The Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi says President Donald Trump has admitted to actions that amount to “bribery” in the Ukraine scandal, accusing the Republican leader of an impeachable offense under the US Constitution.

“The bribe is to grant or withhold military assistance in return for a public statement of a fake investigation into the elections. That’s bribery,” Pelosi said at a news conference on Thursday at the US Congress.

“What the president has admitted to and says it’s perfect, I say it’s perfectly wrong. It’s bribery,” she added.

The US Constitution states that impeachable offenses include “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. What exactly that means is unclear. Historically, it can encompass corruption and other abuses, including trying to obstruct judicial proceedings.

Only two American presidents have been impeached by the House, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither Johnson nor Clinton was convicted by the Senate.

In 1974, then US President Richard Nixon resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office over the Watergate scandal.

Democrats in the House launched an impeachment inquiry against Trump in September after a whistleblower alleged the Republican president pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had served as a director for Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Democrats are looking into whether Trump abused his power by withholding $391 million in US security aid to Ukraine as leverage to pressure Kiev to conduct an investigation that would benefit him politically.

The Democratic-led impeachment inquiry shifted to a public phase on Wednesday and revealed new evidence that Trump was willing to sacrifice America’s interests for his own.

The public hearings were launched after weeks of closed-door interviews, marking a new phase of the impeachment probe that could determine the fate of Trump’s tumultuous presidency.

Republicans sought to undercut the public hearing by focusing on Hunter Biden’s role on the Burisma board, pointing out that he was paid $50,000 a month and questioning his qualifications.

Two top US diplomats, William Taylor and George Kent, delivered damning testimony on the first day of the public hearings, describing Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine.

Taylor, the US Ambassador to Ukraine, testified that he was told Trump “cared more about” investigating Biden and improving his reelection chances than caring about US interests.

Trump dismissed the probe again as a “witch hunt” and said he was “too busy” to watch the first public hearings, during which he received strong support from Republican lawmakers.

Asked about the new allegations, while hosting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House, Trump replied: “First time I’ve heard it.”

Source: Presstv

Bolivia is teetering on the brink of a civil war following violent protests which forced President Evo Morales to step down in order to avoid bloodshed.

A senator proclaimed herself Bolivia’s interim president Tuesday in an effort to fill the power vacuum, but Morales condemned the move as a “sneaky coup”.

The power grab came just as Morales, who transformed the Andean nation as its first indigenous president, left the country for Mexico with the aim of helping Bolivia recover from weeks of violent protests.

But the events unfolding in the wake of deputy Senate speaker Jeanine Anez proclaiming herself as interim president portended more violence ahead as rival protesters fought on the streets of the capital. 

Shortly after Morales left for Mexico where he was granted asylum, he accused opposition leader Carlos Mesa and protest leader Luis Fernando Camacho of staging a coup with the help of police.  

Evo Morales Ayma✔@evoespueblo

Así fue mi primera noche después de dejar la presidencia forzado por el golpe de Mesa y Camacho con ayuda de la Policía. Así recordé tiempos de dirigente. Muy agradecido con mis hermanos de las federaciones del Trópico de Cochabamba por brindarnos seguridad y cuidado.

His departure came after what is seen by many as a dramatic coup against the one-time llama shepherd from the Bolivian highlands and former coca growers’ union leader.

As president, Morales helped lift millions out of poverty, increased social rights and presided over nearly 14 years of stability and high economic growth in South America’s poorest country.

Bolivia has been experiencing years of political and economic stability and growth under his rule. The economy has grown by an annual average of about 4.5 percent, well above the regional average, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts it will grow at four percent this year.

“It pains me to leave the country for political reasons, but I’ll always be concerned,” Morales said on Twitter Tuesday. “l’ll return soon, with more strength and energy.”

Coup or revolt?

The opposition has claimed that a fight for “democracy and peace” led Morales to resign and depart the country.  

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Monday the Bolivian military had broken with the constitution by pressing Morales to stand down.

Uruguay, Cuba and Venezuela have also said Morales was deposed illegally.

Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous leader, was declared president for a fourth term in the election but the opposition rejected the outcome and claimed that there had been fraud in the election process.

Source: Presstv

Bolivian Ambassador to Tehran has told Press TV that the ongoing coup in her country is a “soft” one backed by foreign governments who wanted to see the anti-US president, Evo Morales, overthrown.

