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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Joan E Greve (now) and Oliver Laughland (earlier)

Nancy Pelosi on Trump: 'He'll be impeached for ever' – as it happened

Nancy Pelosi said Trump ‘saw the power of the gavel there’.
Nancy Pelosi said Trump ‘saw the power of the gavel there’. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Media

Summary

That’s all from me. Thanks for sticking around for the tail end of this momentous week.

Here’s a summary of the day’s major stories:

  • Nancy Pelosi made a point to emphasize in an interview that Trump would go down in history as an impeached president. “He’ll be impeached for ever,” the House speaker said. “No matter what the Senate does. He’s impeached for ever because he violated our Constitution.”
  • Trump accepted the House speaker’s invitation to deliver his annual state of the union address on Feb. 4, one day after the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa. The timing also means the president will likely speak to Congress shortly after being acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial.
  • Trump suggested Pelosi should be impeached for holding back the articles of impeachment from the Senate, even though members of Congress cannot be impeached.
  • The Democratic national committee announced the requirements to qualify for the January debate, which could eliminate all but five candidates – Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar – from the debate stage.
  • Trump continued to lash out against Christianity Today after the evangelical magazine suggested the president should be removed from office.
  • The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security said immigration agents had not engaged in “misconduct or malfeasance” regarding the deaths in custody of two migrant children last December.

Bernie Sanders spoke with my colleague Sam Levin this morning, and reiterated his critique of Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden and billionaires:

They will tell you, ‘It doesn’t impact me. It really doesn’t mean anything to me.’ That is clearly nonsensical. Why would billionaires and wealthy people be making large contributions if it didn’t mean something to them?

The Vermont senator also addressed concerns that his nomination could lead to a Democratic defeat similar to that of Jeremy Corbyn and the British Labour party’s recent shellacking:

The United Kingdom, last I heard, is not the United States. Brexit is not a major part of what this campaign is about. The issues that I am campaigning on, in fact, are precisely the issues the American people support. Talk about raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour. Four years ago when I introduced that concept, it was a radical idea. Not radical anymore.

Read the full interview here.

It’s the Friday afternoon before Christmas, so please forgive me for sharing this article, a startlingly in-depth investigation into the most dedicated editor of the Wikipedia page of Pete Buttigieg.

Another interesting report from the Washington Post: over the past few days, the White House threatened to veto the year-end spending package necessary to avert a government shutdown before Saturday unless the House dropped language about military aid for Ukraine.

Per the Post:

The Ukraine provision was one of several items the White House drew a hard line on during negotiations to finalize the spending legislation, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the developments. It would have required the White House to swiftly release $250 million in defense money for Ukraine that was part of the spending package.

The White House this year refused to release congressionally appropriated defense aid to Kyiv during a period when President Trump had asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president and 2020 candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. Trump’s request of Zelensky as the White House delayed the aid was at the heart of House Democrats’ decision to impeach Trump this week on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Read the whole report here.

White House aide Stephen Miller has pushed to embed ICE agents in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, in apparent circumvention of federal laws, the Washington Post reports.

Unaccompanied migrant children are cared for by the ORR, which is part of the department of health and human services (HHS), and congress has passed laws to keep the program separate from deportation enforcement efforts.

But after the White House tried and failed to “embed” ICE agents in the agency, it did extract a concession from HHS:

They agreed to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to collect fingerprints and other biometric information from adults seeking to claim migrant children at government shelters. If those adults are deemed ineligible to take custody of a child, ICE could then use their information to target them for arrest and deportation.

Read the rest of the Washington Post’s report here.

The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security found no “misconduct or malfeasance” in the deaths of two migrant children last December, according to BuzzFeed News.

Jakelin Caal Maquin, 7, and Felipe Gómez Alonzo, 8, died in US custody last winter after crossing the border with their fathers and being detained by Customs and Border Protection.

Both died from infections that led to sepsis, according to the report.

Last week, CBP refused to allow a group of doctors in San Diego access to detained migrant children to provide them with flu vaccines. CBP has said that it only detains children for less than 72 hours, making medical services unnecessary, but government records have shown children and adults held for longer.

Since we already had Jane Lynch, it seems only fair to check in on the rest of the day’s weird celebrity/politician match-ups...

Jack Nicholson was spotted at a Bernie Sanders rally:

And here’s an image that will set Hacker News aflame ...

Speaking of billionaires... the two billionaire candidates in the Democratic presidential primary spent about $15m on television ads in California in advance of yesterday’s debate, my colleague Sam Levin reports.

What could you do with that kind of money in a state with 59,000 homeless residents? Well, house some of them, to start.

