and i thought the threat to our nation was well articulated earlier today by professor feldman when you said, if we cannot impeach a president who abuses his office for personal advantage, we no longer live in a democracy, we live in a monarchy or we live under a districtatorship. my view is if people cannot depend on the fairness of our elections, then what people are calling divisive today will be absolutely nothing compared to the shredding of our democracy. after the events of ukraine unfolded, the president claimed that the reason he requested an investigation into his political opponents and withheld desperately needed military aid for ukraine was supposedly because he was worried about corruption. however, contrary to president s statements, various witnesses, including vice president pence s special adviser jennifer williams, testified that the president s request was political. take a listen. i found the july 25th phone call unusual because in contrast to other presidential calls i had observed, it involved discussion of what appeared to be a domestic political matter. for someone who gets caught to deny that their behavior is impermissible, almost always. and one of the question before us is whether the president s claim that he cared about corruption is actually credible. now you ve argued before the supreme court and the supreme court determined that when assessing credibility, we should look at a number of factors. including impact, historical background and whether there are departure from normal procedures, correct. that is correct. and we re trying to figure out if someone s explanation fits with the facts and if it doesn t then the explanation may not be true so let s explore that. lieutenant colonel vindman prepared talking points on anti-corruption reform for president trump s call with ukraine president zelensky. however based on the transcripts released of those calls in april and july, president trump never mentioned these points of corruption. he actually never mentioned the word corruption. does is that go to any of those factors? is that significant? yes. it goes to the one about procedure irregularities and said that you look at the kind of things that led up to the decision that you re trying to figure out somebody s motive about. so let s try another one. ambassador volker testified that the president never expressed any concerns to him about corruption in any country other than ukraine. would that be relevant to your assessment? yes, it would. it goes to the factor about substantive departures. and professor karlan there is, in fact, and my colleague mr. mcclinton mentioned this, a process lined out to assess whether countries that are receiving military aid have done enough to fight corruption. in may of 2019 my republican colleague did not say this, the department of defense actually wrote a letter determining that ukraine passed the assessment and yet president trump set aside that assessment and withheld the congressionally approved aid to ukraine anyway in direction contradiction to the established procedures he should have followed had he cared about corruption. is that assess is that relevant to your assessment. yes. that would go to the factors the supreme courts discussed. and what about the fact and i think you mentioned this earlier as one of the key things that you read in the testimony, that president trump wanted the investigations of burisma and the bidens announced but that he actually didn t care whether they were conducted. that is in ambassador sondland s testimony, what would you say about that. that goes to whether the claim that this is about politics is a persuasive claim because that goes to the fact that it is being announced publicly which is an odd thing. i mean maybe mr. swalwell could answer this better than i because he was a prosecutor. but generally you don t announce the investigation in a criminal case before you conduct it because it puts the person on notice that they re under investigation. and given all of these facts and there are more that we don t have time to get to, how would you assess the credibility of the president s claim that he was worried about corruption some. well, i think you ought to make that credibility determination because you have the sole power of impeachment. if i were a member of the house of representatives, i would infer from this that he was doing it for political reasons. if we don t stand up now to a president who abuses his power, we risk sebdsing a message to all future presidents that they could put their own personal political interest ahead of the american people, our national security and our elections and that is is the gravest of threats to our democracy. i yield back. gentle lady yields back. i noup recognize mr. gom ert for the purpose of unanimous consent request. yes. mr. chairman, i would ask consent to offer article by daniel huff without objection. the article will be entered into the record. and i recognize mr. resh enthraller to question the witnesses. thank you, mr. chairman. i m starting off today doing something that i don t normally do and i m going to quote speaker of the house nancy pelosi. in march the speaker told the washington post i m going to quote this, impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there is something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan i don t think we should go down that path because it divides the country. well on that the speaker and i both