Asia shares mostly lower amid rising coronavirus cases, Washington turmoil

NEW YORK - Asian stocks were mostly lower on Tuesday, tracking Wall Street declines as political turmoil in Washington and rising coronavirus cases worldwide weighed on sentiment ahead of the start of the quarterly earnings season.

Political uncertainty dominated trading as House Democrats introduced a resolution to impeach U.S. President Donald Trump, accusing him of inciting insurrection following a violent attack on the Capitol last week.

Several big tech giants, including Twitter Inc, Amazon.com Inc , Alphabet Inc, Facebook Inc and Apple Inc, have taken actions against Trump and his network of supporters, as concerns mounted over the risk of continued violence.

Twitter’s stock tumbled 6.4 percent on Monday after the micro-blogging site permanently suspended Trump’s account last Friday.

Investors also kept an eye on the continued spread of the coronavirus globally as cases surpassed 90 million on Monday, according to a Reuters tally.

“The weakness was led by tech and I think the banning of Trump’s account by Twitter and Amazon stepping up against Parler all brought a renewed focus on increased regulation and reining in on tech,” said Thomas Hayes, chairman of Great Hill Capital in New York.

Japan’s Nikkei slipped 0.48 percent, South Korea’s KOSPI fell 0.91 percent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index futures lost 0.54 percent.

Defying the broader selloff, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.24 percent.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.29 percent, the S&P 500 lost 0.66 percent and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.25 percent.

Investors are expecting guidance on the extent to which executives see a rebound in 2021 earnings and the economy from results and conference calls from JP Morgan, Citi and Wells Fargo Friday.

Meanwhile, longer-term Treasury yields were at their highest since March before new long-dated supply coming this week and on speculation of more U.S. fiscal stimulus as Democrats will have control of Congress and the White House.

“People are optimistic to see the yield curve steepening and it could help spreads and net interest margins for banks,” Hayes said.

Benchmark 10-year notes last fell 11/32 in price to yield 1.1443 percent, from 1.107 percent late on Friday.

The spread between the two-year and 10-year Treasury yields brushed against 100 basis points to hit its steepest since July 2017.

The climb in yields in turn offered some support to the dollar, which rose to its highest in over two weeks against a basket of currencies.

The U.S. dollar index rose 0.256 percent, with the euro down 0.54 percent to $1.2152. The Japanese yen weakened 0.24 percent versus the greenback at 104.20 per dollar, while Sterling was last trading at $1.3516, down 0.35 percent on the day.

Crude oil prices fell, hit by renewed concerns about global fuel demand amid tough coronavirus lockdowns across the globe, as well as the stronger dollar.

U.S. crude recently fell 0.1 percent to $52.19 per barrel and Brent was at $55.61, down 0.68 percent on the day.

Safe-have spot gold dropped 0.2 percent to $1,844.27 an ounce. Silver fell 1.70 percent to $24.94.

-reuters-

Historic Trump impeachment trial begins in US Senate

The historic impeachment trial of Donald Trump opened Thursday in the US Senate, as lawmakers took a solemn oath to be "impartial" in deciding whether to force the 45th US president from office.

In a hushed chamber, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, clad in a traditional black robe, raised his right hand as he was sworn in to preside over the trial. He then administered the oath to senators in turn, to convene the third court of impeachment in American history.

Roberts asked if they swore to deliver "impartial justice" according to the US Constitution, and 99 lawmakers -- one was absent -- responded in unison: "I do."

Earlier in the day in a deeply symbolic moment, the two articles of impeachment -- charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress -- were read out on the Senate floor.

The Senate Sergeant of Arms Michael Stenger issued a warning as proceedings got underway.

"Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye," Stenger said, commanding senators to "keep silent, on pain of imprisonment."

Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who will serve as lead prosecutor for the trial, read the charges accusing Trump of "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Trump has ridiculed the impeachment process for months, and he responded to the opening of the trial by once more branding it a "hoax."

"I think it should go very quickly," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

"It's totally partisan," Trump said. "I've got to go through a hoax, a phony hoax put out by the Democrats so they can try and win an election."

The Democratic-controlled House, in an overwhelmingly partisan vote, impeached Trump on December 18 over his dealings with Ukraine and subsequent efforts to obstruct the investigation into the affair.

Impeachment rules require a two-thirds Senate majority to convict and remove a president, and Trump's acquittal is widely expected in the Republican-dominated Senate.

Justice Roberts, 64, was appointed to the nation's top court by president George W. Bush, and will preside over the duration of the trial, which is expected to last two weeks.

After the senators' swearing in, the Senate adjourned until 1:00 pm (1800 GMT) on Tuesday, when the prosecution begins laying out its case against the president.

One senator -- Republican James Inhofe -- was absent due to a family medical emergency but said he would be sworn in "with no delay" on Tuesday, when Trump's impeachment trial begins in earnest.

'Senate's time is at hand'
Trump is accused of abuse of power for withholding military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting for the country's president in exchange for an investigation into his potential presidential election rival Democrat Joe Biden.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released Thursday that the White House violated federal law by putting a hold on the congressionally-approved funds for Ukraine.

"Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law," according to the GAO, a congressional watchdog.

The second article of impeachment relates to Trump's refusal to provide witnesses and documents to House impeachment investigators in defiance of congressional subpoenas.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been extremely critical of Trump's impeachment by the House and Democrats have accused him of planning to oversee a "sham" trial in the Senate.

McConnell has said he would coordinate the defense of Trump in the Senate with the White House.

"It was a transparently partisan performance from beginning to end," McConnell said of the House impeachment. "But it's not what this process will be going forward.

"The House's hour is over," the Republican senator from Kentucky said. "The Senate's time is at hand."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trump had given the House no option.

"It is a sad day for America," Pelosi told reporters. "We were given no choice."

Trump's actions undermined national security, were a violation of his oath of office and "jeopardized the integrity of our elections," she said.

For weeks Pelosi held back on delivering the articles to the Senate as she pressured McConnell to agree to subpoena the witnesses and documents that the White House blocked from the probe.

McConnell has refused to commit, saying the issue will only be decided after the trial's opening arguments and questioning.