“Evidently it is a coup d’état that has been going on for a long time, but has been completed after the October elections,” the ambassador said in an interview with Press TV on Monday evening.

After the October elections, she said, the opposition – knowing that it could lose the election – had basically started to say that there was a fraud in this election and ask for a second round for the elections, and then ask for the resignation of President Morales

She said the opposition has clearly been planning the coup from a long time ago with strong support from foreign countries – including the support for the opposition leader,

The ambassador noted that the ongoing coup is of a kind different from the one in 1970s when the army and military equipment were deployed in the streets and many people were killed. “It is a soft coup to change the president who is not aligned with the interests of the US.”

President Morales has established sovereignty in Bolivia, ending the “robbery” of the country’s resources by transnational corporations and the oligarchy, the ambassador noted.

“This is a coup that finishes with the resignation of our president, serving these foreign objectives,” she added.

The envoy’s comments came after Latin America’s leftist governments and prominent politicians denounced the opposition-led “coup d’état” in Bolivia against the government of Evo Morales, who was forced to step down as president under pressure from the army amid violent post-election protests.

Morales — Latin America’s longest-serving president — was declared the winner of Bolivia’s October 20 presidential election.

The opposition, however, rejected the outcome and said there had been fraud in the election process. That sparked violent street protests, which left three people dead and hundreds more wounded, in what the Morales government called a coup bid.

Source: Presstv

Bolivian President Evo Morales announced his resignation Sunday, caving in following three weeks of sometimes-violent protests over his disputed re-election after the army and police withdrew their backing.

“I resign my post as president,” the leftist Morales said in a televised address, capping a day of fast-moving events in which several ministers and senior officials quit as support for Latin America’s longest-serving president crumbled.

The streets of La Paz immediately exploded in celebration, as jubilant Bolivians set off firecrackers and waved the country’s red, yellow and green flag.

Morales, 60 and in power since 2006, was declared the winner of the October 20 presidential election a narrow margin, giving him a controversial fourth term.

But the opposition said there was fraud in the vote count and three weeks of street protests ensued, during which three people died and hundreds were injured.

The Organization of American States carried out an audit of the election and on Sunday reported irregularities in just about every aspect that it examined: the technology used, the chain of custody of ballots, the integrity of the count, and statistical projections.

As chanting Bolivians kept up demonstrations in the street, Morales called new elections, but this was apparently not enough to calm the uproar, and the commanders of the armed forces and the police joined the calls for the president’s resignation.

Violence continued Sunday as a caravan of buses taking opposition supporters to La Paz was attacked, leaving three people injured, including one by gunfire.

To make the announcement that he was stepping down, Morales traveled by plane to the coca-growing Chimore region of central Bolivia, the cradle of his career in politics.

It was there in the 1980s that Bolivia’s first indigenous president made his name as a combative union leader defending farmers who grow coca, which in the Bolivian countryside is used for medicinal and other purposes. It is also the raw material for making cocaine. 
He was accompanied by vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera, who also resigned.

On social media, Bolivians speculated that Morales might leave the country, perhaps going to Argentina, which just elected a center-left government.

(Source: AFP)

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales has called a new presidential election in an outstanding concession, as the opposition in the Latin American country has disputed the results of the recent election that the incumbent has won.

In a TV address on Sunday, Morales said he would “call for new national elections, which, by voting, allow the Bolivian people to democratically elect new authorities.”

The announcement came after the Organization of American States (OAS) — which was tasked with doing a count audit after the opposition claimed the previous poll was fraudulent — released a preliminary report saying the election must be re-run due to irregularities.

“The first round of the election held on October 20 must be annulled and the electoral process must begin again, with the first round taking place as soon as there are new conditions that give new guarantees for it to take place, including a newly composed electoral body,” the organization said.

Electoral authorities announced that Morales secured an outright win in the first round of the presidential election on October 20, while his rival and the head of the Civic Community opposition party, Carlos Mesa, refused to recognize the results of the vote.

Opposition parties claimed that there had been irregularities in the vote-counting process, and the Bolivian president accused the opposition of trying to overthrow him.

The new announcement by Morales came after he called on Saturday for “urgent” negotiations with the opposition amid reports that the country’s police and security forces had joined anti-government protesters.

