The impeachment so far verifies intelligence differences, as prescribed by the Budapest conference and the Trump -Orban meetings drawing down the line, of international barriers…
Basically the bottom line is intelligence variance surrounding the same type of agreements that were pre-scribes by the Malta Agreements, drawing lines of influence between the east and west.
That an agreement like that would utilize mob-collaboration, is no different from the Mafia’s participation in WW2 .
What else is new?
This was a time when Democratic ‘principles’ meant something else then oligarchian collusion. It was affordable.
2 nd hearing:
POLITICO
Ad
Magazine
OPINION | LAW AND ORDER
Trump Is Writing His Own Articles of Impeachment
Disparaging a witness in the middle of her testimony, the president made the Democrats’ job a lot easier.
By RENATO MARIOTTI
11/15/2019 11:28 PM EST
The second public impeachment hearing should have made less of an impact than the blockbuster first hearing. After all, the witness—former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch—had little testimony to offer about the aid-for-dirt scheme at the core of the inquiry.
President Trump changed that with a single tweet.
Trump often blasts his perceived enemies on Twitter, and the result is usually little more than handwringing on cable news. Thursday’s blast was altogether different and may end up changing the actual charges the House ultimately files against Trump.
The timing could not have been more dramatic, coming about an hour into the hearing and only moments after Yovanovitch testified about how mortified she felt reading what Trump had said about her to the Ukrainian president in July. And then he did it again: “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” he wrote. Chairman Adam Schiff deftly turned the disparaging tweet against Trump by reading it to a stunned Yovanovitch.
Her response to the tweet—“It’s very intimidating”—spoke volumes and drowned out any other narrative that could have come out of her testimony.
Trump has been a master at distraction, and today he tried to do so by releasing the transcript of his first call with newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, dutifully read the entirety of the call into the record.
But that move landed with a thud, given how irrelevant the transcript was. His second attempt to distract—the tweet—succeeded only in making Yovanovitch’s testimony far more weighty and relevant than it might have been otherwise.
It’s not hard to see why commentators rushed to call it witness tampering. After all, Yovanovitch called it “very intimidating” herself, and knowingly using intimidation with the intent to influence testimony is the very definition of witness tampering.
It doesn’t matter that Yovanovitch would not be intimidated by a mere tweet, given how formidable she appeared during her testimony. As Schiff pointed out, the fear of a Trump tweet could influence other witnesses, such as Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who is scheduled to appear next week. Indeed, the picture painted by testimony during the inquiry thus far is of Trump officials working under the specter that a Trump tweet could turn their world upside down.
That doesn’t mean a federal prosecutor would actually charge Trump with witness tampering if he was not in office. It would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump intended to intimidate witnesses. Trump’s state of mind is a difficult thing to pin down in any context. In fact, he later denied he was trying to intimidate her, insisting he was exercising his “free speech” right.
But it really doesn’t matter. Impeachment is a political process, and you can expect House Democrats to add another article of impeachment charging Trump with witness tampering, which was also part of the articles of impeachment against former president Richard Nixon.
More importantly, Trump handed the narrative to Democrats on a day when his supporters could have otherwise argued that Yovanovitch didn’t really provide testimony of truly impeachable acts by Trump.
For her own part, Yovanovitch provided something important to Democrats. Her testimony not only set the stage for the core story to be told by subsequent witnesses, but she provided an emotional heft and counterpoint to Trump that had power beyond the substance of her words.
Yovanovitch reminded me of a type of witness who often testifies at a criminal trial—a victim of wrongdoing who possesses a quiet strength while detailing how a wrongdoer has impacted her life.
One weakness of the Democrats’ otherwise strong case against Trump is that the victim of Trump’s scheme was Ukraine—or our system of government as a whole. There was no tangible American who was the target of Trump’s scheme other than former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, who are too politicized to be portrayed as victims by House Democrats.
