of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that the lawsuit by the former presidential aide, Charles M. Kupperman, was moot because House Democrats had subsequently dropped the attempt to subpoena him.

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[Kupperman] had asked a court to clarify whether he should obey a subpoena from Congress to testify in the impeachment inquiry, or defy it on the White House’s instructions.

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The lawsuit by Mr. Kupperman, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump, had been closely watched because it was seen as a harbinger for whether his former boss, John R. Bolton, might testify about what he knows about Mr. Trump’s use of his official powers to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations that could benefit him politically.

Mr. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, has let it be known that he has additional relevant information about the Ukraine affair than other witnesses who defied the White House and testified before the House.

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Unlike the Miers and McGahn lawsuits, both of which were brought by the House in an effort to get a judge to order the former executive branch officials to comply with subpoenas, Mr. Kupperman did not wait for Congress to sue him. Instead, he filed a lawsuit against both the House and the White House, asking Judge Leon to tell him which side was right.

But House Democrats decided not to pursue litigation against recalcitrant witnesses in the Ukraine inquiry, seeing the slow pace of the judicial process — including inevitable appeals up to the Supreme Court — as guaranteeing that Mr. Trump could run out the clock before the 2020 election, even though he is accused of trying to rig it by soliciting foreign interference.

[...]

Bolton is represented by the same lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, as Mr. Kupperman, and he also made clear that he would not testify unless a court ordered him to comply with a subpoena — suggesting that he would echo Mr. Kupperman and file a lawsuit seeking judicial resolution of the dispute.

The White House, in the administrations of both parties, has argued that top presidential aides are absolutely immune from being forced to testify about their work, meaning they do not even have to show up in response to a congressional subpoena.

Federal District Court judges have twice rejected that constitutional theory — once in a 2008 case involving Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel to President George W. Bush, and once this year in a case involving Donald F. McGahn II, a former White House counsel to Mr. Trump.

[...]

The Justice Department has appealed to a federal appeals court the ruling that Mr. McGahn must testify.

  NYT

Next up in the Congressional impeachment hearings

A key witness in the House’s impeachment investigation filed a lawsuit in federal court Friday asking a judge to rule on whether he can testify to congressional investigators after President Trump invoked “constitutional immunity."

Charles Kupperman, who served as President Trump’s deputy national security adviser, was subpoenaed by House Democrats on Monday to testify in their investigation into the president’s dealings with Ukraine. However, the White House declared Friday that Trump had invoked “constitutional immunity” to bar Kupperman from appearing on Capitol Hill.

  The Hill

Reason number whatever for why you pack the courts.

Constitutional immunity extends beyond the powers of executive privilege, which the White House has used to block testimony from several other current and former officials. While executive privilege frees a person from being forced to divulge any dealings with the White House to investigators, constitutional immunity means individuals cannot be forced to testify before Congress at all, and do not even have to appear at hearings.

“The president … has asserted that plaintiff, as a close personal adviser to the president, is immune from congressional process, and has instructed plaintiff not to appear and testify in response to the House’s subpoena,” the lawsuit reads.

Sources told CNN that Tim Morrison [Trump’s top Russia and Europe adviser on the National Security Council] will testify before Congress that he did not see anything wrong with what the administration did but noted that there will be “nuance” to his testimony.

Morrison is the first current White House official scheduled to testify as part of Democrats' impeachment inquiry into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. An attorney for Morrison said he intends to testify if he is subpoenaed, even if the White House seeks to block him.

  The Hill

Nuance? How about simple truth and facts? If he doesn't see anything wrong with it, so be it, but he still needs to tell the truth.

She declined to provide a preview of what Morrison plans on telling investigators, though he is set to support testimony from William Taylor, who serves as the chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, according to CNN. Taylor laid out in detailed testimony this week that Trump decided to withhold roughly $400 million in financial aid until he secured a commitment from Ukraine that they would investigate Biden, one of his top political rivals.

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Morrison was mentioned 15 times in Taylor’s opening statement, including when he testified that Morrison described a “sinking feeling” from Trump saying there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine while he pushed Zelensky to investigate Biden.

