Holmes' Testimony

[Massena]

This is absolutely hilarious. Trump, who is a proven liar on a variety of subject, now accuses a witness who was under oath of lying. And Holmes was backed up in his testimony by Sondland.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...cid=spartandhp

President Trump on Friday lashed out at the impeachment process and said a key witness — who swore under oath to be truthful — made up his testimony.

In a 53-minute phone interview with “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Trump referred to the account from David Holmes, a political counselor to the American ambassadors in Ukraine, who told impeachment investigators on Thursday that he had overheard Mr. Trump on a phone call with the American ambassador to the European Union ask about investigations into his political rivals.

“I guarantee you that never took place,” Mr. Trump said.

[Massena]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...cid=spartandhp

President Donald Trump presented little in the way of defense in

the opening phase of his impeachment

.

He refused to give Congress documents. He ordered subordinates to defy subpoenas. And he issued blanket proclamations of his innocence, over Twitter and in exchanges with reporters, without testifying under oath on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, as Democrats moved one step closer to a House floor vote on impeachment that they expect to hold before Christmas, a string of current and former administration officials collectively described for the House Intelligence Committee over the last two weeks how the president directed a concerted effort to aid his own re-election efforts at the expense of U.S. national security interests.

Specifically, they said he deployed several Cabinet officials, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on a mission to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to announce probes of former Vice President Joe Biden and a discredited theory that his own country framed Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, withholding $391 million in taxpayer dollars and a White House meeting to aid that effort.

"The question for impeachment is abuse of power," said Kim Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law who worked on Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Bill Clinton. "There is no Trump narrative laying out a legitimate public policy rationale for how the president, through Giuliani, treated Ukraine — by refusing a meeting and withholding aid needed to fight Russia — other than entrenching his own power."