agree. and you know who else agrees? the founding fathers. the founding fathers recognize that crimes warranting impeachment must be so severe regardless of political party that there is an agreement the actions are impeachable. but go back to speaker pelosi s words one more time and the case for impeachment must also be compelling. well after last month s schiff show this is what we learned. there is no evidence that the president directed anyone to tell the ukrainians that aid was conditioned on investigation. aside from the mere presumptions by ambassador sondland there is no evidence that trump was convinced on and if you doubt go back to the transcript because never in the call was the 2020 election mentioned and never in the call was military aid mentioned. in fact, president trump told senator johnson on 31 august that aid was not conditioned on investigation. rather president trump was rightfully skepts cal about the ukrainians, the country has a history of corruption and he merely wanted the europeans to contribute more to a problem in their own backyard. but i think we can all agree it is appropriate for the president as a steward of taxpayer dollars to ensure our money isn t wasted. i said i wouldn t go back to speaker pelosi but i do want to go back because i forgot she also said that impeachment should only be pursued when it is quote, unquote, overwhelming. so it is prblly not good for the democrats that none of the witnesses that testified before the intel committee were able to provide firsthand evidence of a quid pro quo. but i forgot we are calling it bribery now after the focus group last week. and there is no evidence of bribery either. instead, the two people who did have first hands knowledge, the president and president zelensky, both say there was no pressure on the ukrainians. and again the transcript of july 25th backs this up. and to go back to nancy pelosi one more time, she said that the movement for impeachment should be, quote/unquote, bipartisan. which is sully the same sentiment echoed by jerry nadler who in 1998 said, and i quote, there must never be a narrowly voted impeachment supported by one of the major political parties and opposed by another. well, when the house voted on the democrats impeachment inquiry it was just that. the only bipartisan vote was the one imposing the inquiry. the partisan vote was the one to move forward with the inquiry. so we re 0 for 3. let s face it. this is a sham impeachment against president trump. it s not compelling, it s not overwhelming and it is not bipartisan. so even by the speaker s own criteria, this is failed. rather what this is is nothing more than a bipartisan witch hunt which denies the fundamental fairness for american justice system and denies due process to the president of the united states. the democrats case is based on nothing more than thoughts, feelings and conjectures and a few and thoughts and feelings of few unelected bureaucrats and the american people are absolutely fed up. instead of wasting our time on this we should be passing usmca and lowering the cost of prescription drugs with that said, mr. turley, i watched as your words have been twisted and mangled all day long. is there anything you would like to clarify? only this. i think one of the disagreements that we have and i have with my esteemed colleagues is what makes a a legitimate impeachment, not what technically satisfies an impeachment, there are very few technical requirements of impeachment but the question is what is expected of you and my objection is that there is a constant preference for inference over information. for presumptions over proof. that is because this record hasn t been developed. and if you re going to remove a president, if you believe in democracy, if you remove a sitting president then you have an obligation not to rely on inference when there is still information you can gather. and that is what i m saying. it is not that you can t do this. you just can t do it this way. thank you, mr. chairman. gentleman yields back. ip recognize mostly sunny jackson lee for the purpose of unanimous consent request. thank you, mr. chairman. i would like unanimous consent to place in the record a statement a new statement from checks and balances on president trump s abuse of office without objection republican and democratic attorney general. without objection. i now recognize miss demings, five minutes for questioning the witnesses. thank you mr. chairman. as a former law enforcement official, i know firsthand that the rule of law is the strength of our zks. and no one is above it. not our neighbors, and in our various communities, not our co-workers and not the president of the united states. yet the president has said that he cannot be prosecuted for criminal conduct. that he need not comply with congressional requests and subpoenas. matter of fact, the president is trying to absorb himself of any accountability. since the beginning of the investigation in early september, the house sent multiple letters, document requests and subpoenas to the white house. yet the president has refused to produce documents and has directed others not to produce documents. he has prevented key white house officials from testifying. the president s obstruction of congress is pervasive. since the house began its investigation, the white house has produced zero subpoenaed documents. in addition, at the president s direction, more than a dozen members of his