A Trump administration official told reporters they expect the trial to last no longer than two weeks, suggesting McConnell could use his 53-47 Republican majority to stifle calls for witnesses and quickly take the charges to a vote.

Aside from Schiff the prosecution team will include Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler; House Democratic Caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries; Zoe Lofgren, a veteran of two previous impeachment investigations; and three others.

cl-mlm/ec

Agence France-Presse

Trump slams House's impeachment delay as 'so unfair'

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida -- President Donald Trump on Saturday criticized House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi for holding off on sending the articles of impeachment against him to the Senate.

"It's so unfair," Trump said, days after he was impeached by the House, during a speech to conservative student group Turning Point USA, saying that Pelosi adopted the strategy because she has "no case."

"They are violating the Constitution," Trump said.

The Democratic-controlled House voted on Dec. 18 to impeach Trump, setting the stage for a trial in the Senate. Trump is very unlikely to be convicted and removed from office by the upper chamber of Congress because it is controlled by his Republican Party. A two-thirds majority vote in the Senate is needed for a conviction on impeachment charges.

Republicans and Democrats are at loggerheads over how the trial will play out. Pelosi and other Democrats want to call top Trump aides as witnesses and are seeking assurances that the trial will be held on terms they consider fair.

Pelosi has not yet sent the impeachment package to the Senate in a bid to increase pressure on Republicans there. Pelosi has also not yet announced the managers, or prosecutors, who will present evidence in the trial.

"Until the House gets a clearer picture of what a Senate trial will look like, the Speaker will not be in the position to appoint managers and take the next steps in holding this President accountable and ensuring the Senate fulfills its constitutional duty," Pelosi's office said in a statement on Saturday.

Pelosi's office said senators have a constitutional obligation to conduct a "fair process that provides both the Senators, who will act as jurors, and the public with the opportunity to understand the full extent of President Trump’s abuse of power."

Trump is accused of abusing his power by holding back $391 million in security aid to Ukraine in an effort to get Kiev to announce a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the November 2020 election.

The president is also charged with obstruction of Congress for directing administration officials and agencies not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry.

Trump says he did nothing wrong and has dismissed his impeachment as a partisan bid to undo his 2016 election win. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Impeachment vote set for Wednesday as Trump rages

WASHINGTON - An enraged US President Donald Trump said he was being subjected to an "attempted coup" and a witch trial as Democrats set a historic impeachment vote for Wednesday.

In an extraordinarily angry six-page letter, Trump on Tuesday told Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the Democratic-led House of Representatives, that "history will judge you harshly."

Referring to a famous miscarriage of justice and religious extremism in the 17th-century United States, resulting in 20 executions, Trump said he'd been given less rights than "those accused in the Salem Witch Trials."

The letter came just minutes before Pelosi announced that the House would vote Wednesday to make Trump only the third US leader ever impeached and placed on trial in the Senate.

"Tomorrow the House of Representatives will exercise one of the most solemn powers granted to us by the Constitution as we vote to approve two articles of impeachment against the president of the United States," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to Democratic colleagues on Tuesday.

"During this very prayerful moment in our nation's history, we must honor our oath to support and defend our constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic," she added.

FRUSTRATION AND FURY

Trump is accused of attempting to force Ukraine into what would have been a damaging announcement of an unfounded probe into a main 2020 reelection rival, Joe Biden.

He is also accused of obstructing Congress by refusing to cooperate with the impeachment investigation, barring staff from testifying and holding back documentary evidence.

The two articles of impeachment are certain to pass in the House, where Democrats hold a firm majority.

That will send the case to the Senate, where a trial of Trump is expected to open in January, and his acquittal is equally expected, given the Republicans' control there.

Even with that likely outcome, Trump virtually exploded in an extraordinary outpouring of frustration and fury in the letter to Pelosi defending his record and attacking Democrats.

The letter, on White House paper and ending with his characteristic oversized signature in thick black pen, accused the veteran Democratic politician of "breaking your allegiance to the Constitution" and "declaring open war on American Democracy."

It repeated his claim that the entire case against him is a "hoax" and a "colossal injustice."

It said Democrats were being driven in impeachment "by your most deranged and radical representatives of the far left."

DEMOCRATS DO THE NUMBERS

In a comment in Congress likely to further enrage Trump, Pelosi dismissed the missive as "really sick."

With the exception of just two, her party's 235 members in Congress appeared poised to stand united in voting through the formal impeachment charges Wednesday.

While some members from relatively conservative districts face the possibility of being voted out of office next year for their stance, they stood together under Pelosi's political wrangling.

"My military service taught me to put our country -- not politics -- first, and my time as a federal prosecutor taught me about the importance of the rule of law and of justice," declared Mikie Sherrill, a first-term representative from a Trump-leaning district in New Jersey.

"I will be voting in favor of the articles of impeachment."

"I know some people will be angry at my decision, but I was elected to do what is right, not politically safe," said Anthony Brindisi, another first-term Democrat, from a conservative New York constituency.

TENSIONS IN CONGRESS

Tensions boiled over in Congress meanwhile over impeachment.

At a hearing in the House Rules Committee, which sets out the procedures for votes, senior Republican Doug Collins accused Democrats of trying to rush through the impeachment.

"There will be a day of reckoning," Collins warned. "Whatever you may gain will be short-lived."

And the top two senators butted heads over what form the trial will take.

Democrats are insisting on calling White House officials as witnesses, but Republicans appear to want to put the entire scandal to rest.

Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer wants Trump's chief of staff, former national security advisor and two others to testify.

But Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who can largely set the rules, rejected this and dismissed any idea that the trial wasn't a purely political exercise.

"I think we're going to get almost an entirely partisan impeachment," he said.

"This is a political process. There is nothing judicial about it. I'm not impartial about this at all."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Trump impeachment debate opens with fiery partisan battle

WASHINGTON - Democrats warned that US President Donald Trump was on the verge of dictatorship while Republicans fiercely defended his record at the opening of a stormy, historic debate on impeachment charges Wednesday.

The parties held tightly to diametrically opposed views of Trump as they weighed articles of impeachment at the beginning of a two-day debate.

Trump is alleged to have wielded the power of the presidency for personal and political gain by pressuring Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 US election.