Rev Andy Bales of the Union Rescue Mission told Sam that $15m could provide immediate if temporary shelter for approximately 1,800 homeless people from LA’s Skid Row.

Alternatively, that kind of money could fund 30 new units of supportive housing, providing longterm housing for about 50 people.

Read the rest of Sam’s report here.

The Trump campaign will not be, well, turning the other cheek on this one.

Hello everyone! This is Julia Carrie Wong, reporting in from a wine cave somewhere north of San Francisco where I’ve been hanging out with my good pal Jane Lynch.

Is she joking? Is she serious? It’s hard to tell, but according to a quick search of federal elections filings, a Jane Lynch who lists her profession as actor and residence as Los Angeles has made the following donations to presidential campaigns this year:

  • $2700 to Pete Buttigieg,
  • $100 to Elizabeth Warren, and
  • $100 to Marianne Williamson.

Evening summary

That’s it from me after a historic week in Washington. My west coast colleague, Julia Carrie Wong, will take over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • Nancy Pelosi made a point to emphasize in an interview that Trump would go down in history as an impeached president. “He’ll be impeached for ever,” the House speaker said. “No matter what the Senate does. He’s impeached for ever because he violated our Constitution.”
  • Trump accepted the House speaker’s invitation to deliver his annual state of the union address on Feb. 4, one day after the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa. The timing also means the president will likely speak to Congress shortly after being acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial.
  • Trump suggested Pelosi should be impeached for holding back the articles of impeachment from the Senate, even though members of Congress cannot be impeached.
  • The Democratic national committee announced the requirements to qualify for the January debate, which could eliminate all but five candidates -- Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar -- from the debate stage.
  • Trump continued to lash out against Christianity Today after the evangelical magazine suggested the president should be removed from office.

Julia will have much more coming up, so stay tuned.

Trump suggests Pelosi should be impeached, which is impossible

Trump has now sent a tweet suggesting Nancy Pelosi should be impeached as House speaker for holding up the articles of impeachment, even though members of Congress cannot actually be impeached.

The Constiution specifies the House can only impeach the “President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States,” and the Senate detemined in 1799 that members of Congress do not qualify as “Civil Officers of the United States.”

According to Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, members of Congress can be expelled for “disorderly behavior” if two-thirds of their colleagues support their removal. But expulsion and impeachment are different mechanisms of removal.

Updated

Trump just sent a tweet declaring his “FULL Endorsement” for Jeff Van Drew, the congressman who switched his party affiliation to Republican after opposing the president’s impeachment.

“South Jersey is TRUMP COUNTRY, so I know ALL NJ Republicans will join me in supporting Jeff Van Drew,” the president wrote.

The tweet comes one day after Van Drew appeared alongside Trump in the Oval Office and declared his “undying” support for the president, setting off plenty of Twitter heckling.

Van Drew won his congressional seat as a Democrat last year with 53% of the vote, so it’s possible the district could change hands. But the Cook Political Report has rated the seat as “Lean Republican” following Van Drew’s party switch.

Eric Ueland, Trump’s legislative affairs director, said the president is “baffled” by Nancy Pelosi’s threat to hold back the House-passed articles of impeachment from the Senate.

“I think the president is completely baffled at the theory that Nancy Pelosi appears to have that somehow holding back impeachment articles will leverage some sort of specific behavior out of the Senate,” Ueland told CBS News.

The legislative affairs director added it would be “constitutionally questionable” and “extraordinarily unprecedented” if Pelosi held back the articles of impeachment.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone had a “brief conversation” with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell as he and Trump’s legisaltive affairs director, Eric Ueland, toured Capitol Hill to look at potential locations for the eventual impeachment trial.

Shortly after Trump bragged that he has been the best president for “religion itself,” Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg sent this tweet.

Buttigieg has often discussed his faith on the campaign trail and has used it to explain his political positions. For example, the Indiana mayor got into a bit of a feud earlier this year with Vice President Mike Pence, who signed a law as governor of the state that LGBTQ advocates feared would allow businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples.

“If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade,” Buttigieg said in April. “And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

Congress has no more votes scheduled before the holidays, but the Senate is already looking ahead to its 2020 business.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the finance committee, has announced a Jan. 7 markup session for the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, which the House approved yesterday.

The Democratic-controlled House approved the bill by a vote of 385 to 41, so it seems likely the Republican-controlled Senate will pass the legislation, which Trump is eager to claim credit for.

But at a press conference yesterday, Nancy Pelosi praised the House Democratic caucus for working to get the bill passed. “Of course we’ll take credit for it,” the House speaker said. “It would have collateral benefit for the president. I don’t care about that. We had an opportunity to do something very important for America’s people.”