Although Yovanovitch was not the intended victim of Trump’s scheme, she paid a price for his wrongdoing. Her strength and dignity in the face of poor treatment by Trump drew a contrast to him and created an emotional weight to the Democrats’ case that it did not have before.
Trump may very well escape removal from office, given that the Senate Republicans appear to be all but impervious to any evidence that might emerge from the hearings. But he is his own worst enemy. His ham-handed mistreatment of Yovanovitch and impulsive desire to belittle her during her testimony made it even more difficult for House Republicans to distract viewers from his indefensible conduct. If he keeps this up, he might well be the author of his own political end.
Privacy Policy
© 2019 POLITICO LLC
Weak ego?
Opinion, Analysis, Essays
HOT TAKE
Trump’s impeachment tantrums reveal a fragile ego obsessed with saving his legacy
Fear is dominating Trump’s decision-making right now. It’s a sense of panic, masquerading as strength.
Impeachment is Trump’s scarlet letter.Tom Brenner / Reuters
SHARE THIS -
Nov. 16, 2019, 4:30 AM EST
By Kurt Bardella, NBC News THINK contributor
As the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, gave public testimony during the House Intelligence Committee’s second public impeachment hearing Friday, President Donald J. Trump unleashed a bizarre tweet attack, claiming, “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him.”
Aside from the absurdity of blaming the ambassador for decades of turmoil in Somalia, Trump’s clear intent, as committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., noted, was to intimidate future witnesses and maybe even convince them not to testify.
While Trump may have deluded himself into believing that this kind of bullying projects strength, I think it reveals the exact opposite. Donald Trump is afraid. This is a man who has spent the entirety of his adult life plastering his name on skyscrapers and casinos; this is a man who is obsessed with his own legacy. And that’s why impeachment is the permanent stain that Trump deserves — and one he clearly fears.
While Trump may have deluded himself into believing that this kind of bullying projects strength, I think it reveals the exact opposite.
Axios reported recently that Trump has said privately impeachment is a “bad thing to have on your resume.” He doesn’t want impeachment to be the first thing written about him in the world’s history books.
Conventional wisdom suggests that there are enough votes in the Democrat-controlled House to successfully impeach Trump, while the Senate will vote against it. But when it comes to Trump and how he is wired, it may not matter if he is thrown out of office. The fact that he would go down in history as only the third president ever to be impeached would psychologically cripple him.
Think about how Trump’s self-obsession manifests itself. In August, in the wake of yet another mass shooting, Trump visited a hospital in El Paso, Texas, and proceeded to brag about the crowd size at an earlier campaign rally, saying, “the place was packed … that was some crowd and we had twice the number outside.” During a rally last summer in Minnesota, the supposedly populist president riffed on “the elite” declaring, “I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are, I’m richer than they are.” Even his infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment during the 2016 campaign was also a brag. Before going on to make what sure sounded like an endorsement of sexual assault, Trump noted “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Trump revels in his own celebrity, fame and wealth. But what we’re talking about right now is infamy on a historic scale. Impeachment is his scarlet letter, a public rebuke that will be very hard to dismiss or minimize (although we can be sure that he’ll try).
And the increasing public meltdowns we have seen from the president suggest the fear of impeachment is getting to him.
Related
OPINION
Trump rages about the impeachment process. But the GOP created those rules.
It wasn’t long ago that the president of the United States tweeted about the possibility of “a Civil War like fracture” if he was impeached. Trump has begun to recycle his Mueller mantra describing this as “The Greatest Witch Hunt in American history!” He tweeted a fake conspiracy theory about changes to a whistleblower report that never happened. He even called for the resignation of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, suggesting he “should be looked at for treason.”
Trump’s tantrums reveal a fragility that is dominating his decision-making. It’s panic, masquerading as strength. He’s not even trying to hide his self-pity, tweeting, “there has been no President in the history of our Country who has been treated so badly as I have.”