There is little question about the outcome in the House Judiciary Committee: by the end of the week the majority-Democrat panel is expected to approve the charges and send them to the entire House of Representatives for passage next week.

But lawmakers in the televised hearing appeared focused on speaking to voters, whose sentiment will be crucial if, as expected, Trump goes on trial in the US Senate in January.

In a grave voice, Democratic committee chairman Jerry Nadler opened the hearing.

"Today we begin consideration of two articles of impeachment against President Donald J. Trump," he said.

"Taken together, the two articles charge President Trump with placing his private political interests above our national security, above our free and fair elections, and above our ability to hold public officials accountable," he said.

"If the president can first abuse his power and then stonewall all congressional requests for information, Congress cannot fulfill its duty to act as a check and balance against the Executive -- and the president becomes a dictator."

- Charges 'generic, vague' -
Doug Collins, the senior Republican on the committee, argued that Democrats have been seeking to impeach Trump ever since he came into office in January 2017, and have no clear case beyond "abuse of power."

"It's just generic vague statements," Collins said. 

"You go home and pick something you don't like about the president, and there's your abuse of power."

"This is as much about political expediency as it is anything else, and that should never be an article of impeachment."

Trump faces becoming only the third president in US history to be impeached and placed on trial in the Senate.

He is accused of pressuring Ukraine for help against his Democratic challenger Joe Biden ahead of next year's national elections, and holding up military aid to the country which it needed to face Russian aggression, unless it did his bidding.

REPUBLICANS STICK BEHIND TRUMP

With the committee's 40 members speaking one by one, alternating by party, Republicans were united in claiming there was no evidence to support the charges.

Jim Jordan said Democrats were simply refighting their 2016 election loss and hated Trump.

"This is about one basic fact: the Democrats have never accepted the will of the American people," he said. "They don't like the 63 million people who voted for this president."

But Democrats clung to statements of principles, warning not to let Trump get away with inviting foreign interference in a US election.

"Will we hold the president accountable, or will we serve as his accomplices?" asked Hank Johnson. 

Most indications are that the Republican majority in the Senate will ultimately protect Trump from conviction and removal.

But impeachment could mar his record as president and affect his reelection chances in November 2020.

At a political rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania on Tuesday, he ridiculed the charges.

"Everybody said, 'This is impeachment light,'" Trump said.

"They're impeaching me and there are no crimes. This has to be a first in history. They're impeaching me. You know why? Because they want to win an election. And that's the only way they can do it."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Trump ramps up Facebook ads against impeachment

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump's re-election campaign is countering impeachment efforts against him with a new surge in Facebook ads, while his Democratic rivals are saying little on the subject on the social media site or the campaign trail.

Trump ran more than 2,500 ads mentioning "impeach" or "impeachment" in the week through Dec. 5, more than his campaign did in the prior 2 weeks combined, according to a Reuters analysis of data published by Facebook Inc.

The ads criticize the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry in the US House of Representatives as producing "baseless LIES" and ask for money to support Trump's bid to win another four-year term in November 2020.

The torrent of messages is a sign of Trump's belief that the impeachment effort will backfire on Democrats, energizing his base and winning over independents skeptical of the process. Public opinion polls show support for impeachment is concentrated among Democrats.

Leading Democrats vying to challenge Trump next year have supported the impeachment process but ran only a handful of ads mentioning impeachment in recent weeks, according to the Reuters analysis of the most recent Facebook data available which was gathered by researchers at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering.

They have focused instead on issues like healthcare, gun laws and climate change.

That could change if the Republican-led Senate takes up the impeachment matter next month and dismisses the charges, said Nicholas Valentino, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

"Dismissal will be a highly mobilizing tool" for Democrats, Valentino said.

House Democrats unveiled formal impeachment charges on Tuesday that accuse Trump of "betraying" the country by abusing power in an effort to pressure Ukraine to probe a political rival and then obstructing Congress' investigation into the scandal.

While the House appears likely to approve impeachment, the Republican-controlled Senate is expected to dismiss the charges.

Trump has denied wrongdoing. He again ripped into Democrats at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, calling the probe a hoax.

"The ONLY thing stopping Democrats from carrying out their impeachment WITCH HUNT is Patriotic Americans standing with President Trump," according to the text of an ad Trump's Facebook page ran on Dec. 3. Other anti-impeachment ads by Trump solicit supporters' phone numbers and email addresses.

In contrast, Democrats' recent Facebook ads have referred to impeachment only sparingly.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, mostly has focused her ads on strengthening gun laws, fighting corruption and raising taxes on wealthy Americans.

Her proposal for universal health insurance coverage was the key topic at a town hall in Las Vegas on Monday. Impeachment did not come up.

Former Vice President Joe Biden's ads have focused on gun violence and his recent bus tour in early voting state Iowa. Biden launched new ads on Nov. 21 asking Facebook users to take a poll on whether Trump should be impeached.

Several Facebook ads for Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has been rising in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, asked viewers to think about what he described as pressing issues.

"These big issues, from the economy to climate change, will not have taken a vacation during the impeachment process," according to the text of 3 ads launched on Dec. 1.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

How Rudy Giuliani led Trump to the brink of impeachment

Not so long ago, it seemed to Rudy Giuliani that he would be presiding over a hefty part of the world.

Holding court a few nights after the 2016 election in a private cigar bar on Fifth Avenue, glass of Macallan at hand, Giuliani boasted to friends that President-elect Donald Trump would soon nominate him to the most prestigious of Cabinet posts.

"How about," Giuliani asked, "secretary of state?"

Chief global representative of the U.S. in war, peace and trade.

It would be a sublime reward for having thrown in with Trump when the respectable Republican establishment was keeping its distance, a fresh burst of stardom in a public life that had been fading fast. Giuliani made himself indispensable to the Trump campaign by doing dirty work that no one else wanted and trudging ahead even after the candidate lashed him with humiliations.

Three years on, Giuliani never got the job he believed he had coming — "a bitter disappointment," his now-estranged wife says — but in his five decades as a public figure, he has never been more prominent in national affairs.

Step by step, he has escorted Trump to the brink of impeachment. Giuliani himself is now under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in the very office where he enjoyed his first extended draughts of fame nearly four decades ago. The separate troubles he has gotten his client and himself into are products of the uniquely powerful position he has fashioned, a hybrid of unpaid personal counsel to the president and for-profit peddler of access and advice.

