Impeachment watch: GOP defends Trump with 120-page report filled with lies

In an effort to defend Donald Trump from the damning impeachment report the House Intelligence Committee plans to release on Tuesday, House Republicans released a counter report filled with lies and omissions, Politico reported.

The report largely mirrors the weak defense Republicans have been using to defend Trump over the past few months of the impeachment inquiry. It claims that Trump held up aid to Ukraine over legitimate concerns of corruption, and again uses the debunked conspiracy that Trump was justified in being skeptical of Ukraine because Ukraine tried to keep Trump from becoming president.

However, multiple officials testified during the public impeachment hearings that career employees determined Ukraine had met the anti-corruption standards needed to get the aid, and that the GOP claims that Ukraine somehow meddled in the 2016 election are wrong and benefit Russian President Vladimir Putin.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff panned the GOP report.

“The GOP report ignores voluminous evidence Trump used his office to press Ukraine into investigating Biden by withholding military aid and a White House meeting,” Schiff (D-CA) tweeted Monday night. “They say this is just Trump’s ‘outside the beltway’ thinking. It’s more accurately outside the law and Constitution.”

The House Intelligence Committee, for its part, plans to release its own report on Tuesday, laying out the facts uncovered throughout the weeks-long impeachment proceedings.

Here’s what else is happening in impeachment news:

• The House Judiciary Committee released the list of witnesses for the first hearing in the next phase of the impeachment proceedings. Four law professors will testify about the history of impeachment on Dec. 4 at 10 a.m. Despite being invited to participate, Trump and his legal team will not join the hearing.

• Republicans are once again complaining about the impeachment process, saying that it’s unfair to hold other hearings at the same time impeachment hearings are taking place. This comes after Republicans attacked Democrats for not conducting other business while impeachment was going on — an unfair attack given that Democrats were passing numerous bills in the House.

• Democrats released a video highlighting the testimony from the impeachment inquiry in an effort to build public support for impeaching Trump.

• Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, asked a federal court to release evidence from his arrest that pertains to the impeachment inquiry, ABC News reported.

• Republicans continue to push the debunked Russian propaganda claim that Ukraine tried to get Hillary Clinton elected. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr went on NBC to compare Russia’s hostile hacking of Democratic institutions to the fact that some Ukrainian officials supported Clinton over Trump — while Trump had taken positions that threaten Ukraine’s very existence as its own country. “Every elected official in the Ukraine was for Hillary Clinton,” Burr (R-NC) claimed. “Is that very different than the Russians being for Donald Trump?” This comes after the very committee Burr leads determined that Ukraine did not interfere in the 2016 election.

Come back tomorrow for more impeachment news.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.