Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Vivian Ho in San Francisco (now) and Tom McCarthy in New York (earlier)

Joe Biden to announce presidential bid on Thursday – as it happened

Joe Biden to announce his bid on Thursday.
Joe Biden to announce his bid on Thursday. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images

Evening summary

  • Will there or won’t there be testimony? The Washington Post reports that the White House will fight the House Judiciary Committee-issued subpoena for former White House counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony. Committee chair Jerry Nadler called that obstruction.
  • The US Senate race in Texas seems to have devolved into a tussle of what is and isn’t a dirty word, with incumbent Senator John Cornyn’s team going after comedian Patton Oswalt for supporting Cornyn’s opponent, MJ Hegar.

Blocking McGahn testimony will be "one more act of obstruction"

House Judiciary chair Jerry Nadler responds to reports that the White House plans to fight a subpoena issued by his committee for testimony from former White House counsel Donald McGahn.

What did President Trump and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey talk about in their meeting this afternoon? According to the Washington Post, mostly about the number of followers the president has:

A significant portion of the meeting focused on Trump’s concerns that Twitter quietly, and deliberately, has limited or removed some of his followers, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity because it was private. Trump said he had heard from fellow conservatives who had lost followers for unclear reasons as well.

But Twitter long has explained that follower figures fluctuate as the company takes action to remove fraudulent spam accounts. In the meeting, Dorsey stressed that point, noting even he had lost followers as part of Twitter’s work to enforce its policies, according to the source, who described the meeting as cordial.

Updated

Comedian Patton Oswalt appeared in a video announcing MJ Hegar’s run for US Senate in Texas. That would usually be where the story ends, but this is 2019 in the age of Twitter, and incumbent Senator John Cornyn’s team is having none of it.

Team Cornyn has decided to comb through Oswalt’s Twitter feed going back to 2013 to pick out “some offensive comments” to show his supporters exactly what “Hollywood Hegar” embraces. The problem, however, is not so much what Hollywood Hegar embraces, but what Team Cornyn rejects. For some reason, Team Cornyn has found the words “vagina”, “penis”, “scrotum” and “dildo” so offensive that they bleeped them out.

As expected, Team Cornyn’s efforts have been met with more amusement than support, particularly from Oswalt himself.

Updated

Now the Washington Post is reporting that the White House will fight the House Judiciary Committee subpoena of former counsel Donald McGahn:

The Trump administration also plans to oppose other requests from House committees for the testimony of current and former aides about actions in the White House described in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, according to two people familiar with internal thinking.

White House lawyers plan to tell attorneys for administration witnesses called by the House that they will be asserting executive privilege over their testimony, officials said.

Such a move will intensify an ongoing power struggle between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats, potentially setting up a protracted court battle.

Updated

Hey all, Vivian Ho on the west coast, taking over for Tom McCarthy.

Updated

Summary

Here’s a summary of where things stand:

  • Former vice president Joe Biden intends to make a video announcement Thursday that he is running for president, sources have told the Guardian. Biden was then to head out on tour.
  • Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner downplayed the Russian election-jamming effort detailed in the Mueller report. Kushner said Mueller’s investigation “had a much harsher impact on democracy than a bunch of Facebook ads.”
  • Democrats continued their debate about whether to pursue the impeachment of Trump. Among 2020 candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris favor the step while Bernie Sanders and others have doubts.
  • The House oversight committee has moved to find a former White House official in contempt of Congress for his refusal to testify about the Trump administration’s process for granting security clearances.
  • The White House has announced a boycott of the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner, set for Saturday.

Trump has tweeted a photo from his historic meeting with @jack:

Pelosi: impeachment would be 'divisive'

House speaker Nancy Pelosi just got asked, at the Time 100 summit in NYC, for her latest thoughts on impeachment – and she sure didn’t sound like a fan of the idea.

“I do believe impeachment is one of the most divisive paths that we could go down in our country,” Pelosi said. “But if the path of fact-finding takes us there, we have no choice. But we’re not there yet.”