Practically no name, other than Trump's, was mentioned more than Giuliani’s at the impeachment hearings and in a subsequent Democratic report that described him as the hub of a grievous abuse of presidential power (or legitimate advocate for Trump, in the Republicans’ minority response).

A dozen witnesses testified over five days and if Giuliani were somehow subtracted from their stories, there seems to be no one in or out of government who could take his place as the president’s man on the ground. No one to carry out a campaign to force a vulnerable ally, Ukraine, to damage a political opponent of Trump and undermine a special counsel investigation in ways that would help both Trump and an ally now in prison for laundering millions of dollars.

Giuliani has been the voice in Trump’s ear when others could not be heard and served as the voice of Trump in places where presidents dare not go.

Each modern impeachment saga — of Richard M. Nixon, Bill Clinton and now Trump — has been shaped not by grievances over policy differences but by human vanities and appetites. In this case, those include Giuliani’s, which have run in strong currents for decades, unconcealed.

The forces that have returned Giuliani to the stage at age 75 are the same ones that made him a star federal prosecutor as a young man, a memorable mayor of New York in the 1990s and a scorched-earth advocate for Trump in 2016: his relentless drive to put himself at the center of public life and his very high regard for his own virtuousness.

Patrick Oxford, a former law partner and chairman of Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, who praises him as "a fine man," says he has not changed.

"He's just a whole lot more of what he was," Oxford said. "I've noticed that political figures have a hard time retiring from the scene. I think my friend Rudy may be trying too hard to remain involved."

His personal life has descended into the sort of well-appointed shambles that material wealth can disguise, though not necessarily make any less fraught.

A third marriage has fallen into divorce court ruins, revealing monthly expenses of $230,000 for six homes and 11 country club memberships. By taking Trump as a client, he lost a position at a law firm in 2018 that paid him $6 million annually, according to court filings. In October, he broke with a partner in a security consultancy, a former police officer who had been at his side for three decades. He was so badly hurt in a fall two years ago that his wife put off divorce plans and looked after him for a while. She laments that before he appears in public, no one tells him that dye has given his hair an orange tinge.

He betrays no distress at any aspect of his life, only delight.

Working on a laptop at a restaurant table in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, he has bathed in the warm acclaim of friends and strangers who recognize him from his television advocacy. "I enjoyed the fact that people were coming by and tapping me on the back," Giuliani said.

He was there so often, he said, that he set up a plaque.

Rudolph W. Giuliani

Attorney at law

"He doesn’t just like the spotlight," his estranged wife, Judith Giuliani, said in an interview. "He craves it, for validation."

She said she could scarcely believe he was working for Trump, given his disdain for people like Clinton, whom he saw as dishonest. But public attention, even refracted through Trump, was irresistible, she said.

Perhaps that helps explain the velvet-glove treatment he lavished on two Soviet-born American businessmen.

Giuliani brought one of them, a former penny-stock trader with a string of bad debts, to the state funeral of President George H.W. Bush last December.

And both men were Giuliani's guests this year at an annual dinner he gives for a band of people, mostly city workers, knitted together after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Other guests were perplexed by the men’s presence.

Had they been at ground zero in 2001?

No, they had not.

They were part not of Giuliani’s past but of his wished-for future.

He deployed both men to find pressure points in Ukraine, and joined them in undermining an American ambassador. His intentions, he says, were pure. “As a person who finds public corruption a cancer,” Giuliani said, “I cannot ignore it.”


He may also have been trying to improve the chances for Rudy Giuliani to persist into his ninth decade as an indispensable man.

THE THANKS HE GOT

Poised to take off from La Guardia Airport, the Trump campaign plane had to wait for one more passenger. It was a chilly, cloudy Sunday in New York, Oct. 9, 2016. That evening, Trump would debate his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in St. Louis.

Inside the custom-fitted Boeing 757-2000, about 40 people were in their seats, including candidate Trump. They could not leave without one last person: Rudy Giuliani.

Why were they waiting for him?

That moment, as much as any, maps the ground between Trump and Giuliani.

They had known each other for nearly 40 years. Trump was the gaudy, gold-veneered developer who somehow navigated the shoals of organized crime, labor racketeering and official corruption in the New York real estate market of the 1980s, even as Giuliani was becoming so well known as a federal prosecutor that he kept a mental scorecard of his television appearances. ("Actually, it was only two nights," Giuliani told a man in 1985 who mentioned he had just seen him five times on television. "Last week, it was five.")

With Trump as co-chairman of his first campaign fundraiser, Giuliani ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1989. He won the next time, in 1993, and served until the end of 2001. For the world, he embodied resilience following Sept. 11, a stature he would parlay into wealth but not a successful presidential candidacy. After a dismal showing in the 2008 Republican primaries, in which he spent more than $60 million and won no delegates, he and Mrs. Giuliani retreated to her family’s home in Florida. There he fell into what she called a lingering "catatonic" state. He never fully returned to his law firm, Bracewell Giuliani — "his specialty was being Rudy," his ex-partner, Oxford, said — but in time resumed giving paid speeches and running a lucrative security consultancy.

As the years of Barack Obama's presidency passed, Giuliani’s voice seemed to carry farthest when it was keyed to harsh or apocalyptic tones. Faintly echoing Trump’s falsehood about the president’s origins, he questioned Obama’s Americanism ("He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up, and I was brought up, through love of this country," he said). Apart from such flare-ups, he largely dropped out of public conversation.

“Before the 2016 election, Rudy was running around hawking Life Lock on commercials that ran at 2 a.m. on channel 83,” a longtime close aide said.

Giuliani had not raced to sign on with Trump 2016, waiting until the nomination was nearly inevitable, but few bigger names beat him to it.

Prominent Republicans who now style themselves devoted allies of Trump spoke of him then with acid revulsion or clenched-teeth neutrality. The campaign needed someone able to dial into a steady state of rage on a moment’s notice, even a high-mileage ex-politician scarcely known to a younger generation of voters.

Given a speaking spot of honor at the Republican convention, Giuliani roared: "There’s — there’s — there's no next election! This is it! There's no more time for us left to revive our great country!"