Morales, who spoke at a press conference in the Bolivian capital of La Paz, called for a round-table discussion with the four political parties represented in the country’s assembly.

The Bolivian military said in a statement the same day that it wouldn’t confront the demonstrators in the weeks-long standoff over Bolivia’s disputed election.

Three people have died and hundreds injured in often violent protests since Morales claimed a fourth consecutive term in the election.

The president came to power in 2006 as Bolivia’s first indigenous leader and has won his previous three terms with solid majorities.

Morales won last month’s vote with a lead of over 10 points against Mesa, his nearest rival. The victory was marred by a near 24-hour halt in the count, which, when resumed, showed a sharp shift in Morales’ favor.

Source: Presstv

US President Donald Trump’s top aides have been implicated in the impeachment looming over his presidency.

Latest testimonies show Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland were involved in the Ukraine scandal at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

According to the testimonies released on Friday by the House, Giuliani, Mulvaney and Sondland were part of a joint effort pursuing a criminal investigation by Ukraine’s judiciary into Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. That, in exchange for the delivery of US Congress-approved aid to Ukraine.

Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, “blurted out” that Mulvaney had approved the meeting if the Ukrainians announced the investigation, said Fiona Hill, a former senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security Council (NSC).

The testimony by Hill, who says she has been threatened to death after she agreed to testify, was corroborated by simultaneously released testimony by another key witness of the scandal, Lt Col Alexander Vindman.

At his testimony to Congress, Sondland said he was regularly in contact with Giuliani about the Ukraine scandal.

Sondland, Giuliani and Mulvaney have all admitted that all acknowledged the quid pro quo element in the scandal, repeatedly saying that they were acting under Trump’s orders.

In the July 25 phone call, Trump insistently asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to find “dirt” on Biden.

Trump has dismissed the Ukraine scandal as a hoax, attacking Democrats for their handling of the impeachment proceedings and questioning the credibility of witnesses who testified against him.

In several of his Twitters posts he called on his followers to read a White House rough transcript of his July 25 phone call with Zelensky on which the impeachment case is being built up by the Congress lawmakers.

Democrats in the US House of Representatives have considered drafting as many as three articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, as they prepare to take their Ukraine impeachment inquiry public next week after a month of closed-door depositions, according to multiple sources familiar with the deliberations.

No decisions have been made, and what happens will ultimately be shaped by the conclusions and findings of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.

In the last two modern impeachment proceedings against Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, the House Judiciary Committee sent three and four articles of impeachment, respectively, to the full chamber for consideration, including articles charging abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress for defying congressional subpoenas.

Democrats have floated the possibility of charging Trump with abuse of power for efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s family and the 2016 election, as well as obstruction of Congress for the administration’s refusal to comply with subpoenas for records and witness testimony.

They have also weighed an obstruction of justice charge centered on the president’s efforts to obstruct former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Mueller’s findings in the second volume of his report, focused on obstruction, are repeatedly referenced in the report accompanying their resolution laying out the impeachment inquiry.

Some Democrats have suggested that the article charging Trump with obstruction of Congress could resemble the article drawn up on the same charge against President Nixon, and itemize all the subpoenas the administration has defied.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office declined to comment on the potential articles of impeachment at this stage in the process, and the speaker has not endorsed any number of articles or specifics suggested in the caucus.

The topic of the number of articles was raised by a lawmaker in one recent meeting Pelosi held with a group of Democrats focused on impeachment messaging, according to sources familiar with the discussion, though Pelosi did not appear to engage with the comment one way or another.

The focus is on what’s in front of us right now: making the public case about the president’s abuse of power and his actions to undermine the 2020 election,” a senior Democratic leadership aide told ABC News.

While some lawmakers also support charging Trump with violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, though others have advocated for keeping the impeachment push narrowly focused on the Ukraine matter.

Although the bulk of the impeachment hearings will happen in the Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee will draft the articles of impeachment. It’s not clear whether they will include accusations of criminal wrongdoing.

The Judiciary Committee is expected to move forward with the process after receiving a report from the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees summarizing their inquiry in the coming weeks. Other panels, including the House Ways and Means and Financial Services Committees, could also share information with the Judiciary Committee from their ongoing investigations that could be used to craft the articles of impeachment.