‘We’re not there yet.’
‘We’re not there yet.’ Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Lauren Aratani is at the event for the Guardian. Pelosi was interviewed by Molly Bell, national political correspondent for Time. Here are extracts from Pelosi’s replies:

On the Mueller report:

While we haven’t seen it all, what we’ve seen has omitted the grand jury’s report, which we expect to see. What we did learn is that the Russians had a systemic overall assault on electoral system, so what we see is that the President of the United States engaged in behavior that was unethical, unscrupulous and beneath the dignity of the office he holds. What’s surprising about that is that the Republicans have an appetite for this behavior. Instead of being ashamed about what that report said, they’ve given their blessing, once again, to the president.

Do you believe the president committed obstruction of justice?

That remains to be seen when we see the rest of the report. … We said no, we’re not taking any redaction back here by reading it in a room with the few of us and then preventing us from having any conversation with other people. Our people deserve the truth, we want them to see what the report says.

It was really a sad day for our country to see that report come out with all the inconsistencies in it. Over the weekend, I have read and studied it. Last night we had a conference call with our members -- a record number of 177 members were on the phone over a break, holiday time, … for 87 minutes, 70 minutes at least of that was listening to the comments of 20 members who called in over and above the report of our six distinguished chairpersons. They made their presentation of the Mueller report. . … This is about being totally free from passion, prejudice, politics. It’s about presentation of the facts when we have the facts we’ll have a better idea of how to go forward.

Do you see the report as a impeachment referral?

There are many ways to hold the President of the United States accountable, and the Mueller report sort of led way to that by not making an indictment .... What matters is the truth. The investigations that our committees will conduct will take us down a fact-finding path — everyone should welcome that. What’s interesting about that is that we see the administration’s stonewalling of the facts getting to the American people. They want to sue head of the oversight committee Elijah Cummings for making a request for testimony, they want to obstruct any subpoenas for info. This is a moment in our history, it’s not about politics, it’s about patriotism, this is an existential threat to our democracy, to our constitution.

I do believe that all of us in public office have a duty to the American people to keep us together. … I do believe impeachment is one of the most divisive paths that we could go down in our country. But if the path of fact-finding takes us there, we have no choice. But we’re not there yet.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has held will hold [it was unclear whether the meeting had yet taken place] a private half-hour meeting with the president to discuss “the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” Vice reports, quoting what it says is an internal Twitter email:

The email does not detail what the meeting will specifically be about, but says the company anticipates it to be about “the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” according to the email written by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety.

If only someone could think of a way to instantly improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter.

Will @jack get stern with Trump? Given the hate speech that Twitter has in the past allowed to thrive on the sight, that’s hard to imagine.

Twitter shares by the way are up. Here’s a snap this morning from Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares in Twitter Inc jumped 13 percent on Tuesday after the social media company reported quarterly revenue above analyst estimates, which executives said was the result of weeding out spam and abusive posts and targeting ads better.

Updated

The House oversight committee has moved to hold a former White House official in contempt of Congress after he failed to appear at a hearing to investigate the handling of White House security clearances.

Committee chairman Elijah E. Cummings said he would schedule a contempt vote against personnel security director Carl Kline, who was directed not to appear by a White House lawyer who said Cummings’ subpoena “unconstitutionally encroaches on fundamental executive branch interests”.

A whistleblower previously told the committee that the mishandling of security clearances, including a clearance for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, had created a national security vulnerability.

A statement issued by Cummings said in part:

“The White House and Mr. Kline now stand in open defiance of a duly authorized congressional subpoena with no assertion of any privilege of any kind by President Trump. Based on these actions, it appears that the President believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight.”

Clinton calls Mueller report 'part of the beginning'

Following Jared Kushner onstage (though not immediately) onstage at the Time 100 summit, Hillary Clinton makes a point opposite to what Kushner said. The Russian attack on the US election should not be treated as a threat that’s behind us, Clinton said: “This is about what’s going on today and the threats to our next election.”