During the last three months of the campaign, he spun like a tornado from one television studio to the next or jetted around the country, at every stop hurling charges of corruption like boiling brimstone at anyone standing in Trump’s way.

"He'd do an event with then-candidate Trump and then he’d speak at a different event with Pence and then do one on his own," David Bossie, the deputy campaign manager, said.

None of that compared to his work on the Sunday when the Trump campaign jet waited at La Guardia.

Two days earlier, an off-camera tape from the television show "Access Hollywood" had been released of Trump speaking in crude terms about how his celebrity status gave him license to sexually assault women.

Trump’s usual surrogates — Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Chris Christie — had been booked to appear on the Sunday shows before the tape came out. When it did, they all bailed.

Then Giuliani stepped forward.

"Rudy was the only person willing to go on television to defend Donald Trump," Bossie said.

Giuliani spent that morning rushing between studios — he appeared on all five major networks — pausing long enough to strike a penitential chord and write off Trump’s words as unfortunate locker room talk.


Considering the circumstances, the campaign staff believed Giuliani had blunted the political blow Trump had inflicted on Trump. "Most people thought he did a great job," Bossie said.

When Giuliani boarded the plane, spent from his labors, he strode down the aisle a conquering hero, swapping high-fives. Then he settled across from Trump.

Everyone could hear what the candidate said next.

"Man, Rudy," Trump said, “you sucked. You were weak. Low-energy.”

Giuliani slumped in his seat, one witness said. The plane grew silent.

By day’s end, Giuliani was back in front of the cameras, claiming victory for Trump in the debate. And his most important work for the campaign was yet to come.

SURPRISE

On Oct. 25, 2016, exactly two weeks until Election Day, Giuliani appeared on "Fox and Friends," and was asked what the Trump campaign would do with the remaining time.

"We've got a couple of surprises left," Giuliani said, chuckling but coyly refusing to be drawn out on specifics.

"I think he’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days," he told another interviewer. "I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises."

Unknown to the public, the FBI had recently obtained a laptop used by one of Hillary Clinton’s aides that had not been examined during the investigation of her private email server. That inquiry had concluded in July without charges but the newly discovered laptop contained about 50,000 emails that might have been relevant. FBI agents planned to go through them in due course, but several ranking officials did not see that any mad rush was called for, the Justice Department inspector general would later report. They believed — correctly, as it turned out — that the emails would be similar to the hundreds of thousands already examined.

Then Giuliani began dropping those broad hints of a "surprise," adding that he knew FBI agents were very upset. It seemed apparent to Attorney General Loretta Lynch that leaks were coming from the New York office of the FBI, according to the inspector general. Faced with the likelihood that word of the emails would be coming out one way or another, FBI Director James Comey announced a review of the newly discovered cache. It played as a stunning piece of news, a fresh gust of scandal 11 days before the election.


Giuliani would later deny that he had heard about the emails from FBI agents, though he had bragged about that in broadcast interviews.

Years before, he had shown that working with virtually nothing, he could cultivate the mere existence of investigations to his political benefit. Early in his first term as mayor, facing criticism over patronage hires, Giuliani and aides announced spectacular claims that a widely respected commissioner in the previous administration, Richard Murphy, had overspent his budget by millions of dollars for political reasons. Moreover, computer records seemed to have been destroyed in a suspicious burglary. The heat shifted from the reality of Giuliani’s patronage hires to the wispy vapors of the Murphy investigation. A year later, it emerged that Murphy had neither overspent nor done anything wrong and that no records had been destroyed or stolen. Mayor Giuliani shrugged.

"This happens all the time," he said. "And you write about those things all the time. Sometimes they turn out to be true. And sometimes they turn out to be wrong."

So it was with the emails. With two days to go until the 2016 election, Comey said the review of the material in the laptop had not changed the bureau’s view that Clinton had not committed a crime. The unquantifiable damage, though, had been done.



Declaring victory on election night, Trump hailed his family and his campaign staff.

One more person was singled out.

"I want to give a very special thanks to our former mayor, Rudy Giuliani," Trump shouted, to chants of "Rudy, Rudy." "That Rudy never changes. Where’s Rudy? Where is he?" A moment later, spotting him, Trump called again, "Oh, Rudy, get up here."

With that, Giuliani stepped onto the stage, holding his wife’s hand, joining the Trump family.

THE INNER CIRCLE

Representing the president of the United States was, Giuliani said, "kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

He grabbed it. He strode across the public stage as a man without border or boundary, Full Throttle Giuliani — "I am a high-functioning human being, able to outwork people half my age," he told New York magazine — blending the rare opportunity to serve the president with far more ordinary chances to profit from his closeness to power.

He became a one-stop human bazaar for the trade of money, favors and influence, certain that he was incorruptible.

"I'm probably the most ethical person you ever met," he said.

There are conflicting accounts of why Giuliani did not get the State Department position he campaigned for in 2016, and of whether anyone other than himself even thought it was a real possibility, but his years of lucrative consulting payments from foreign governments since leaving City Hall would certainly have made for a complicated Senate confirmation.

So he returned in January 2017 to his partnership at Greenberg Traurig. He was also running a consulting company, Giuliani Security & Safety, with mostly foreign clients.

Yet for all that, he seemed to be itching to get back inside.

Out of the blue, he would call John Dowd, an old colleague from their days as young lawyers. Dowd had known Giuliani as a 30-year-old prosecutor whose withering cross-examination drove a sitting congressman to halt his own trial and plead guilty.

Now, though, Dowd was the president’s chief lawyer in the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Giuliani would phone just to volunteer suggestions or help, Dowd said.

"When I had the lead," Dowd said, "he always had my back."

In year one of the investigation, Trump went through multiple lawyers, including Dowd. By spring 2018, Trump was having a hard time getting top legal talent to work on the case.

Up stepped Giuliani, who said he would serve without pay.

The Trump administration turned out to be very good for the business of being Rudy Giuliani, though it was no simple matter to say precisely what that was.

"Probably in the last two years, people have talked to me about hundreds of deals," Giuliani said this fall.

