Philbin knows that too. Just more flagrant lies from the lying liars.
"Whataboutism" in trumps case is used to justify bad behavior without admitting it is bad behavior. Your complaining about Obama is being directed to the wrong audience. Ask the repubs why they didn't impeach him. They controlled the house for 6 of his years.
To be honest, I really didn't think there would be such wide-spread blind devotion to trump. Before the election, the sheer numbers of never-trumpers who pointed out all his glaring inadequacy and lack of character seemed to indicate the repubs would nominate someone else.
As the number of repubs climbs while embracing his lie about everything mindset shows we are in decline. trump is the worst possible role model there is. He is a scumbag without the spirit of our country. It's not that he is a repub because he isn't. He has many of the negative traits I can't stand.
He'll always be a guy from Queens who never got over the rejection he got from Manhattan.
And one other question. Since all federal impeachments that reached the senate had allowed witnesses, why shouldn't this one?
"The House of Representatives adopted a resolution on June 11 authorizing Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, to go to court to pursue civil enforcement of subpoenas issued to Attorney General William Barr and former White House Counsel Don McGahn. Importantly, however, the measure also makes changes that will increase the power of House committees to pursue enforcement of additional subpoenas.
At present, House Democrats have chosen not to open a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump. But other efforts to investigate potential misconduct by the executive branch and to check the president’s use of executive authority are proceeding on several fronts. In a number of cases—such as the attempts to obtain Trump’s personal financial records and to limit the administration’s ability to spend money on a border wall—this work has involved going to court. The resolution regarding subpoena power sets up the potential for another round of lawsuits.
The powers with which congressional committees are vested to develop legislation and conduct oversight are granted to them by their parent chambers, the House and the Senate. Questions about how much power House committees should have to issue and enforce subpoenas aren’t new. Prior to 1975, only a few House committees had the power to issue subpoenas as a matter of course under the Rules of the House of Representatives, while other panels were routinely granted the authority as part of separate investigative resolutions reported out of the House Committee on Rules and adopted by the House. But in 1973-1974, as part of a broader reform effort, the House considered whether to change this approach. Some members, including Rep. Richard Bolling, who was leading the House Select Committee on Committees, maintained that the House had become too permissive in granting committees subpoena power. “What has happened in the present situation,” he argued in a 1974 hearing, “is that it becomes a matter of rivalry and prestige. If one committee has got it, the other committee wants it, too.”
Bolling’s panel suggested tightening these procedures; under its proposal, committees and subcommittees could request subpoena power for specific purposes and could issue subpoenas “only upon the authorization of the House … expressly for (and limited to) that investigation or activity or series of investigations or activities.” (Three of the four committees that already had subpoena power would maintain it.) Once granted subpoena authority, a majority of the members on the committee would have to approve their issuance, and “compliance with any subpena [sic] issued by a committee or subcommittee … may be enforced only as authorized or directed by the House.”
Ultimately, however, the House adopted a different reform, recommended by the Democratic Caucus’s Committee on Organization, Study, and Review. This reform granted all committees and subcommittees subpoena power; however, it contained the same suggestions of Bolling’s committee on majority approval and requiring House approval for enforcement. As Margaret Taylor and one of us discussed recently on Lawfare, the House has repeatedly expanded committees’ subpoena power since then. The House has maintained, however, the requirement that enforcement of compliance with a subpoena must be authorized or directed by the full chamber. Indeed, in 2008, when the House sought to enforce a subpoena against White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten through civil federal court proceedings—the first time Congress attempted to do so by adopting a single-chamber resolution to authorize the filing of its own lawsuit—the process began with a vote of the full House.
The June 11 resolution passed by the House changes this, however. Now, committee chairs have the ability to go to court on behalf of their committees to try to force compliance with subpoenas they’ve issued without first receiving approval of the full House. Instead, committee chairs will require the approval of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), which comprises the speaker, the majority leader, the majority whip, the minority leader and the minority whip. Specifically, the resolution states that a vote of the BLAG—on which Democrats have a majority—“is the equivalent of the vote of the full House of Representatives.”
Why might House Democrats be continuing this expansion of House committees’ subpoena power now? One possibility is that it is a product of the House’s litigation strategy. As Mike Stern, a former lawyer in the House General Counsel's office, has explained, the House could arguably have used the BLAG alone to authorize lawsuits to enforce committee subpoenas, without adopting this most recent resolution—but would have had to reconcile such an action with the provision in the House rules requiring the chamber to authorize or direct efforts to enforce compliance with a subpoena. The current House leadership has initiated other litigation on the House’s behalf using just the BLAG, including its challenge to Trump’s efforts to construct a border wall. But existing case law in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia most squarely supports the conclusion that “the House as a whole has standing to assert its investigatory power” and can authorize individual committees to do so by enforcing its subpoenas. Hence, the resolution may be an effort to avoid possible standing issues by strengthening the case that the BLAG can authorize such legal action in the House’s name. (Notably, while another D.C. district court judge recently ruled against the House on different standing grounds in the border wall case, he distinguished that matter from case law relating to the House’s investigatory and oversight authority.)