Trump’s unhinged tweets and press outbursts are a manifestation of what feels a lot like desperation. And the more desperate Trump becomes, the more outrageous his rhetoric will become and the more his paranoia will grow. He will continue to howl and bark in the hopes that he can both scare anyone willing to cooperate with impeachment and maintain his GOP-firewall of protection. But just remember, like any bully, the louder he yells, the more scared he is.
Kurt Bardella
Kurt Bardella is an NBC News THINK contributor and served as the spokesperson and senior advisor for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee from 2009-2013.
Live TV
A day that underscored the corruption swamping the Trump presidency
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 5:33 AM EST, Sat November 16, 2019
(CNN) A fateful convergence of events Friday reflected a culture of corruption and intimidation endemic to the circle of a President who vowed to drain the swamp but instead became its incarnation.
First, a US ambassador told how her reputation was shredded and she was hounded out of her job by President Donald Trump’s rogue associates after a faultless 30-year career advancing America’s interests.
“Ukrainians who prefer to play by the old corrupt rules sought to remove me,” former US envoy to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said at the House impeachment hearings. “What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them.”
Incredibly, her testimony was interrupted by a Trump attack tweet that visibly exacerbated her anguish over his bullying tactics, lent credibility to her testimony and could now be folded into articles of impeachment.
As she spoke, and less than a mile away across Washington’s mall, Roger Stone became the latest associate who will pay for his loyalty to the President.
Trump associate Roger Stone found guilty of lies that protected Trump
Trump associate Roger Stone found guilty of lies that protected Trump
The Nixon-era political trickster was found guilty of lying to Congress and witness tampering, apparently motivated by a desire to protect Trump from embarrassment over the Russia scandal.
“Truth matters. Truth still matters, OK?” prosecutor Michael Marando had told the jury on Wednesday. “In our institutions of self-governance, committee hearings, courts of law … truth still matters.”
All this came during a week in which the President made a new last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court to shield his tax returns from public scrutiny.
And on Friday evening, things took another turn for the worse for Trump.
Diplomatic aide David Holmes testified that he had heard Trump on a telephone call ask US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland whether the Ukrainians were going to open investigations he had asked for into former Vice President Joe Biden and a conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election.
Sondland told Trump on the call in July that Ukranian President Vlodymyr Zelensky was ready to do “anything you ask him to,” according to a transcript of an opening statement delivered by Holmes to a closed-door session of the impeachment investigation.
The revelation significantly raised the stakes for Sondland’s testimony in a televised hearing next week and suggests that Trump was intimately involved in his lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to pressure the Ukrainians.
Whether Americans ultimately come to believe that the President’s alleged misconduct merits the terrible sanction of removal or come to believe the Democratic impeachment attempt is narrowly political and unjustified, this was a clarifying day.
At a time of swirling misinformation, propagandistic pro-Trump news coverage and conspiracy theories, it showed that while facts may be under assault, they can ultimately still emerge in a way that will allow history to render a judgment even if the fractured political climate makes that it impossible in the moment.
Friday piled more testimony on the mountain of evidence suggesting that the US is in the grip of not just the most unorthodox, but the most corrupt presidency of the modern era.
The Stone and Yovanovitch dramas did not take place in isolation. They fit into a pattern of questionable behavior clouding Trump’s entire political career. The sheer weight of such evidence confounds his supporters’ claims that the real problem is that Democrats and the media are caught up in some kind of “Never Trump” mania that amounts to a coup.
This, after all, is a President who demanded misplaced personal loyalty from FBI chief James Comey, then fired him and said he did it because of the Russia investigation. Trump also repeatedly berated his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions for honoring an obligation to recuse himself from the Russia probe.
While special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, he said the President’s team expected to benefit from his election meddling.
And he pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction.
This is a President who tried to get the US government to cut him a check to host next year’s G7 summit before backing off because of the political outrage. As if to underscore conflicts of interests posed by his financial entanglements, Trump filed suit with the Supreme Court Friday to stop prosecutors pulling his tax returns, setting up a landmark separation of powers showdown.