As an insurgent, Trump arrived in Washington without the camp followers of brand-name lobbyists and insiders who set up shop with each new administration. Their absence heightened the value of the few people known to have influence with Trump, like Giuliani. Before and after he became the president’s personal lawyer, he thrived.

He hired himself out to a Turkish money launderer, Reza Zarrab, and argued his case directly to the president and the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in the Oval Office. Zarrab had been accused of moving $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran, evading U.S. sanctions. He eventually pleaded guilty and became a prosecution witness.

That was not the only piece of Turkish business Giuliani brought before the president, or so aides to Trump suspected. They believed that on his regular visits to the White House, he was pushing the president to deport a Turkish Muslim cleric — a prize sought by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who saw the man as an enemy of his regime. Giuliani called the claim that he was lobbying on that issue "stupid" and untrue. Still, for a short time, his access to the Oval Office was curbed.

He got paid to promote an ethane-methane deal in Uzbekistan. His security consultancy signed contracts with the government of Bahrain and a Ukrainian-Russian developer. Other work included engagements with governments, groups, individuals and causes in Romania, Iran, Brazil and Venezuela.

Trying to dazzle a woman on a date, he took her to a reception on the rooftop of the Hay Adams Hotel thrown by a lobbyist for the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congolese, who were hoping to get the U.S. to back off sanctions, wanted his advice on how to please the Trump administration.

He seemed taken aback when reporters questioned him about his private business clients. "I'm not going to answer any more of your goddamn questions because this is getting to be harassment," he said in an interview last month.

One of those clients had cost him big dollars.

When he announced that he would be representing Trump, he said he would be taking a leave of absence from Greenberg Traurig. But his partners, and some of their clients, had had their fill of being associated with Trump. The firm said Giuliani was resigning. He said it was a mutual decision.

The loss of the $6 million income came with one consolation. No longer would Giuliani be subject to a moratorium on his TV appearances, imposed by the firm’s buttoned-down reticence. "The last year and a half, I haven't been on television," Giuliani said in May 2018. "Frankly, I've missed it."

He returned to the airwaves with mesmerizing announcements and claims. Contradicting Trump, he said the president had indeed reimbursed one of his former lawyers, Michael Cohen, for the hush money paid to a pornographic film actress who said she had had a sexual encounter with Trump. A typical errand for a lawyer, he averred, though many begged to differ.



Giuliani denounced FBI agents and federal prosecutors investigating the president and Cohen as thugs, storm troopers, bumbling. (Cohen, now in prison for his role in the hush-money scheme, said the investigators who raided his office had been polite; when he turned against Trump, he was declared a “scumbag” by Giuliani.)

Other lawyers on the Trump team were dismayed by his rhetoric but Giuliani said it was tactical, regardless of how unhinged it seemed. Once he learned that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had decided that Justice Department policy forbade the criminal indictment of a sitting president, he said, he viewed impeachment as Trump’s only risk. That would be a public relations war, not a legal one, he explained, with the battles fought on television — an arena that Mueller did not contest. During his barrage, public opinion shifted slightly against an impeachment based on the Mueller findings and Congress showed little appetite for pursuing it. Giuliani took victory laps.

With scant attention at first, he shifted the theater of combat away from television screens, and into murky Ukraine politics.

THE UKRAINIANS

Without Giuliani’s push for money and frank yearning for relevance, the Trump Ukrainian initiative might never have amounted to much more than presidential tweetstorms. Giuliani compressed the digital gases of the president’s suspicions and wishful theories into what is now the molten core of impeachment.

Nothing shows how few limits Giuliani observed as plainly as his extended bear-hugs of Lev Parnas or Igor Fruman, his friends, clients and fellow emissaries for the president of the United States — the men he brought to his 9/11 dinner at the Maloney & Porcelli steakhouse in Manhattan.

In just about every snapshot from their travels, and there are many, Giuliani has a big grin on his face when he poses with Parnas and Fruman, two Florida men who were trying to hustle up business in Ukraine for an energy company they had just created.

They are simultaneously minor characters in the impeachment saga and very telling ones.

Giuliani may have been stopped from becoming secretary of state in 2017 by his business entanglements, but as Trump’s personal lawyer in 2019, he created and oversaw the dominant U.S. foreign-policy channel with Ukraine, running the president’s affairs, his clients’ and his own through it.

That brought Parnas and Fruman into the president’s wake, sea gulls following an ocean liner.

When they met Giuliani last year, Parnas, born in Ukraine, and Fruman, a native of Belarus, were on the prowl for influence to help their companies and over time would plow about $700,000 into political campaigns.

Fruman also had a business distributing luxury products in Ukraine, including yachts, jewelry, cars and electronics.

Parnas’ résumé includes work for companies that sold penny stocks in New York, a string of evictions and lawsuits in Florida and a judgment, now approaching $700,000, owed to an investor in a film project. He started a company called Fraud Guarantee to provide due diligence services for investors. Like other business ventures of his, it was a bust. But it managed to pay $500,000 to Giuliani, who served as godfather for Parnas’ newborn son and attended the bris in Boca Raton, Florida.

The three men enjoyed private dinners in Washington, Florida, New York. Trips to Paris, Warsaw, Madrid. At a Yankee game in London, Giuliani, sporting one of the four diamond-encrusted World Series rings he’d gotten from the team, ushered them onto the field and into the dugout.

Giuliani opened doors for them and they reciprocated at an opportune moment.

Late last year, Giuliani began to pursue information in Ukraine that he believed might show that the Mueller inquiry was built on a false premise, that it was really Ukrainians who meddled in the election and then framed the Russians for it.

This had long been the claim of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, now serving 7 1/2 years in federal prison for laundering millions of dollars from the Russia-aligned political party in Ukraine.

Manafort maintained that he and Trump were victims of Ukrainian meddling that took two forms: the release of a mysterious slush fund ledger that detailed payments by the Russia-aligned party, including $12.7 million earmarked for Manafort; and the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers that was blamed on Russia.

“The original investigation came to me from an investigator who had a client who said that the Ukrainians were the ones who did the hacking,” Giuliani said in April. In addition, he said, he was told that the release of the ledger was a malignant act by Ukrainian forces hostile to Trump — and that it might be a forgery.

So, he said, he had a duty to Trump to run it down.