Reporting also suggests that the House would like to avoid taking up floor time with repeated votes on the House floor. Floor time can be a hot commodity in Congress, though this is often less of an issue in the House than in the Senate (where layover requirements related to filing cloture in the presence of a filibuster can eat up significant time). In addition to saving time, avoiding individual floor votes on resolutions authorizing civil enforcement of subpoenas also allows more vulnerable House Democrats to avoid being tagged as “repeatedly voting to harass the president” or whatever other criticisms might be levied against them in the 2020 campaign.
At the end of the day, civil enforcement in response to noncompliance with a House subpoena still has the potential to be a long, slow slog through the courts. The Miers litigation, for example, took roughly 19 months to resolve. But the House’s decision to make it easier for committees to pursue litigation represents another step in Democrats’ efforts to use their powers to investigate the executive branch without—yet—moving to a full impeachment inquiry."
https://www.lawfareblog.com/house-st...na-enforcement
The courts have already ruled on testimony by white house personnel. The courts have said McGahn must testify. And if he has to testify, others will too. Not all of their appeals will make it to the top. It is under appeal with SCOTUS but a decision is expected in May or June.
"WASHINGTON — The former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II must testify before House impeachment investigators about President Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Mueller inquiry, a judge ruled on Monday, saying that senior presidential aides must comply with congressional subpoenas and calling the administration’s arguments to the contrary “fiction.”
The 120-page decision by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia handed another lower-court victory to House Democrats in their fight to overcome Mr. Trump’s stonewalling.
“Presidents are not kings,” wrote Judge Jackson, adding that current and former White House officials owe their allegiance to the Constitution. “They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.”
The Justice Department, which is representing Mr. McGahn in the lawsuit, will appeal, a spokeswoman said. Still, the ruling by Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, could have broader consequences for the investigation into the Ukraine affair.
In rejecting the Trump administration’s sweeping claim that top presidential advisers, as Mr. McGahn was, are absolutely immune from being compelled to talk about their official duties — meaning they do not even have to show up — the judge said the same is true even for those who worked on national security issues.
Notably, John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, has let it be known that he has significant information about the Ukraine affair at the heart of the impeachment inquiry but is uncertain whether any congressional subpoena for his testimony would be constitutionally valid. He wants a judge to decide.
Judge Jackson’s ruling also came on the same day that another federal judge in Washington held out the possibility that more documents about the Ukraine affair could yet see the light of day, ruling that emails between the White House and the Pentagon about the freezing of military aid to Ukraine should be released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
But even as those rulings suggested that more potential evidence for impeachment investigators might become available as the cases play out, House Democrats said the Intelligence Committee would deliver a report soon after Thanksgiving making the case for impeaching Mr. Trump, moving forward rather than waiting for the inevitable appeals to drag on.
Democrats are compiling a list of “noncompliance with lawful subpoenas” as part of the report so the Judiciary Committee can consider drafting an article of impeachment charging Mr. Trump with obstructing Congress, the intelligence panel’s chairman, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, wrote in a letter to colleagues on Monday.
Indeed on Monday, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked an appeals court ruling in another case that required Mr. Trump’s accounting firm to turn over financial records to another House committee while justices decide whether to take the case. If they do choose to hear arguments, the justices might not issue a final ruling on the matter until late June.
THE LAWYER AT THE CENTER OF TRUMP’S LEGACYDonald McGahn’s efforts to reshape the American judiciary won him praise from conservatives even as his central role in the Mueller report angered President Trump and his supporters. Watch this episode of “The Weekly” on FX and Hulu.
Several potential witnesses to what Mr. Trump said and did to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations that could benefit him politically — like Mr. Bolton and Mr. Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney — have declined to testify because the administration instructed them not to, claiming that current or former senior officials are constitutionally immune.
Mr. Bolton, who met alone with Mr. Trump about why he was freezing a military aid package to Ukraine in August, has threatened to sue if Democrats try to compel him to testify, seeking a court ruling about whether such a subpoena is legally valid.
A lawyer for Mr. Bolton, Charles J. Cooper, has previously argued that Mr. Bolton’s situation is different from Mr. McGahn’s because Mr. Bolton’s official duties centered on foreign affairs and national security matters. But Mr. Bolton’s intentions and desires are unclear.
Mr. Bolton has become an enigmatic figure in the impeachment drama. According to other testimony, he strongly opposed the Ukraine pressure campaign and told aides to report what was going on to White House lawyers. He left the White House under rancorous circumstances in September and has since criticized Mr. Trump’s foreign policy.
But it remains unclear what he would tell impeachment investigators if he were to appear, and House Democrats are nervous that he is such a wild card he could just as easily hurt their case as help it. He accused the White House last week of not giving him back his Twitter account when he left, then teasingly asked if it was “out of fear of what I may say?”