“We were a subject of a foreign adversary’s attack,” Clinton said. “You can try to figure out everything that – we need to get the full report, unredacted version. It’s fair to say that this is not just about the reckoning with a recent past. This is about what’s going on today and the threats to our next election.

“The report is long and it obviously takes time to wade through it, but it’s something that every American who cares about holding our adversaries accountable should take the time to go through. I’m really of the mind that the Mueller report is part of the beginning, it’s not the end. ... there’s so much more that we should know and act upon and obviously that’s what Congress is trying to do.

“... What I want is for the country, the Congress and the press to come to grips with what happened and not to get diverted and distracted by an effort to move on or diminish the impact of this attack.”

“There’s so much more that we should know and act upon...”
“There’s so much more that we should know and act upon...” Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Clinton said Trump had committed acts worthy of indictment:

“I think there’s enough that any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted,” she said. “But because of the rule in the Justice Department that you can’t indict a sitting president, the whole matter of obstruction was very directly sent to the Congress.”

Clinton said she agreed with how Nancy Pelosi was handling the response to the Mueller report:

“I think what Nancy [Pelosi] means, and I agree with what she means I that it shouldn’t be a pre-ordained conclusion, it shouldn’t be about what you do for partisan political purposes outsides … it should be something you take based on serious evidence, not on partisan advantage.”

Beto O’Rourke, the Texas congressman and presidential candidate, is jumping into the race for big donor $$$ with a New York City fundraiser next month in which hosts are asked to raise $25,000. The New York Times reports:

Biden to announce Thursday

The Guardian can confirm reports that former vice president Joe Biden will launch his 2020 campaign this week.

Sources close to Biden said he will make his announcement in a video to be released on Thursday and plans to hold an event in Pittsburgh on Monday.

Biden was initially expected to kick off his campaign on Wednesday before delaying his launch. Early polling shows Biden in the top tier of the Democratic field but in close competition with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for frontrunner status.

Joe Biden leaves a rally organized by UFCW Union members at a Stop and Shop in Dorchester, Massachusetts, April 18, 2019.
Joe Biden leaves a rally organized by UFCW Union members at a Stop and Shop in Dorchester, Massachusetts, April 18, 2019. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images

White House orders boycott of correspondents' dinner

The White House has ordered Trump administration officials not to attend the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner this Saturday. The news was first reported by CNN.

In past years the dinner has been an occasion for mingling between and among media people and government people, and it has typically included a roast of the president, who has typically attended in person.

Not Trump. He didn’t attend last year, and this year he apparently does not want anyone else going either. Instead Trump will hold a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“The dinner is so boring and so negative that we’re going to hold a very positive rally,” Trump said.

In reply to the boycott, Olivier Knox, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said:

We’re looking forward to an enjoyable evening of celebrating the First Amendment and great journalists past, present, and future.”

Biden video announcement Thursday – reports

The @joebiden Twitter account has liked a tweet by a Bloomberg journalist reporting that Biden will release a campaign video Thursday and travel behind it beginning on Monday.

This can only mean one thing.

Updated

Clooney takes swipe at Americans in UN plea for survivors of sexual violence

Addressing a United Nations Security Council meeting on sexual violence, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney called on member nations to stand on the right side of history in supporting the Yazidi survivors of sexual violence.

“This is your Nuremberg moment,” Clooney said at UN headquarters in New York.

The Lebanese-British Clooney chided the US and Russia for refusing to acknowledge the International Criminal Court as a forum for justice, calling out by name John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, and US secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

Member states needed to make greater efforts to end impunity for sexual violence in conflict zones, Clooney said. She pointed particularly to members of Isis, who kidnapped and enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls in Iraq.

Clooney at the UN.
Clooney at the UN. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Clooney, who is representing Nobel laureate Nadia Murad and other Yazidi women, said although member states had expressed their deep concern about the slow progress made in ending the epidemic of sexual violence, “we must go further, because if this august body can’t prevent sexual violence in conflict, it must at least punish it”.