Politically, putting forward multiple articles of impeachment could benefit some House Democrats – including the freshman lawmakers from moderate and GOP-leaning districts who have raised concerns about the administration’s obstruction of Congress, but who have yet to say conclusively whether they believe Trump’s actions towards Ukraine are impeachable.

It could also focus pressure on some Republicans in the House and Senate who have disapproved of the administration’s refusal to comply with some of House Democrats’ oversight efforts, but rejected concerns of whether Trump has abused his power as president.

in 1998, the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee approved four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, though the House only passed the first and third articles – charging Clinton with providing false testimony to a grand jury in the Paula Jones case, and obstruction of justice related to evidence in the Jones case.

The second and fourth articles were defeated, with 28 Republicans voting with Democrats against a second perjury charge, and 81 siding with the minority against charging Clinton with abuse of power.

“It gives Democrats in tighter districts the opportunity to say they’re open-minded,” Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who voted against Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, told ABC News.

But King, who said he did not find Trump’s comments to Ukraine’s president impeachable and defended the White House’s ability to challenge congressional subpoenas, predicted that few Republicans would cross party lines in any vote to impeach Trump in the House.

“Most if not all Republicans will look at all the articles as being tied together,” he said.

(Source: ABC News)

French President Emmanuel Macron said he believed NATO was undergoing “brain death”, lamenting a lack of coordination between Europe and the United States and unilateral action in Syria by key member Turkey, in an interview published Thursday.

“What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” Macron told The Economist magazine.

The president’s explosive comments, appearing to question the very future of NATO, threatened to send shock waves through the alliance ahead of a summit in Britain next month.

“You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None,” said Macron.

“You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another NATO ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake,” he added, according to an English transcript released by The Economist.

Turkey’s latest military operation against Kurdish forces in northern Syria was staunchly opposed by fellow members like France, but made possible by a withdrawal of US forces ordered by President Donald Trump.

“There has been no NATO planning, nor any coordination,” Macron said.

And while NATO works well in communicating between armies and commanding operations, “strategically and politically, we need to recognise that we have a problem”, he said.

“We should reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States,” he warned, adding that “In my opinion, Europe has the capacity to defend itself.”

‘Drastic words,’ says Merkel

Macron said that while “it’s not in our interest” to expel Turkey from NATO – as has been urged by some politicians – member states should “reconsider what NATO is”.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday rejected Macron’s view that NATO was experiencing “brain death”, saying that such comments were not necessary.

Macron “used drastic words, that is not my view of cooperation in NATO”, said Merkel after talks with visiting chief of the translantic defence alliance Jens Stoltenberg.

“I don’t think that such sweeping judgements are necessary, even if we have problems and need to pull together,” she added.

Stoltenberg meanwhile stressed that “NATO is strong”, adding that the United States and Europe “work together more than we have done for decades”.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking during a visit to the German city of Leipzig as part of anniversary events for the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, also dismissed Macron’s remarks.

“I think NATO remains an important, critical, perhaps historically one of the most critical strategic partnerships in all of recorded history,” he told a press conference.

That was why it was “an absolute imperative that every country participate and join in and contribute appropriately to achieving that shared security mission,” he added, in a nod to Washington’s longstanding gripes about some member countries not paying their way.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, speaking at the same press conference, also said he believed strongly in the military alliance “especially as we face ever more and ever greater global challenges”.

However, Moscow on Thursday hailed Macron’s comments. 

“These are golden words… a precise definition of the current state of NATO,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page.

‘Strategic dialogue with Russia’

In the interview, Macron also emphasised it was crucial to seek a rapprochement with Moscow, which regards NATO and its expansion into ex-Communist bloc states with huge suspicion since the alliance was set up to counter the USSR.

“We need to reopen a strategic dialogue, without being naive and which will take time, with Russia,” said Macron, who is seeking to broker an end to the conflict in Ukraine and has courted President Vladimir Putin as a partner.

He said NATO did not reexamine its future in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and “the unarticulated assumption is that the enemy is still Russia”.

“So, the question about the present purpose of NATO is a real question that needs to be asked,” especially by the United States where Trump sees the alliance as a “commercial project”, he said.

And Macron said he believed that Putin, for all the anti-Western bombast from the Kremlin, would find his strategic options limited, in the long term, to “a partnership project with Europe”.