For sure, there are legal questions about immunity and the extent to which individual in that job should expect financial privacy at play here.
But Trump’s move still raised the question about what he has to hide from the people for whom he holds a public trust.
The human toll of the Ukraine scandal
Yovanovitch’s only offense may have been that she got in the way of a plan by Giuliani, working at Trump’s direction, to get the Ukrainian government to investigate one of the President’s domestic political opponents – Biden.
It was notable that while Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee protested the process and highlighted that Yovanovitch was gone before Trump’s alleged scheme to get dirt on Biden came to fruition, they did little to counter her story of a back door diplomatic scheme led by Giuliani.
Democrats scheduled the former ambassador in their second televised impeachment hearing to suggest the human cost of the President’s Ukraine scheme.
She also helped them flesh out an argument that Giuliani, acting at the direction of the President, and with associates in Ukraine like now indicted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, had trampled over America’s foreign policy interests in pursuit of their own personal and political enrichment.
Yovanovitch also found herself the target of a fierce campaign by conservative pundits that including the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
Far from working to drain corruption as Yovanovitch was in Ukraine, she testified that Giuliani’s team was working with corrupt figures in Kiev and importing their methods to the US.
Like her colleagues, George Kent and Bill Taylor who testified Wednesday, she seemed like an envoy to a country she no longer understood – her own – where governance is beginning to share characteristics of corruption-laced nations where they served.
“How could our system fail like this?” Yovanovitch asked.
“How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government? Which country’s interests are served when the very corrupt behavior we have been criticizing is allowed to prevail?” Yovanovitch said.
Like other witnesses from the foreign service bureaucracy, Yovanovitch also warned that current turmoil will damage America’s reputation.
“Such conduct undermines the US, exposes our friends and widens the playing failed for autocrats like President Putin,” she said. “Our leadership depends on the power of our example.”
Trump’s tweet in which he accused Yovanovitch of making each country that she served in – for instance Somalia – worse, only lent credibility to her account of feeling intimidated by the commander-in-chief’s smears and threats.
Several Republicans decried Trump’s attack as counterproductive.
“It was idiotic to tweet today about her,” one Trump campaign source told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “She seems legitimately worried.”
The President’s intervention could be a sign that he understood the damage the ambassador’s testimony was doing. But he insisted later that he had every right to go after her.
“You know what? I have the right to speak. I have freedom of speech just as other people do, but they’ve taken away the Republicans rights,” the President said.
It’s unclear whether the tweets reach a standard of witness tampering that might stand up in court. Democrats suggested they could become part of eventual articles of the political process of impeachment in any case.
But the attack couldn’t have been a clearer sign of the intimidation that characterizes Trump orbit.
And the assault by the most powerful man in the world will surely be on the mind of witnesses called to testify in next week’s frenetic week of impeachment theater.
Trump rails at ‘double standard’
6 Trump associates have been convicted in Mueller-related investigations
Stone’s conviction stems directly from the Mueller investigation. He was accused of lying about his efforts to contact Wikileaks to get information that could helped Trump during his 2016 election campaign against Hillary Clinton.
Prosecutors argued that his crimes were partly motivated by a desire to save the President from political embarrassment.
Stone became the sixth Trump associate to be convicted – a list that includes former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the campaign’s ex-deputy chairman Rick Gates, short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos.
So far, the President has largely avoid such legal consequences. But each of these men now has cause to regret their decision to jump aboard the Trump train. If a man is judged by the company he keeps, their convictions reflect poorly on the President.
Trump reacted furiously to Stone’s conviction, claiming his fate at the hand of a jury of his peers was another example of an establishment plot against him.
“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come,” Trump tweeted, before raging at his usual punching bags including Clinton, Comey and Obama administration intelligence community officials.
“A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?” the President wrote.
Speculation is already running high that the President could use his power to pardon Stone – a move – at the time of an impeachment drama that would be politically radioactive.