The reviews are in of Jared Kushner’s outing at the Time 100 summit:

Kushner also spoke about an immigration proposal that he said he would present to Trump this week or next week.

Kushner said that Trump’s immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Kevin Hassett were on board.

Bennett: Talking about immigration, when was the last time you and Stephen Miller have had a fight?

Kushner:

Stephen and I have not had any fights. ... I think we’re at a time when people are understanding this issue better than ever before. I do believe the president’s position has been defined by his opponents, by what he’s against, as opposed to what he’s for.

I’ve tried to put together a detailed proposal for him ... My hope is that we can put together something that will show people we are for immigration.

Kushner: Khashoggi murder 'absolutely terrible tragedy'

Lauren Aratani brings us more lines from the Time 100 summit, where White House correspondent Brian Bennett is grilling Kushner now about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Kushner’s bosom friend Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

US intelligence agencies say that the murder happened with MBS’ direct assent.

Bennett asks Kushner whether he disputes that. Kushner replies:

Look, I’m not going to dispute American intelligence services and recommendation. I’m also not going to talk about anything intelligence related.

What I can say is that what we’ve done, when we went to Saudi Arabia for the president’s first trip, it was a very important trip I thought. What we were able to do there was lay out the president’s top four priorities. Number one was priority was countering Iran. We’ve worked with our allies is to think about how we can push past against Iran’s aggression. Everywhere in the Middle East we look where there’s terrorism. ...

Number two priority was to defeat ISIS. You’ve seen that the president has turned up the pressure and now we’ve destroyed the physical caliphate and taken that land back. The third priority was defeating the ideology of extremism. We’ve worked with the Saudis to clean out a lot of the poison that was being taught in the mosques, and we’ve been able to make more progress than people thought we were able to do.

Fourth, was the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. We’ve worked very hard on that for the last couple of years, and you’ll see more of that coming out in the next couple of months.

Bennett: Did you give advice to MBS after the fallout about Khashogghi?

Kushner:

The advice I gave was be transparent as possible. We have to make sure there’s accountability for what happened. The state department has. ...

Bennett: Has he followed that advice? Be transparent as possible?

Kushner:

We’ll find out. ... It’s an absolutely terrible tragedy, what happened. It’s absolutely horrible thing. Again, my job for the president, I have certain objectives that are in America’s interests that we need to accomplish, coming to work every day saying how do I move forward on these objectives that further America’s interest.

Kushner dismisses concerns about Russian spying operations

Here is more from Lauren on Kushner’s exchange with Bennet at the Time 100 summit.

Asked whether he is concerned about Russian spy ops, Kushner said “the world is very curious about Trump”:

Bennett: Are you concerned that Russian intelligence was trying to influence you?

Kushner: “The advice I got is that everyone in the world is very curious about Trump, because he’s a very unknown commodity, and his advice was that’s not a bad thing. Because if you win, and we had a very good chance of winning and he said.

“We had people coming at us from everywhere. We met with the Russian ambassador during the transition, which is also another area of proof that we didn’t have a connection to the Russians during the campaign. ... I do think what is important is the fact we’ve been focused for the last two years while everyone’s losing their mind about Mueller investigation and Russia collusion. The president is trying to rebound the trade relationships, trying to figure out how to get us out of these long-standing wars, thinking about our economy.”

Bennett: Can you make any assurances that you don’t have any Russian entanglements?

Kushner: “I’ve been in government now for two years. When I was thinking of going into government — this is the last thing I thought of doing with my life — I had three companies, I was doing very well, I had a great life, lot less controversial. ... what I did was hired DC lawyers to look at my financials, I have very expensive financial holdings, some very successful businesses. They made recommendations on what I needed to divest, what I could keep. I went through these recommendations, it was a very exhaustive thing. I’ve adhered to the ethics, to the barriers that they wanted me to keep. I’ve done nothing that’s influenced any of my decisions.”