"I think if I didn’t do it, I wouldn't be a good lawyer," Giuliani said.

Far more than a lawyer serving a client in a legal matter, though, Giuliani continued his Ukraine project long after Trump was clear of any jeopardy from the Mueller investigation, which ended in March.

Pinning the 2016 cyberattacks on Ukraine was a steep hill to climb, as the Senate Intelligence Committee had unequivocally found that they were a Russian operation. Even so, Giuliani demanded that the country’s new president announce an investigation of it, according to Gordon Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union.


Equally difficult would be showing that Manafort was a victim of a forged paper ledger: Electronic bank records were so overwhelming that he pleaded guilty.

Nevertheless, if blame were seen to have shifted to Ukraine in these episodes, Giuliani would provide balm for Trump’s lingering furies that the findings of Russian involvement had tainted his presidency. Debunking the slush-fund ledger could also help build the case for a pardon of Manafort, Giuliani said.

Enter Parnas and Fruman, guides in Giuliani’s search for vindication of assorted conspiracy theories.

They connected Giuliani to a former prosecutor in Ukraine who added another twist to the plot. He claimed that Vice President Joe Biden had forced his removal because Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had been given a lucrative, little-show position by an oligarch who wanted the prosecutor out. Proving this would be yet another steep hill to climb, as the prosecutor’s record was so dismal that his dismissal was also sought by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the G7 and Ukrainians who protested his actions.

Still, Giuliani’s project expanded from Manafort to include the vilification of Biden and yet one more person: the American ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.

The ambassador, an advocate for reforms in the Ukrainian energy sector, testified that she believed Parnas and Fruman saw her as an obstacle to their business plans. Parnas assured people — prophetically — that she would be removed in short order.

Giuliani fed claims about the ambassador and Biden to a writer at The Hill, bundled articles and memos into folders from Trump hotels and sent it all to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a big White House envelope. Though the charges against the ambassador were decried by the State Department as fabrications, they were amplified on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. She was abruptly ordered home.

Phone records show that Giuliani was in frequent touch with the White House during this time, including with a regular caller identified only as “-1,” who Congressional investigators suspect may be the president.

Parnas and Fruman also dangled American favors in front of Petro O. Poroshenko, president of Ukraine at the time, and two exiled Ukrainian oligarchs facing legal problems in the U.S. In exchange, the oligarchs and the president were asked for their help in implicating the Bidens in bribery, or Ukraine in 2016 meddling.

In August, Giuliani met in Madrid with an adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the new Ukrainian president, and also told Sondland, the ambassador, that he wanted the Ukrainians to announce investigations. As Giuliani knew from experience, such an announcement at the right moment can be as lethal as a poison arrow, needing only to break the skin to do its damage.

By fall, as a whistleblower’s complaint brought the pressure campaign into the light, the foundations of Giuliani's work were crumbling. An ally of Giuliani said he saw no evidence that Vice President Biden or his son had broken Ukrainian law.

Giuliani himself publicly conceded in a Sept. 29 interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos that there was no evidence that Ukraine had hacked the Democratic computers and said that he had never actively investigated it.

A few days before, he had appeared on CNN.

"Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?" asked Chris Cuomo, the host.

"No," Mr. Giuliani replied."I actually didn’t.”

He held that position for 27 seconds. Cuomo followed up, "So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?"

"Of course I did," Giuliani replied.

His project to deliver a crushing blow against a Trump opponent, and to establish that Trump — not the Democrats — had been the victim of foreign interference in the 2016 election, would fade into a toxic fog of impeachment charges.


At the same time, The New York Times reported that contrary to Giuliani’s claim that he had no business interests in Ukraine, he had negotiated with officials there for up to $500,000 in contracts that would involve the recovery of looted assets.


And during an August trip to Spain, Giuliani also did business unrelated to Ukraine: He met with a Venezuelan oligarch facing legal troubles from federal prosecutors in Florida, as The Washington Post reported. (One month later, as The Times reported, Giuliani held a high-level meeting on the man’s case with Justice Department officials in Washington.)

Giuliani and his two friends got together for lunch on Oct. 9, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, the company cafeteria of Trump-world, where hamburgers go for $26 and the least expensive shots of Macallan are $29.

All three were heading to Vienna — Parnas and Fruman that very evening, Giuliani the next night. One of their sources, the unhappy ex-prosecutor, was going to be interviewed there by Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality.

They probably did not know that this would turn out to be their last get-together, at least for a while.

That evening, as they waited to board their Vienna flight, Parnas and Fruman were arrested on charges of making illegal campaign contributions — in part, prosecutors charge, to influence the removal of the ambassador.

Few people could have been more astonished at Parnas' access to the halls of power and prestige than those who say they were bilked or stiffed by him. A lawyer, Robert J. Hantman, represents a creditor with a judgment against Parnas.

"It's unbelievable that these people would be in the White House, or be hanging out with Giuliani,” Hantman said. "For Giuliani, the president, or anyone who wants to work with him to not have googled him, it’s unreal."

In a world with few boundaries or limits, it was very real.

FULL TIME HERO

Giuliani was far from a Lone Ranger in the Ukraine pressure campaign. Top figures in the administration knew of it or worked with him. “Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland testified.

But it was Giuliani who served as the wrangler of business hustlers, compromised ex-prosecutors, Ukrainian oligarchs and a host of bewildered American diplomats and Ukrainian elected officials who could not entirely fathom how he had come to wield such outsize influence, or to what ends he was wielding it.

And what of his relationship going forward with Trump, who effortlessly throws people under the bus? In October, the president praised Sondland on Twitter as a “really good man and great American.” When the ambassador testified last month that he had been acting on the president’s orders in pressuring Ukraine, Trump said: "I don’t know him very well. I have not spoken to him much.”

After signs of distance between the president and Giuliani — when the president hesitated about confirming that he was still his personal lawyer, Giuliani made a “joke” to The Guardian about having “very, very good insurance” — Trump gushed praise for him on Twitter and on “Fox and Friends.”

Giuliani said he appreciated the show of support, but added: “I’m not some little schmuck that needs Daddy to protect him.”

The Rudy Giuliani business has been hurt, he said, because potential clients are afraid of being exposed to the endless scrutiny of his affairs.