Trump then lashed out against Pelosi on Twitter -- claiming the House speaker, who oversaw months of negotiations with US trade representative Robert Lighthizer, “doesn’t even know what [the bill] says.”

Two senior Trump advisers, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and legislative affairs director Eric Ueland, are visiting Capitol Hill to view locations where the president’s eventual impeachment trial could take place.

“It will be a good straightforward run-through,” Ueland said.

Trump accepts state of the union invite

Trump has accepted the House speaker’s invitation and will deliver his annual state of the union address on Feb. 4, one day after the Iowa caucuses.

“President Donald J. Trump has accepted the Speaker’s invitation to deliver the State of the Union Address on February 4, 2020,” White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley said in a statement.

The timing means Trump will likely deliver the annual speech shortly after he is acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial.

Joe Biden seems to be taking the high road after Sarah Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, sent a now-deleted tweet mocking the former vice president for his history of stuttering.

During last night’s debate, Biden reflected upon children he has met on the campaign trail who have asked him for help because they also struggle with stuttering.

To emphasize the point, Biden did an impression of his own past stutter. Shortly afterwards, Sanders sent a tweet reading, “I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I hhhave absolutely no idea what Biden is talking about.”

Biden quickly replied on Twitter, “I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy. Look it up.”

Sanders later deleted the tweet and apologized, claiming she did not know about Biden’s history of stuttering. “I actually didn’t know that about you and that is commendable,” Sanders said. “I apologize and should have made my point respectfully.”

Less than two months after dropping out of the presidential race, Beto O’Rourke has launched a political action group meant to boost Democratic candidates in his home state of Texas.

In an email to supporters, O’Rourke said the group, which is called Powered by People, will bring “together volunteers from around the state to work on the most important races in Texas.”

“Powered by People will organize grassroots volunteers to do the tough, necessary work that wins elections: registering Texans to vote (especially those that have just moved to Texas and those who are just turning 18), knocking on their doors, making phone calls, and connecting the dots so that we all understand that in order to make progress on the issues we care most about — like gun violence, healthcare and climate — we will have to register, volunteer and vote,” O’Rourke said.

It’s worth noting what a historic week it has been for Nancy Pelosi. In less than 48 hours, the House speaker oversaw the impeachment of a president, shepherded through a renegotiated North American trade deal and invited Trump to deliver his state of the union address.

Meanwhile, Trump is still stewing over the evangelical magazine Christianity Today calling for his removal from office, claiming he has been the best president for “religion itself.”

Despite the magazine’s censure, Trump’s approval rating among white evangelicals, whose support he will need to win reelection, remains very high.

Nancy Pelosi’s letter inviting Trump to deliver his state of the union seemed to take on an added meaning considering the House’s vote this week to impeach the president for abusing his power and obstructing Congress.

“In their great wisdom, our Founders crafted a Constitution based on a system of separation of powers: three co-equal branches acting as checks on each other,” the House speaker wrote.

“In the spirit of respecting our Constitution, I invite you to deliver your State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 in the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Pelosi invites Trump to deliver state of the union in February

Nancy Pelosi has invited Trump to deliver his annual state of the union address on Feb. 4, one day after the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa.

The timing of the state of the union also likely means Trump will deliver his remarks shortly after being acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial.

Pete Buttigieg’s campaign has just announced an endorsement from actor Kevin Costner, who will introduce the presidential candidate at a town hall in Indianola, Iowa, this Sunday.

Costner starred in the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” which centers on an Iowa corn farmer building a baseball diamond in his fields after hearing a voice saying, “If you build it, he will come.”

DNC raises qualification thresholds for January debate

This is Joanie Greve in Washington, taking over the blog from Oliver Laughland, and there is some more debate news today following last night’s face-off.

Candidates take the stage for the sixth Democratic presidential debate.
Candidates take the stage for the sixth Democratic presidential debate. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Media

The Democratic National Committee has announced the requirements to qualify for the January debate in Des Moines, Iowa, and they could eliminate all but a handful of candidates.

According to the requirements, candidates must attract 225,000 donors and hit 5% in at least four national or early-voting state polls. Candidates can also hit 7% in two early-voting state surveys to meet the polling requirement.

These heightened thresholds could eliminate everyone from the debate stage except Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang, who participated in last night’s debate, have not yet met the polling requirement, and there will be few surveys taken over the holidays, complicating their qualification path.

