GOP Senator Doesn’t Recall Trump Comment: Impeachment Update

(Bloomberg) -- The House Intelligence Committee plans to hear from eight witnesses in open hearings this week in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.The first ones, testifying Tuesday, will be Jennifer Williams of Vice President Mike Pence’s office, National Security Council official Alexander Vindman, former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, and NSC official Timothy Morrison.Here are the latest developments:GOP Senator Doesn’t Recall Trump Comment (5:37 p.m.)Republican Senator Ron Johnson said Monday he doesn’t remember Trump telling diplomatic officials to talk to his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani about Ukraine during a meeting last May.U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland has testified that during a May 23 meeting with Trump at the White House, the president told U.S. officials to “talk to Rudy” about Ukraine policy. Johnson, in a written statement to Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, said he also attended the meeting and added, “I have no recollection of the president saying that during the meeting.”“It is entirely possible he did, but because I do not work for the president, if made, that comment simply did not register with me,” Johnson said. He also said that Sondland stayed behind to speak to the president as others left the meeting. Johnson also said that when he met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his advisers in Ukraine in early September -- while U.S. military aid was on hold -- there was no mention by any Ukrainian officials “that they were feeling pressure to do anything in return for the military aid.”Embassy Aide Holmes to Testify in Public (4:31 p.m.)The impeachment inquiry’s public session on Thursday will hear from David Holmes, a staff member in the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, who testified in private last week that he heard Trump ask Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, about “the investigations” -- a reference to probes about Joe Biden and the 2016 election.According to a copy of his opening statement, Holmes said Sondland told him in July that Trump “did not give a s--- about Ukraine” and that the president only cares about the “big stuff” that benefits Trump “like the Biden investigation that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”Pompeo Says He’s ‘Proud’ of Work in Ukraine (2:55 p.m.)Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said he’s “proud of the team” at the State Department even as he refused to discuss the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the department employees who defied his orders by testifying in the impeachment investigation.“I always defend State Department employees,” Pompeo said in a press briefing at the department on Monday. But he refused to answer substantive questions about the ouster of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled from Kyiv at Trump‘s demand as the president pressed Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden and other Democrats.Pompeo also declined to say whether he agreed with Trump’s tweet during Yovanovitch’s testimony last week, when the president wrote that “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go?”House Lawyer Implies Trump Lied to Mueller (11:53 a.m.)The House Judiciary Committee needs to see materials and transcripts from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury including, potentially, evidence that Trump might have lied, an attorney for House Democrats told a U.S. appeals court in Washington on Monday.The lawyer, Douglas Letter, made that claim in opposing the Justice Department’s request to keep those materials under seal while it appeals a lower court order granting the committee’s request for the records last month.Chief Judge Beryl Howell on Oct. 25 rejected Justice Department arguments that the House impeachment process doesn’t qualify as a judicial proceeding for the purposes of turning over grand jury materials that are ordinarily kept sealed.Justice Department lawyer Mark Freeman reiterated that argument Monday before a three-judge panel. The panel includes one judge appointed by a Democratic president and two appointed by Republicans. One, Neomi Rao, was placed on the court by Trump earlier this year.Defending Howell’s ruling, Letter told the court there’s evidence that “very sadly, the president might have provided untruthful answers” to the Mueller probe. -- Andrew HarrisTrump Says He’ll Consider Testifying in Probe (9:10 a.m.)President Donald Trump, in a tweet on Monday morning, said that he’d “strongly consider” testifying in the House’s impeachment inquiry after Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that he’s welcome to do so.“The president could come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants if he wants -- if he wants to take the oath of office or he could do it in writing,” Pelosi said in a interview for CBS’s “Face the Nation” broadcast on Sunday. “He has every opportunity to present his case.”Trump on Monday criticized the hearing, questioned the House’s progress on passing the U.S. Mexico-Canada trade agreement and referenced Pelosi’s comments. “Even though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to this No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it!”Trump similarly suggested repeatedly that he’d agree to an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators. But his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani later said he’d only answer limited questions on whether his presidential campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. Trump -- via Giuliani -- demanded in return that he isn’t asked questions about obstruction of justice. -- Mario ParkerPoll Finds 70% Say Trump’s Ukraine Bid Wrong (7:30 a.m.)After the House’s first week of public impeachment hearings, 70% of Americans think Trump’s request that Ukraine‘s president investigate political rival Joe Biden was wrong, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll has found.Just over half of Americans -- 51% -- said Trump should be impeached and removed from office over those actions.Another 19% deemed Trump’s actions wrong, yet said he should either be impeached by the House but not removed from office by the Senate, or that he should neither be impeached nor removed.Underscoring the continued divisiveness in America, the poll found that 25% don’t think Trump did anything wrong.The House is conducting an inquiry into whether the Trump administration tried to get newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to announce an investigation into Biden and his son, in exchange for releasing nearly $400 million in U.S. security aid or scheduling a meeting between the two leaders.The Nov. 16-17 survey of a random national sample of 506 adults has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.8 percentage points. -- Elizabeth WassermanCatch Up on Impeachment CoverageKey EventsFormer U.S. envoy to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told the House impeachment inquiry Friday she felt intimidated by Trump’s attacks on her work, only to have the president launch a fresh broadside against her as she testified in a public hearing.The Gordon Sondland transcript is here and here; former special envoy Kurt Volker’s transcript is here and here. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s transcript is here and here; the transcript of Michael McKinley, former senior adviser to the secretary of State, is here. The transcript of William Taylor, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine, is here and here. State Department official George Kent’s testimony is here and here. Testimony by Alexander Vindman can be found here, and the Fiona Hill transcript is here. Laura Cooper’s transcript is here; Christopher Anderson’s is here and Catherine Croft’s is here. Jennifer Williams’ transcript is here and Timothy Morrison’s is here.Taylor’s opening statement is here; Kent’s statement is here. Yovanovitch’s opening statement is here.\--With assistance from Mario Parker and Andrew Harris.To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton, Laurie AsséoFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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