In her ruling, Judge Jackson appeared to respond to Mr. Cooper’s notion. She wrote that the law required not just Mr. McGahn, but also “other current and former senior-level White House officials” who receive a subpoena to appear — and that it made no difference if they worked on domestic or national security matters.
Still, she emphasized, her ruling is only about whether Mr. McGahn must show up to be asked questions. It leaves unanswered whether the questions that lawmakers want to ask him — primarily about conversations with Mr. Trump detailed in the Mueller report — are subject to executive privilege, suggesting that even if Congress ultimately wins a Supreme Court ruling forcing Mr. McGahn to show up, the litigation process might have to start all over again.
The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Mr. McGahn in May after the release of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. It showed that Mr. McGahn was a key witness to several of the most serious episodes in which Mr. Trump sought to obstruct the Russia investigation.
But Mr. Trump, who had openly vowed to block “all” oversight subpoenas after Democrats took control of the House in the 2018 midterm election, instructed Mr. McGahn not to cooperate.
In August, the House Judiciary Committee sued Mr. McGahn, seeking a judicial order that he comply with the subpoena. That same day, the panel also asked a judge for an order permitting it to see secret grand jury evidence gathered by Mr. Mueller, which Attorney General William P. Barr declined to provide to Congress. (Another federal judge ruled for Congress in the grand jury case a month ago, but the administration has appealed.)
The court filings said the House needed the information not just for oversight purposes, but also for an impeachment inquiry. While the impeachment focus has since shifted to the Ukraine affair that burst into public view in September, House Democrats are still considering an article of impeachment that would accuse Mr. Trump of obstruction of justice.
A question pervading both disputes is whether the Constitution permits Congress to subpoena aides to a president like Mr. McGahn and, potentially, Mr. Bolton, to talk about their official duties — or whether the president’s secrecy powers make his aides absolutely immune from such subpoenas.
Administrations of both parties have taken the position that “Congress may not constitutionally compel the president’s senior advisers to testify about their official duties,” as a 15-page legal opinion from Steven A. Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, put it. But there is no definitive court precedent on the issue.
In 2008, another Federal District Court judge, John D. Bates, rejected that theory in a subpoena dispute. He ruled that President George W. Bush’s former White House counsel Harriet Miers had no right to skip a hearing for which she had been subpoenaed. Judge Bates, a Bush appointee, said she had to show up — although she might still refuse to answer specific questions based on a claim of executive privilege.
But because the Miers dispute was then resolved before an appeals court weighed in, Judge Bates’s opinion does not count as a controlling precedent for other disputes raising the same issue. That left the Obama administration, in a 2014 memo, free to take the position that Judge Bates had been wrong, and the Trump legal team echoed that logic.
In declaring that absolute immunity from congressional subpoenas for senior-level presidential aides “simply does not exist,” Judge Jackson spoke scornfully of the memos by the Office of Legal Counsel, sometimes called O.L.C., saying otherwise.
“Absolute testimonial immunity for senior-level White House aides appears to be a fiction that has been fastidiously maintained over time through the force of sheer repetition in O.L.C. opinions, and through accommodations that have permitted its proponents to avoid having the proposition tested in the crucible of litigation,” she wrote."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/u...ny-ruling.html
Just finished watching the first days presentation by the defense and I thought it was quite effective countering all the lies told by Schiff and company but especially manager Jefferies whose lie after lie attorney Philbin categorized nicely.
Philbin was tasked with explaining the legal arguments behind the accusations from Jefferies and others that Trump decided on a "whole scale blocking of all subpoena's without any legal justification". Well, Philbin laid it all out in detail why that was a lie. He quoted chapter and verse as to why the initial request for subpoena's in the impeachment trial were illegal because they were sent without a full vote from the House. Remember the brilliant Nancy Pelosi decided to take it upon herself to start an impeachment inquiry without the required full vote of the House and any subpoena's issued before that vote were invalid. Jefferies continued to repeat the false notion that Trump merely ignored any request to negotiate which Trump's team also proved untrue.
And remember, as I have posted several times now ( Yikes, I'm starting to sound like the Democrat managers ) Obama ( close your eyes if whataboutism offends you ) refused subpoena's and document's for 2 years under Executive Privilege before a court orderd him to in the Fast and Furious case where his "wingman" AG Holder was found in contempt of Congress but apparently, that wasn't enough to get impeached. Funny how that works huh?. Trump is merely asking that his privilege be observed until a court tells him what he can keep from Congress and what he can't.
If it is agreed that witnesses can be called, undoubtedly Trump will assert EP on every member of the Executive branch and it will take a court order, not something John Roberts or even a majority of Senators can over ride.
Jay Sekulow was every effect in countering all the lies told about connecting aid to an investigation of the Bidens with a reoccurring "they didn't tell you that, did they". A very good day for Republican Senators who need ammunition if they are going to tell their constituents why they voted not to convict the President. Originally Posted by HedonistForever