Despite what he claims here about transparency and divestment, Kushner of course has been a model of opacity. As of May 2018, ProPublica reported, Kushner had had to update an ethics disclosure at least 40 times, because he has a way of leaving off details about big loans and corporate structures and certain giant assets.

Updated

Kushner: Mueller investigation 'just a big distraction'

Lauren Aratani reports from the Time 100 summit in New York City, where Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was scheduled to talk about criminal justice reform.

The first question for Kushner, however, is about the Mueller report, Lauren reports:

Right off the bat, Brian Bennett, Time’s White House correspondent, asked Kushner about the Mueller investigation.

Kushner called it “a big distraction” – characterizing the Russian attack on the presidential election, described in its alarming details over 199 pages by Mueller, as “a bunch of Facebook ads” – and said the Mueller report absolved the president.

“Quite frankly the whole investigation is just a big distraction for the country ... the investigations and all the speculation has had a much harsher impact on democracy than a bunch of Facebook ads,” Kushner said.

“Nonsense.”
“Nonsense.” Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

“I personally think what happened was that all these people thought Trump was going to lose, they all predicted Trump was going to lose. They were wrong. The American electorate and this great democratic system chose the opposite. I think that was them saying ‘Hey, we got it wrong. Well, maybe it was Russia.’

“I think now we’ve spent two years going through that nonsense and the one thing the Mueller report is very conclusive on is that there’s absolutely no collaboration or collusion within the Trump campaign. Everything I’ve been saying for the past two years have been fully authenticated.”

Updated

The White House is not saying whether it intends to try to sweep a veil of executive privilege over potential upcoming testimony on Capitol Hill by former counsel Don McGahn. The House judiciary committee subpoenaed McGahn yesterday.

Asked whether a claim of executive privilege was being considered to limit McGahn’s testimony, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told reporters “It’s up to the attorneys.”

As for McGahn’s running description in the Mueller report of potentially criminal misconduct by Trump, Gidley said, “I haven’t spoken to the president about that.”

Asked whether Trump would accept Russian help in the 2020 election, Gidley replied, according to a press pool report:

I don’t understand the question...he’s already denounced multiple times Russian involvement. This report proves we knew about this in 2014. Barack Obama did nothing, and we are already coordinating on the state and local level to ensure this doesn’t happen again...We’re already running tests to see if the election could be hacked and how that would work to stop that. Things that Barack Obama and his administration did not do. We now know why. He thought Hillary Clinton would in fact win the election.”

Then Gidley listed actions he said the administration has taken against Russia.

“We’re the ones who have been tough on Russia,” Gidley concluded. “Barack Obama clearly hasn’t. This report exposes that.”

Biden watch continues

Joe Biden, the former vice president and frontrunner in many polls of 2020 Democratic candidates for president, plans to announce his candidacy with a video this week to be followed by a fundraiser in Philadelphia and a rally in Pittsburgh, according to reporting led by Mike Allen at Axios.

The Biden announcement video could apparently drop at any moment but is being telegraphed for Wednesday or Thursday. Biden already has scooped up an endorsement, from the New York governor, who passed over home-state senator Kirsten Gillibrand, also running for president:

Representative Katie Hill, a first-termer from California, contributes a nice, public-service-oriented recap of the Mueller report.

“I wanted to walk it back and walk through the details,” she says:

We posted earlier about the debate cleaving the Democrats over whether to move to impeach Donald Trump.

Should it not go without saying that Republicans are not having the same debate? In any case, they’re not:

Some Republicans not speaking now were just outraged, outraged when Clinton was impeached for obstruction of justice, my colleagues Jon Swaine and Lauren Gambino wrote this week.

Take senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, speaking on the senate floor in favor of convicting Clinton in 1999:

Following his deposition, the president had to decide what to do with his loyal secretary, Ms Betty Currie. And, again, the undisputed evidence shows that the president took the path of lies and deceit.

Contrary to federal obstruction of justice laws and contrary to judge Wright’s protective order … President Clinton left the deposition, went back to the White House and called Ms Currie at home to ask her to come to the White House the next day, which, I might add, was a Sunday.