The President has exceedingly broad power to pardon offenders, but saving Stone would suggest that people around him are above the law. And it would further color in a portrait of rampant corruption already threatening to dominate his legacy.
View on CNN
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Trump tweets Saturday , Nov 16 2019
If her were impeached, there will be the biggest depression , wiping out all 401 K’s …
Could this really happen ? You bet! From what we have seen so far, nothing is impossible.
In spite of everything can the Dems win the 2020 general election?
2020 ELECTION
High anxiety: Jittery Democrats fear their candidate won’t beat Trump
Acknowledging the concern, former President Barack Obama told his party’s moderates to chill and the left to get more realistic.
Nov. 16, 2019, 9:48 AM EST / Updated Nov. 16, 2019, 10:15 AM EST
By Alex Seitz-Wald
WASHINGTON — The offer: A $1 million check from a major Democratic donor to a major Democratic group. The one condition: The money would be refunded if Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warrenbecomes the party’s nominee.
That offer was rejected, according to an official familiar with it, but it was indicative of the larger anxiety felt by many in the Democratic Party’s elite circles about the state of the 2020 Democratic presidential field. “Ninety to 95 percent of our donor base is terrified about Warren,” said a prominent Democratic official.
Democrats, often prone to fretting about elections, have been increasingly worried that their large and divided presidential field, currently led by four imperfect front-runners, doesn’t have what it takes to beat President Donald Trump next year.
They worry that Biden is too old and stumbling; that Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, is too young and too inexperienced; and that Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are too far left and can’t win. And they tend to write off the rest of the field, assuming that if those contenders haven’t caught on yet, they never will.
That angst reached a fever pitch this week and helped push one new candidate and another potential challenger from the party’s more moderate wing into the race — former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who announced he’s running, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s thinking about it — just ahead of a New Hampshire filing deadline, which essentially barred the door to new candidates when it expired at 5 p.m. on Friday.
Former President Barack Obama, who is loath to speak publicly about internal party politics, felt the need to tell an influential group of donors on Friday night to essentially calm down,while also warning progressives that the country is “less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement.”
“Democratic voters and certainly persuadable independents or even moderate Republicans are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain, you know, left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party,” Obama said at the private meeting of the Democracy Alliance donor group at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington.
“That’s not a criticism to the activist wing. Their job is to poke and prod and test and inspire and motivate,” he continued. “But the candidate’s job, whoever it ends up being, is to get elected.”
And Obama reminded them that he faced his own messy primary and won.
“Not only did I win ultimately a remarkably tough and lengthy primary process with Hillary Clinton, but people forget that even before that we had a big field of really serious, accomplished people,” he said.
Not everyone is so sure, though, even though polls show all of the party’s front-runners beating Trump at the moment in head-to-head tests.
"With stakes this high in the election, Democrats from coast to coast are in search of the perfect candidate,” said Rufus Gifford, the former national finance director for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and ambassador to Denmark. “That person doesn’t exist. He or she never has.”
Democratic voters have expressed little interest in expanding the field. Eighty-fight percent said they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with their present options in a September NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, while other surveys have found a sizable number of Democrats wanting to winnow their options.
But many party insiders, who have watched the field take shape and studied the candidates closely, feel none of them measure up to Obama, who remains the model presidential candidate for many in the party.
“Donors are casting around for someone who can fill those shoes because they feel that Joe Biden hasn’t closed the deal yet,” said David Brock, a Democratic fundraiser who runs a constellation of progressive groups, including Media Matters and American Bridge. “Donors are always kind of anxious, it’s in their DNA. They’re nervous that Biden has proven to be a shaky front-runner and they’re nervous about the rise of Elizabeth Warren and/or Bernie Sanders.”
President Barack Obama waves as he is followed by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, right, upon his arrival on Air Force One at Logan Airport in Boston on March 5, 2014.Charles Krupa / AP file
And they looked around for other potential white knights:
Hillary Clinton? “I’m under enormous pressure from many, many, many people to think about it,” the 2016 presidential nominee told the BBC.