[...]

Morrison is known to have been on the July phone call.

I'm waiting for Pence's advisor Keith Kellogg, who was on the call, to testify what he heard and what he told Pence.

Officials close to Pence contend that he traveled to Warsaw for a meeting with Zelensky on Sept. 1 probably without having read — or at least fully registered — the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with the leader of Ukraine.

  WaPo

He may not have read it, but his advisor most assuredly explained it to him.

White House officials said that Pence probably would have received the detailed notes of the president’s call in his briefing book on July 26. The five-page document also should have been part of the briefing materials he took with him to Warsaw to prepare for the meeting, according to the officials, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Of course.

But officials said Pence and his staff weren’t aware that the call had provoked alarm inside the White House — even though his national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, had been monitoring it.

Pure bullshit.

Kellogg, Pence’s top national security adviser, listened in on the call from the Situation Room, which was the standard practice, but did not see it as unusual or flag any concerns about it to the vice president, officials said.

Which, if true, could mean that Pence was in on the scheme all along.

White House lawyers, alarmed by the call, quickly moved detailed notes of it from a widely shared internal computer network to one reserved for “codeword-level” records about CIA covert action programs and other highly classified material.

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[Trump] sent Pence, with instructions to “take the measure” of the Ukrainian leader and inform him that the administration wasn’t going to release the aid until it had assurances that Zelensky was committed to fighting corruption, U.S. officials said.

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A Pence aide disputed the notion that the vice president was poorly prepared for his meeting with Zelensky, and pointed to the eventual outcome — that the Trump administration ultimately released the aid — as a sign of a productive meeting.

In other words, Pence took the message to Zelensky, and Zelensky agreed to the terms.

Once the meeting began, Pence faulted the E.U. for not providing more security aid to Ukraine, just as Trump did on the July 25 call, and also reiterated the administration’s position that Zelensky needed to do more to fight corruption.

But he wasn't briefed on that call? B.S.

When Zelensky asked about the aid, Pence replied that the administration was “still looking at it,” a U.S. official said.

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Pence conveyed the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine was not going to be released amid concerns about the country’s lagging efforts to combat corruption. He also emphasized Trump’s frustration that he thought the European Union was not doing a sufficient job in helping to provide aid. A participant in the meeting said Zelensky was “crestfallen” by the news, though a second participant described the meeting as “cordial” and Zelensky as understanding of U.S. concerns.

[...]

The White House Counsel’s Office did not alert the vice president’s office to the existence of the whistleblower complaint until the day before it became public, the aide added.

Now that I can believe.

A panic in the White House

The nature and timing of the previously undisclosed discussions with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg indicate that officials were delivering warnings through official White House channels earlier than previously understood — including before the call that precipitated a whistleblower complaint and the impeachment inquiry of the president.

At the time, the officials were unnerved by the removal in May of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, by subsequent efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to promote Ukraine-related conspiracies, as well as by signals in meetings at the White House that Trump wanted the new government in Kiev to deliver material that might be politically damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

  WaPo

But nobody said anything outside the fortress.

Those concerns soared in the call’s aftermath, officials said. Within minutes, senior officials including national security adviser John Bolton were being pinged by subordinates about problems with what the president had said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Bolton and others scrambled to obtain a rough transcript that was already being “locked down” on a highly classified computer network.

May be a factor in why Bolton got canned.

It is unclear whether some or all of the officials who complained to Eisenberg are also the ones who later spoke to the whistleblower.

The accounts are sharply at odds with Trump’s depiction of the call as a “perfect” exchange in which he “did nothing wrong.”

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But new details about the sequence inside the White House suggest that concerns about the call and events leading up to it were profound even among Trump’s top advisers, including Bolton and then-acting deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman. Bolton and Kupperman did not respond to requests for comment.

Bolton is saving it for his book. (Yes, he's writing a book.)

Officials said that within hours of the 9 a.m. conversation, a rough transcript compiled by aides had been moved from a widely shared White House computer network to one normally reserved for highly classified intelligence operations. According to the whistleblower’s complaint, White House lawyers “directed” officials to move the transcript to the classified system. At the same time, officials were seeking ways to report what they had witnessed, an undertaking complicated by the lack of a White House equivalent to the inspector general positions found at other agencies.