… I am completely and utterly perplexed by those who argue that perjury and obstruction of justice are not high crimes and misdemeanors.

Read the full piece here:

Have you seen the new trailer yet for Knock Down the House, the upcoming Netflix documentary that follows four women candidates who were part of the historically large wave to win House seats in 2018?

The doc follows Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the breakout Bronx star; Cori Bush, an African American woman in the Missouri district where unarmed teen Michael Brown was killed by police officers in 2014; Paula Jean Swearengin, a West Virginia woman whose community has been upended by fracking; and Amy Vilela, a no-nonsense Las Vegas woman who went from being a single mother on food stamps to having a C-suite position whose core issue is healthcare.

Here’s the teaser:

In his review of the film, Jordan Hoffman wrote:

The bulk of this spry, under-90-minutes film is on AOC. How could it not? She’s an international superstar and ratings-driver for both leftwing and rightwing cable news. While this is not Frederick Wiseman-esque pure “direct cinema” there are enough sequences that lean into that fly-on-the-wall type of film-making. As such, one comes away with really knowing what makes AOC tick, proving that she really is as good as she seems on TV and social media. (Also we get to meet her boyfriend, which was a first for me; he seems quite nice.)

Read Jordan’s full review here:

Speaking of Trump, we have his day’s schedule, and it includes lunch with vice president Mike Pence at 12:30 pm and a swearing-in ceremony for interior secretary David Bernhardt at 3:45.

And if you think that’s a light schedule, you’ve never had lunch with Mike Pence.

Donald Trump has been tweeting his usual morning stew of paranoiac caps-lock attacks on Democrats and the media mixed with quotations from Fox and Friends and a jag about TV ratings. You know where to find it if you’re interested. Here’s the finale:

House Republicans impeached Bill Clinton in 1998 for lying to a grand jury about sex with a former intern and for obstruction of justice. (The senate acquitted Clinton.)

Why would Democrats now hesitate to impeach Donald Trump, given the pile of evidence against Trump that special counsel Robert Mueller has handed them – and not even in a heap, but rather neatly stacked, with footnotes even?

Advocates for impeachment largely make an argument about principle. They argue that to do nothing with the evidence against Trump would set a very bad precedent, in terms of the president’s accountability before the law, and represent a further concession of power by the legislature to the executive, further upsetting the constitutionally prescribed “balance” of powers. What will some future president do, if Trump gets away with this?

Opponents of impeachment, meanwhile, make a political argument. Impeaching Trump now will hurt Democrats in 2020, they say. Not every voter thinks Mueller found significant wrongdoing by Trump. Those voters might still vote against Trump in 2020 – unless, the thinking goes, the Democrats serve voters up a year of impeachment hearings on CNN atop two years of Mueller. And in an election year, the thinking continues, there are other things to talk about, such as health care and wealth inequality.

To point out how Democrats might be hurt by impeaching Trump, some analysts point to the (temporary) dive in Republicans’ approval ratings after that party impeached Clinton. But the lesson from the Clinton episode might not be so simple, as NBC News’ Steve Kornacki tweeted yesterday in a thread we can recommend to you:

Impeachment: where the 2020 Democrats stand

Where do the other Democrats stand on the I-question? Here’s a rundown of what the major 2020 candidates have said about impeaching Donald Trump:

Joe Biden: [radio silence]

Bernie Sanders: (weak) NO. “I worry that works for Trump’s advantage.”

Kamala Harris: (weak) YES. “I believe Congress should take the steps toward impeachment.”

Pete Buttigieg: PUNT. “I’m pretty sure he deserves to be, but Congress will have to figure procedurally what to do.”

Elizabeth Warren: (strong) YES. “If any other human being in this country had done what’s documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail.”

Beto O’Rourke: PUNT. “I’m not asking Congress to do one thing or the other. I’m just saying — you’re asking me, has the president committed impeachable offenses? Yes. Period.” As a senate candidate in 2018, O’Rourke favored impeaching Trump.