Updated

Lunchtime summary

Here’s how things stand at lunch:

  • Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, has said she shown Donald Trump “the power of the gavel” and has impeached the president “forever”. The combative talk comes as Democrats and Republicans in the senate continue to battle out the parameters of a senate trial.
  • Ivanka Trump has defended her father’s relationship with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani who she described as a “real warrior and a great, great mayor”.
  • Donald Trump is expected to sign a multibillion dollar defense bill later today.
  • Trump also lashed out at Christianity Today, an evangelical newspaper that has called for his impeachment.

Pelosi: Trump will be 'impeached for ever'

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has told the Associated Press that she has shown the president “the power of the gavel” by impeaching the president “for ever”.

“He just got impeached. He’ll be impeached for ever. No matter what the Senate does. He’s impeached for ever because he violated our constitution,” she said during an interview on Thursday that was published today.

“If I did nothing else, he saw the power of the gavel there And it wasn’t me, it was all of our members making their own decision.”

She also urged Senate majority leader, the Republican Mitch McConnell, to bring forward votes on the raft of bills passed by Democrats in the House since the 2018 midterms.

“As the election approaches, we would not want these to be election issues, we would like them to be accomplished legislation,” she said. “So they either pass the bills or pay a price for not passing bills.”

Updated

Ivanka Trump defends her father's relationship with Giuliani

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior advisor, has given a particularly soft interview to CBS News. The full interview won’t air until 29 December, but the outlet have released a partial transcript.

There’s not a huge amount of probing in there, but Trump does appear to defend her father’s judgement when it comes to his relationship with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani is at the centre of the Ukraine scandal for his role in an unorthodox diplomatic back channel tasked with setting up an investigation into Trump’s political rivals in Ukraine,

She said:

I know Rudy Giuliani in a very different context as one of the greatest mayors in the history of this country and- and a real hero in New York. So that is- that is the experience I’ve had with Rudy for a very long period of time. He’s smart and thoughtful and- and- and a real warrior and was a great- a great mayor.

She also said her father is “energized” by the impeachment process.

Updated

The president has said that a formal signing of a US trade deal with China is “being arranged” after he spoke directly with president Xi Jinping today.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said yesterday that the nations sides would sign the Phase 1 trade pact, which calls for U.S. farm product exports to China to double over the next two years, at the beginning of January.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has urged the Trump administration to withhold signing the deal until two Canadian detained in China are released by authorities.

Despite the new deal, an analysis by Bloomberg News suggests it will not cover the remaining costs of the ongoing trade war between China and the US, as the majority of tariffs will remain in place.

Here’s some more on Washington state representative Matthew Shea, the local politician found to have “participated in an act of domestic terrorism against the United States”, according to a report produced for the state legislature.

This from Jason Wilson, who has reported on Shea for the Guardian. It was Wilson’s reporting along with other local outlets, that led to the legislature commissioning the investigation:

The report further contends that in a document entitled the Biblical Basis for War, Shea “advocated the replacement of US democracy with a theocracy and the killing of all males who do not agree”.

In its conclusion, while commenting that Shea is not an “imminent direct threat … it is more probable than not that Representative Shea is likely to plan, direct and engage in additional future conflicts that could carry with them significant risk of bloodshed and loss of life”.

It adds: “Representative Shea presents a present and growing threat of risk to others through political violence.”

In response to the report, the Washington Republican state legislative minority leader, JT Wilcox, announced on Twitter that Shea had been suspended from the house Republican caucus.

The report was commissioned by the house and produced by an outside agency, the Rampart Group, following reporting from the Guardian and other local and national outlets on Shea’s activities.

It says Shea “planned the 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge; engaged in the conflict by directing Cows (Coalition of Western States) members and militias in support of the takeover; and traveled to Burns, Oregon, and met with refuge armed occupiers contrary to appeals and warnings from law enforcement and Oregon state elected officials”.

You can read more of Jason’s work on this below:

Donald Trump has responded to an editorial in the mainstream evangelical news outlet Christianity Today, which called for his removal from office.

The outlet was founded in 1956 by the famous evangelical preacher Billy Graham. Graham died in February 2018 and was honored at a US capitol memorial service, where Trump described him as “an ambassador for Christ who reminded the world of the power of prayer and the gift of God’s grace.”

Graham’s son, Franklin, remains an ardent supporter of the president.

But Christianity Today still attracts 4.3 million monthly online reader among a demographic, evangelical Christians, that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Here’s an excerpt from the editorial:

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

The president was clearly irked by the article, posting two tweets this morning branding the publication a “far left magazine” and arguing he has done “more for the evangelical community” than any other president in history.

Updated

Welcome to our live coverage of US politics.

Here are some of the stories we’re tracking this morning.

Updated

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