As a result, one official who had listened on the call went “immediately” to Eisenberg. By the end of the next day, at least two others who had either heard the call or seen the rough transcript had also done so.

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It is not clear whether Eisenberg took any action either after the warnings he received earlier in July or after the Trump-Zelensky conversation. One official said Eisenberg vowed he would “follow up,” [...]

Now go on about your business.

[...] a message interpreted to mean that he intended to investigate the matter and perhaps relay the dismay up the ranks to White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

If that occurred, it would help explain how the White House was already aware of concerns about the July 25 call when contacted by the CIA general counsel weeks before a whistleblower complaint submitted by an agency employee had become public.

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A former Justice Department official, Eisenberg has served as the top legal adviser to the National Security Council since the start of the administration.

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Eisenberg probably would also have played a leading role in White House efforts to prevent the nation’s intelligence director from turning over a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s Ukraine call to lawmakers.

Officials who have worked with Eisenberg described him as conscientious and cautious, but said he has an expansive view of executive-branch authority. One former Justice Department colleague said he is an “honest broker” but has a “disdain” for Congress.

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The absence of any clear action by Eisenberg or others may have contributed to decisions by White House insiders to relay their concerns to a CIA employee who assembled the information they supplied into a whistleblower complaint that he submitted Aug. 12 to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general.

It no doubt contributed. Perhaps was the deciding cause.

Those involved in sounding alarms “were not a swamp, not a deep state,” said a former senior official. Rather, they were White House officials “who got concerned about this because this is not the way they want to see the government run.”

They've been there for three years while it's been run this way.

Officials traced the origins of their initial concerns about Trump and Ukraine to the abrupt and unexplained removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, after she became the target of a right-wing smear campaign that accused her — with no apparent evidence — of undermining Trump and his policies.

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In his frequent meetings and conversations with Giuliani, Trump also became increasingly focused on Kiev-centered conspiracies, including a bizarre claim that the Democratic National Committee had not actually been hacked by Russian intelligence in 2016, and that the evidence — the infected machines — had been smuggled to Ukraine and kept there in hiding.

Concerns about the administration’s interactions with Ukraine ticked up further when the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, asserted that he had been put in charge of relations with Kiev by the president. Sondland, who had operated a hotel company, got the Brussels-based ambassadorship after donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

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[During a meeting at the White House in early July with Bolton, then-U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker and a pair of advisers to Ukraine’s new president], amid a broader discussion in which White House officials were encouraging Ukraine to continue its work to eliminate corruption in the country’s energy sector, Sondland blurted out that there were also “investigations that were dropped that need to be started up again,” according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.

Senior officials understood Sondland’s statement to be a reference to Burisma and Biden. “Bolton went ballistic” after the meeting, the official said. In the ensuing days, senior NSC officials including Bolton and Kupperman huddled over their concerns about Ukraine.

Those worries were also shared with Bill Taylor, who had been dispatched to Ukraine to serve as acting ambassador after Yovanovitch’s removal. Taylor pressed Sondland in a series of text messages before and after Trump’s call.

Which we have already seen.

Taylor has been asked to testify but not yet scheduled. They should dispense with the asking and start sending out subpoenas. Otherwise they're eating up precious time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The best people

US President Donald Trump appointed Charles M Kupperman last week to assist National Security Advisor John Bolton.

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Kupperman served on the board of directors for the Center for Security Policy (CSP) between 2001 and 2010, according to tax records.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an Alabama-based hate monitor, designates the CSP as an anti-Muslim hate group, pointing to the group's promotion of conspiracy theories claiming that Muslims have infiltrated the US government and seek to establish Islamic law in the country.

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"Once again this is an example of Trump elevating foxes into the hen house, where Islamophobes are well placed to direct our nation's national security priorities," Robert McCaw, director of CAIR's government affairs department, told Al Jazeera.

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Kupperman has held senior positions in defence contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and served in the administration of former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

  alJazeera

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.