President Trump is getting hit with a relentless, daily deluge of leaks — and revelations — from former aides, current officials and Democrats.
Why it matters: This has thrown Trump into a constant state of defensiveness — and turned a growing number of Republicans into skeptics and unwilling full-throated defenders.
- Approval of the impeachment inquiry reached a new high, 55%, in a Quinnipiac Poll out this morning, with 48% favoring removal from office.
As Democrats’ impeachment inquiry hit the one-month mark yesterday, Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, provided some of the most explosive testimony yet about Trump tying aid to a probe of the Biden family:
- Taylor, told House investigators that Trump demanded that “everything” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted hinged on making a public vow to investigate Democrats.
- Taylor testified that he discovered an “irregular” administration back channel led by Rudy Giuliani, and other “ultimately alarming circumstances,” per AP.
Lawmakers who emerged after nearly 10 hours of the private deposition were stunned at Taylor’s account, which some Democrats said established a “direct line” to the quid pro quo at the center of the impeachment probe, AP reports.
- Taylor’s account reached to the highest levels of the administration, drawing in Vice President Pence and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and sliced at the core of the Republican defense of the administration and the president’s insistence of no wrongdoing.
- Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) told the N.Y. Times: “It’s like if you had a big, 1,000-piece puzzle on a table. This fills in a lot of pieces of the puzzle.”
Another big dump on Trump will come Nov. 19, with the publication of “A Warning,” a book by the anonymous senior Trump administration official who penned a mysterious and damaging N.Y. Times op-ed last year.
- The author is represented by Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer of Javelin.
- Latimer told the WashPost’s Phil Rucker that the author didn’t take an advance, “and intends to donate some of the royalties to nonprofit organizations that focus on government accountability and supporting truth-tellers, … including the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Last evening, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement: “President Trump has done nothing wrong — this is a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats.”
- “There was no quid pro quo. Today was just more triple hearsay.”
Go deeper … U.S. envoy: Trump tied Ukraine aid to Biden, DNC investigations
Source: https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-impeachment-inquiry-leaks-1adcb222-28cf-4c5d-8918-4ed469db634a.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Mike Allen
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