Stacey Abrams? “I’ve been urged to reconsider. I have said no,” the former nominee for governor in Georgia said at lunch at the National Press Club.
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown? “How many times do I have to answer this question? No. No, no, no,” Brown, who had considered running this year before deciding against it, told reporters in the Capitol.
In some circles, the search is driven largely driven by deep concerns that Warren or Sanders would fall to Trump and would be an albatross around the neck of Democratic candidates running for the Senate and House in 2020.
A new analysis by political scientist Alan Abromivitz found that support for “Medicare for All,” the single-payer health care plan Warren and Sanders favor, could have cost Democratic congressional candidates as much as 5 percentage points in the 2018 midterms.
Some on the left wonder which is scarier to donors: Warren or Sanders losing to Trump or winning against him and raising their taxes.
“Makes you wonder if they’re trying to save us from Trump or are they really just trying to save themselves from Bernie and Warren,” said Rebecca Katz, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who now advises insurgent progressive candidates.
Warren’s campaign has begun selling mugs to drink “billionaire tears” and engaged in public fights with wealthy financiers who feel, as many of them did under Obama as well, that they’re being unfairly targeted.
Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, one of the more prominent Democrats on Wall Street, condemned Warren’s incivility against the wealthy while taking a not-so-subtle shot at the controversy over her Native American ancestry and DNA test.
Patrick Murray, the pollster who runs the well-regarded Monmouth University poll, said the unsettled state of the field is not uncommon, historically, and more a product of voters waiting to chose a candidate than not liking any of them.
“It’s not a sign of weakness,” he said.
Needless to say, the new entries are frustrating to candidates who have been pitching themselves for months, as alternatives to Biden on one hand and Warren and Sanders on the other, just as Patrick is now.
Obama himself praised the current field and said he was sure that in the end, “we will have a candidate who has been tested and will be able to proudly carry the Democratic banner.”
Alex Seitz-Wald is a political reporter for NBC News.
Republican congressman calls new details about Trump revealed in impeachment testimony ‘alarming’
By Devan Cole, CNN
Updated 4:05 PM EST, Sun November 17, 2019
Washington (CNN)A Republican member of one of the House committees involved in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump said Sunday that information provided about Trump during a closed-door deposition of a former National Security Council official"is alarming" and “not OK.”
“Well, of course, all of that is alarming. As I’ve said from the beginning, I think this is not okay. The President of the United States shouldn’t even in the original phone call be on the phone with the president of another country and raise his political opponent,” Rep. Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“So, no, this is not OK,” he added on Sunday.
On Saturday, Morrison testified that US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland was acting at Trump’s instruction in his dealings with Ukraine. According to Morrison’s deposition, Sondland said the President told him that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “must announce the opening of the investigations” into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Morrison also testified that US aid to Ukraine was conditioned on the country announcing an investigation into the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden in Ukraine.
Ex-NSC official corroborates Sondland said he was directed by Trump on Ukraine
Morrison’s testimony, which was released by House impeachment investigators on Saturday, adds additional corroboration to the testimony of others, like US diplomat Bill Taylor, that Sondland said he was acting at Trump’s direction when he was urging Ukraine to announce political investigations.
In his CNN interview on Sunday, Turner also addressed tweets Trump posted last week during former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s public testimony before the panel. Responding in real-time to the President’s tweets, which claimed that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” the former official said they were “very intimidating.”
“It’s certainly not impeachable, and it’s certainly not criminal and it’s certainly not witness intimidation. It certainly wasn’t trying to prevent her or wouldn’t have prevented her from testifying, she was actually in the process of testifying. But nonetheless, I find the President’s tweets unfortunate,” the congressman said.
“I think along with most people, I find the President’s tweets, generally, unfortunate,” Turner said.
CNN’s Jeremy Herb, Jennifer Hansler, Kevin Liptak and Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.