His need for money shows no sign of ebbing. In addition to his domestic cash burdens, Giuliani is now said to be under investigation by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. He has hired a team of lawyers to represent him. Legal fees could approach seven figures.

Reports indicate that the prosecutors are looking at his compliance with restrictions on lobbying. "I don’t do lobbying, goddamn it," Giuliani said, scoffing at the possibility of criminal charges. 
Although he negotiated with Ukrainian officials about representing them and carried their messages to U.S. officials and journalists, they ultimately did not come to any agreement, he said.

“I represented the president of the United States,” Giuliani said. “It is totally ridiculous to say that I was representing anyone else.”

Anthony Carbonetti, a City Hall aide to Mr. Giuliani and a longtime friend, said he worried that what he saw as Giuliani’s groundbreaking years as New York mayor would be forgotten behind the sky-filling spectacle of Trump.

"The fact that this is what he’ll be known for is painful," Carbonetti said. "His public persona has been dominated by his representation of the president for the last two years, so that has become the public perception of him. I don’t think anyone goes back in time."

Whatever his friends' misgivings, Giuliani remains sure as ever that he is in the right.

His mission, he maintained, uncovered "one of our more major scandals." Evidence against the Bidens is in his safe, he wrote on Twitter, adding, “If I disappear, it will appear immediately.”

Just last week, The Times reported, he returned to Ukraine to create television programs for a conservative network that he believes will show that he is right and House Democrats are wrong. Trump said Saturday that Giuliani wanted to tell Congress what he had found.

So far, Giuliani has declined to testify and described the impeachment hearings on Twitter as an "attempted coup takedown."

The story, then, is being left to the people who survived being buried alive by Giuliani, including the cashiered Ambassador Yovanovitch.

“How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government?” she asked in her testimony.

The face Giuliani sees in the mirror, he has always said, is of a man compelled by his idealism to purify government. “I get completely disgusted when I see public corruption,” he said.

Anyone who sees something else in him is mistaken, he said.

"I really try very hard to be super-ethical and always legal," Giuliani said. "If it seems I’m not — it’s wrong, and I can explain it."

As for how he will be viewed in the future, he has, at times, professed indifference. But in an interview with The Atlantic, Giuliani predicted that he would emerge from all the investigations wreathed in glory, an indispensable man who served the country against the odds.

“These morons,” Giuliani said. “When this is over, I will be the hero.”

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Trump committed impeachable crimes, scholars tell US Congress

Three constitutional experts on Wednesday bolstered Democrats' efforts to impeach Donald Trump by saying the president's actions seeking foreign interference in US elections are grounds for removal, as the inquiry kicked into a new phase in Congress.

But reflecting the Washington political divide, a fourth expert strongly dissented, saying there was "woefully inadequate" evidence that Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors necessary for impeachment.

Democrats have made a forceful case that Trump should be removed from office for abusing his powers by pressuring Ukraine for dirt on an election rival, arguing that the Founding Fathers had a remedy -- impeachment -- for such wrongdoing.

In a theatrical, contentious hearing of the House Judiciary Committee -- now tasked with weighing impeachment charges against the president -- lawmakers listened to damning testimony from constitutional law professors who said Trump's conduct rises to that level.

"We three are unanimous," jurisprudence professor Michael Gerhart of the University of North Carolina stated, referring to fellow witnesses Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law School professor, and professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School.

Americans tuning in to the live broadcast witnessed heated clashes between Democrats and Republican Trump loyalists on the panel, who repeatedly forced procedural votes to help stall the process.

The new phase of impeachment began a day after a congressional report on the high-stakes inquiry detailed "overwhelming" evidence of abuse of power and obstruction by the president.

The report mapped out a months-long scheme by Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, senior diplomats and White House staffers to pressure Ukraine's president into investigating Joe Biden, the current favorite to win the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Trump "was willing to compromise our security and his office for personal, political gain" by "directly and explicitly" inviting foreign interference in US elections in 2016 and again in his 2020 reelection effort, the Judiciary Committee chair, Jerry Nadler, said in his opening statement.

'Impeachable offense'
One of the scholars told Wednesday's hearing Trump had perpetrated one of the gravest political transgressions in US history.

"The president's serious misconduct, including bribery, soliciting a personal favor from a foreign leader in exchange for his exercise of power, and obstructing justice and Congress are worse than the misconduct of any prior president," said Gerhart.

"If Congress fails to impeach here, then the impeachment process has lost all meaning, and, along with that, our Constitution's carefully crafted safeguards against the establishment of a king on American soil."

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham hit back on Twitter, claiming that "3 of 4 'experts' in this sham hearing have known biases" against Trump.

The fourth expert, professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School -- the only one chosen by Republicans -- had a very different assessment.

Turley, who also testified during Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998, argued there is "no evidence" that Trump "acted with the corrupt intent required for obstruction of justice."

Disclosing that he himself had voted against Trump in 2016, Turley said opposition to the president was "irrelevant" to the constitutional questions before Congress.

"One can oppose President Trump's policies or actions but still conclude that the current legal case for impeachment is not just woefully inadequate, but in some respects, dangerous."

'A joke'
The president himself, in London for a NATO summit, lambasted his opponents for proceeding with impeachment hearings during his trip.

"What they are doing is a very bad thing for our country," Trump said. "It's a joke."

Congressman Doug Collins, the Judiciary panel's top Republican, piled on, calling the inquiry a "railroad job" wasting the American public's time.

Collins faced a scolding, however, from one of the professors when he insinuated that they have not followed the twists and turns of the impeachment process.

"I am insulted by the suggestion that as a law professor I don't care about those facts," Karlan said.

Karlan also squarely asserted that Trump's alleged effort to withhold military aid until Ukraine committed to investigating Biden was grounds for removal -- even though the aid was eventually delivered.

"Soliciting itself is the impeachable offense," she said.

The House Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday is expected to form the basis for Judiciary to draw up formal charges -- articles of impeachment -- that could include bribery, abuse of power, obstruction and contempt of Congress.

Democrats reportedly aim to have the articles presented for a vote to the entire House of Representatives by late December.

If they pass as expected, Trump would then stand trial for removal in the Republican-controlled Senate, where he is likely to be exonerated.

source: news.abs-cbn.com