Amy Klobuchar: PUNT. “I believe that I am the jury here, so I’m not going to predispose things.” Klobuchar sits on the Senate judiciary committee which would try Trump if he were impeached in the House.

Julián Castro: (weak) YES. “I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Congress to open up those proceedings.”

Cory Booker: PUNT. “There’s a lot more investigation that should go on before Congress comes to any conclusions like that.”

Kirsten Gillibrand: PUNT. Gillibrand has directed reporters to statements that don’t take a stand. “Congress should get the full, unredacted Mueller report. The American people have the right to know the facts—without the spin.”

Impeachment hearings would need a green light from the Democratic House leadership to proceed. It turns out that that group has expressed not a lot of appetite to impeach. Here’s what three leaders have said:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi: (weak) NO. “While our views range from proceeding to investigate the findings or proceeding directly to impeachment, we all firmly agree that we should proceed down a path of finding the truth.”

Majority leader Steny Hoyer: (strong) NO. “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point.”

Majority whip James Clyburn: (weak) NO. “We want to see the full report, give us the full report, let us make up our own minds.”

Hello and welcome to our live blog coverage of the 2020 race for the White House.

Senator Kamala Harris, a candidate for president, perked some ears at a town hall hosted by CNN Monday night by joining calls for Donald Trump’s impeachment.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “tells us that this president and his administration engaged in obstruction of justice,” said Harris, a former California attorney general.

“I believe Congress should take the steps toward impeachment.”

Impeach!
Impeach! Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

Whether to pursue Trump’s impeachment in the aftermath of the Mueller report is a debate dividing not only the 2020 candidates but the Democratic party at large. With majority control in the House, Democrats could impeach Trump on a straight party-line vote.

Senator Elizabeth Warren was out in front of the field of major 2020 candidates in calling for Trump’s impeachment, a call she repeated on Monday.

“If any other human being in this country had done what’s documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail,” Warren said.

But some Democrats think that giving Trump marquee treatment in the legislature by making him the offstage star of potentially months of impeachment hearings could backfire.

Nancy Pelosi cautioned Democrats against hastily moving toward impeachment in a conference call with party leaders on Monday afternoon. And Senator Bernie Sanders, also a candidate for president, articulated that view at the CNN town hall, which was held in Manchester, New Hampshire, which will be the second state to vote in the primaries season.

“If for the next year and half all Congress is talking about is Trump, Trump, Trump,” Sanders said, “I worry that works for Trump’s advantage.”

Pass.
Pass. Photograph: Meg Kinnard/AP

In other news, the president is fidgeting this morning on Twitter.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Movies and series leaving Netflix in March 2026, including hugely re-watched sitcom
A deal is yet to be struck to keep the show on the service
The Independent UK
The Independent UK
No, autistic people are not ‘mind blind’ – here’s why
For four decades, a controversial idea has shaped how autism is understood by researchers, healthcare professionals and the public: the claim that autistic people are “mind blind”. The phrase suggests an inability to grasp what others think or feel. It is simple, memorable – and wrong.
The Conversation
The Conversation
Demna brings sexy back in effort to reinvigorate Gucci
Designer’s first catwalk for the brand in Milan flirts with bad taste with short, tight dresses and a diamante G-string
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Neil Sedaka death: Legendary singer-songwriter behind ‘(Is This the Way to) Amarillo’ was 86
Sedaka was the songwriter behind a string of popular hits including ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do’ and ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’
The Independent UK
The Independent UK
A 'Mansion Tax' in Los Angeles Is Worsening the City's Housing Crisis
A transfer tax on high-value real estate transactions is reducing the number of homes on the market and limiting new construction.
Reason
Reason
Pink ‘has moved to New York and is in running to take over Kelly Clarkson’s talk show’
After being spotted in the Big Apple, singer Pink is said to have moved to New York and is said to be in the running to take over Kelly Clarkson’s NBC talk show.
BANG Premier
BANG Premier
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.
Download on the AppStore Get it on Google Play