“If we want to build peace in Europe, to rebuild European strategic autonomy, we need to reconsider our position with Russia,” said Macron.

He praised the stance on the issue of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – criticised by many in Europe for being authoritarian and close to the Kremlin.

“He’s quite close to our views and has a key intellectual and political role” in central Europe, said Macron.

‘Edge of a precipice’

The French president, seen by analysts as Europe’s most prominent leader amid Brexit and the looming exit of Merkel in 2021, has sought to stand tall on the foreign policy stage and implement a vision of reforming Europe.

But he said the European Union had been brought “to the edge of a precipice” by a dwindling focus since the mid-1990s on the bloc’s political integration.

“Europe has forgotten that it is a community, by increasingly thinking of itself as a market, with expansion as its end purpose,” said Macron, who recently blocked expanding the EU to include North Macedonia and Albania.

He also said he wanted European nations to break the “taboo” against using deficits to stimulate growth and investment, and scrap a strict limit on eurozone deficits.

Macron said it was a time of turmoil with Europe losing track of history, a risk of the US and China becoming the sole global powers, and authoritarian regimes emerging in its neighbourhood.

“All this has led to the exceptional fragility of Europe which, if it can’t think of itself as a global power, will disappear, because it will take a hard knock,” he said.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

A new poll shows support for impeaching US President Donald Trump has slipped since mid-October.

According to the Morning Consult survey released Wednesday 47 percent of the Americans back impeachment, while in mid-October, a record-high majority, 51 percent, supported it.

American Republican Senator Rand Paul claimed earlier that he had found the identity of the whistleblower, whose revelations lie at the heart of the impeachment inquiry into Trump in the lower chamber of US Congress.

Paul told reporters Tuesday that he was “more than willing” to reveal the name but he preferred to stay focused on the process rather than the person.

“There is no law preventing anybody from saying the name,” he told reporters.

The US president has for a while been hunting for the anonymous whistleblower in part by asking media to release his name.

“There’s nothing that prevents me from saying it now,” Paul said. “I can, and I may, but I can do it right now if I want. Nothing stops me.”

During a Fox News interview he asserted that unlike Trump he did not want the name released for now.

“I want it to be more about the process and less about the person,” Paul argued. “Nothing stops me. There’s no law that stops me from doing it other than that I don’t want to make it about the one individual.”

Trump claims he was investigating corruption in Ukraine involving his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, but Democrats argue that he was engaged in a quid pro quo.

“We also now know the name of the whistleblower. The whistleblower needs to come forward as a material witness because he worked for Joe Biden at the same time Hunter Biden was getting money from corrupt oligarchs,” Paul said at the rally after Trump invited him onstage.

Source: Presstv

US President Donald Trump is facing a big defeat at the ballot box in 2020 amid an ongoing impeachment probe by Democrats, according to the latest polling.

Trump is projected to lose by 10 points to Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden, one new survey shows, which also predicts Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both beat him comfortably.

The survey conducted by Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP shows that just less than 45 percent of voters support Trump in comparison with his rivals, Biden, Warren and Sanders, who get 53%, 52% and 51% respectively.

Political Polls@Politics_Polls

2020 National GE:
Biden 53% (+10)
Trump 43%
.
Warren 52% (+8)
Trump 44%
.
Sanders 51% (+7)
Trump 44%

IBD/TIPP 10/24-31https://www.investors.com/news/joe-biden-leads-elizabeth-warren-both-beat-trump-2020-election-ibd-tipp/

This comes as Trump is under mounting pressure after Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry in September after a whistleblower alleged the Republican president pressured Ukraine to investigate his Biden.

That request by Trump, and accusations he conditioned nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine on the political favor, form the basis of the impeachment inquiry that now threatens his presidency.

House Democrats say Trump has abused his office for personal gain and jeopardized national security by asking Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter, who had served as a director for Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Meanwhile, two impeachment polls by Fox News and NBC/Wall Street Journal showed Sunday that 49 percent support Trump’s impeachment and his removal from office.

A total of 46 percent of the respondents expressed opposition to Trump’s impeachment and removal from the Oval Office.

The poll found that opponents to Trump’s impeachment have shrunk by 3 percent according to another poll from earlier this month, which said 49 percent wanted him to stay in office.

Asked whether they approved of the impeachment effort, 53 said they supported the bid while 44 percent disapproved.

Source: Presstv