More Warnings

Tune in at 9 ET:  In case you are wondering, the White House finally released a “medical” statement on Trump’s visit to Walter Reed.  Apparently, Trump is in tiptop shape but then again previous statements have said that he’s taller, thinner and the healthiest president ever so there is no point in taking the statement at face value.  Curiously, although Trump’s twitter account was active yesterday, he made no public appearances.  If he decides to stay in bed today, he can keep busy watching some more public testimony.  Twin Lt. Col. Vindman, the top Ukraine expert at the National Security Council, and Jennifer Williams, a State Department official who has been serving as a senior aide to VP Pence, will share the stage this morning. Three Amigo/former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker who resigned almost immediately after the Ukraine fiasco came to light, and Timothy Morrison, a senior national security aide, will appear in the afternoon.  According to Morrison’s SCIF transcript, then national security advisor John Bolton, who remains a testimony holdout, met with Trump in August to push for the release of Ukraine aid.  He also says that Bolton tried to get a number of other cabinet secretaries and other security advisors to convince Trump that it was in the US’s best interest to unfreeze the funds to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia but that a frustrated Bolton couldn’t move Trump off his “drug deal.”

LOL: As to yesterday’s tweets, responding to a suggestion that Speaker Pelosi made during her Sunday Face The Nation appearance that Trump could “come right before the committee and talk…..or he could do it in writing” Trump tweeted “Even though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to the No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it.”  The odds of Trump following through on that is somewhere between zero and zip especially since the content of his last effort to provide testimony in writing, the deposition that he provided to Special Counsel Mueller, is once again raising eyebrows.  Yesterday during arguments before a federal appeals court related to Congress’s attempt to get hold of the still unreleased secret grand jury evidence from Mueller’s Russia probe, House lawyers questioned Trump’s truthfulness, suggesting that his deceptive Mueller deposition, particularly the part where he denied knowing about his campaign’s efforts to ferret out the timing of WikiLeaks DNC email dumps, could become part of the impeachment inquiry. Last week Roger Stone was convicted for lying about his communications and/or attempts to communicate with WikiLeaks as well as all those calls he had with Trump, in part, because former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said that he was Trump’s WikiLeaks whisperer.

More on Ukraine:  In other Ukraine news, the AP reports that State Department officials knew as early as May that Ukraine President Zelensky, then just the President-elect, was feeling pressured by Trump’s push for Ukraine to open an investigation into the Bidens.  Amos Hochstein,  a new but minor character in the Ukraine saga, who serves on the supervisory board of Ukraine’s natural gas company Naftogaz participated in a meeting during which Zelensky expressed his concern.  Hochstein relayed details of the meeting to then Ambassador Yovanovitch and two other US embassy officials, including Suriya Jayanti who, together with embassy staffer David Holmes, overheard EU Ambassador’s July 26 Kiev Café call between Gordon Sondland and Trump, a call that will get lots of attention tomorrow during Sondland’s much awaited testimony, assuming he really shows up and talks.  Zelensky’s early knowledge that Trump wanted a Biden investigation knocks down another Republicans talking point, that there was no quid pro quo because Zelensky didn’t know he was being pressured.  As to that Kiev call, David Holmes who is now scheduled to testify in public later this week, says that at least two of Ukraine’s three cell phone carriers, possibly all three, are owned or partially owned by Russians, which is one of the reasons that he was stunned when Sondland used his cell phone to call Trump. Vlad P, if you are listening, release the transcript of that call!  

Homeland Security? Going back to the Republicans, and all their attempts to come up with talking points, at the request of two of Trump’s faves, Congressmen Jim “Gym” Jordan and Devin Nunes, Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson penned a ten page letter detailing his role in the Ukraine mess.  Johnson, who traveled to Ukraine with Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Chris Murphy in early September to discuss the withheld military aid, had previously said that he winced when Sondland told him that Trump would only unfreeze Ukraine’s aid if Ukraine announced the investigations, has been trying to get himself out from under that insufficiently Trump friendly remark ever since making it.  He insists that Trump adamantly denied that there was any quid pro quo, and now, in his letter, in an attempt to deflect blame elsewhere, he’s casting aspersions on Lt. Col Vindman’s judgement saying he fits the profile of a “never Trumper,” one of those deep state people, while also blaming the Whistleblower because “we’d would have been much better off if we were just taking care of this behind the scenes.” In other words, wouldn’t it better to allow Trump to carry out his extortion in private?  Senator Johnson, who is Chair of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, also believes that the DNC server is hiding in Ukraine and that the Ukraine investigation is just a continuation of the assault on Trump by those who never accepted his presidency to begin with, just more “sabotage” by those evil all powerful, but not powerful enough to win the election, Hillary Clinton forces.

Other Items:  Secretary of State Pompeo came out of hiding yesterday.  He announced that the US no longer considers Israel’s West Bank settlements a violation of international law. There are lots of settlements and even with a peace plan most of them were probably staying put, however worldwide almost everyone else, including the UN and the EU, still view them as illegal.  Notably, even AIPAC, the Israel American lobbying group, was less than thrilled with the announcement expressing concern that the Trump administration’s unilateral moves without any progress on a peace plan, does more to erode bilateral US support for Israel and may lead to the EU taking more onerous trade positions with Israel.  The timing of Pompeo’s announcement was probably mostly about Trump wanting to remind his evangelical base that he’s still their man.  As to Pompeo, he gave some barely lukewarm support to his State Department professionals but refused to stand up for any of them by name, saying that questions about people like Ambassador Yovanovitch should be addressed to the White House. Separately, Senator Lindsey Graham announced that the FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz is scheduled to testify on December 11 to review his soon to be released report on FISA warrant abuses, that’s the report that various Fox pundits and some Republicans insist will excoriate the FBI’s treatment of quirky Carter Page and that others think or hope will be a big yawn.  A Warning, the book by the Anonymous author, is out today.  Happy reading.