administration have defied congressional subpoenas. the following slides shows those who have refused to comply at the president s direction. we are facing a categorically blockade by a president who is desperate to prevent any investigation into his wrongdoing. professor gerhardt, has a president ever refused to cooperate in an impeachment investigation? not until now. and any president who i know i know nixon delayed or tried to delay turning over information. when that occurred, was it at the same level that we re seeing today? president trump nixon also had orders his subordinates to cooperate and testify. he didn t shut down any of that. he produced documents and there were times of disagreements but there was not a wholesale broad scale refusal to recognize the legitimacy of this house doing an inquiry. the president nixon s obstruction result in an articles of impeachment. yes, ma am. article three. professor feldman is it fair to say if a president stonewalls an investigation like we re clearing seeing today in whether he has committed an impeachable offense he fears rendering the impeachment power moot. and that is the effect of a president refusing to participate. he s denying the power of congress under the constitution to oversee him and to exercise its capacity to impeach. professor gerhardt when a president stopped those from complying to subpoenas are we entitled to make any resumptions about what they would say if you testify. yes, ma am, you are. and i point out that one of the difficulties of asking for a more thorough investigation is what the houses that tried to conduct and the president has refused to comply, that is where the blockage occurs and that is why there are documents not produced and people not testifying that people today said they want to hear from. in relation to what you just said ambassador sondland testified and i quote, everyone was in the loop. it was to secret. professor gerhardt how is ambassador sondland s testimony relevant here? his testimony is relevant and also rather chilling to hear him say that everybody is in the loop and when he says that he s talking about the people at the high elf levels of our government. all of whom are refusing to testify under oath or comply with subpoenas. professors, thank you for your testimony. the president used the power of his office to pressure a foreign head of state to investigate an american citizen in order to benefit his domestic political situation after he was caught. and i do know something about that. this president proceeded to cover it up and refused to comply with valid congressional subpoenas. the framers included impeachment in the constitution to ensure that no one no one is above the law. including and especially the president of the united states. thank you mr. clair. and i yield back. gentle lady yields back. mr. klein is recognized. thank you mr. chairman. it is just past 5:00 and a lot of families are just getting home from work right now. they re turning on the tv and they re wondering what they re watching on tv. they re asking themselves, is this a rerun because i thought i saw this a couple of weeks ago. but no, this is not a rerun, this is act two of the three part tragedy, the impeachment of president trump and what we re seeing here is several very accomplished constitutional scholars attempting to devine the intent, whether it is of the president or of the various witnesses who appeared during the schiff hearings and it is very frustrating to me as a member of the judiciary committee why we are where we are today. i asked to be a member of this committee because of its storied history because it was the defender of the constitution, because it was one of the oldest committees in the congress established by another verge virginan john float and congressman blat and congressman butler also served on this committee. but the committee that they served under on is dead. that committee doesn t exist any more. that committee is gone. apparently now we don t even get to sit in the judiciary committee room. we re in the ways and means committee room. i don t know why. maybe because there is more room. maybe because the portraits of the various chairman whose would be staring down at us might just intimidate the other side as they attempt what is essentially a sham impeachment of this president. you know, looking at where we are, the lack of the use of the redino rules, in this process, is shameful. the fact that we got witness testimony for this hearing this morning is shameful. the fact that we got the intelligence committee report yesterday, 300 pages of it, is shameful. i watched the intelligence committee hearings from the back. although i couldn t watch them all because the judiciary committee actually scheduled business during the intelligence committee hearings so the judiciary committee members weren t able to watch all of the hearings. but i didn t get to i get to read the transcripts of the hearings that were held in private. i was not able to be a part of the intelligence committee hearings that were in the scif. we haven t seen the evidence from the intelligence committee yet. we ve asked for it. we haven t received it. we haven t heard from any fact witnesses yet before we get to hear from the constitutional scholars about whether or not the facts rise to the level of an impeachment of impeachable offense. mr. turley, it is not just your family and dog who are angry. many of us on this committee are angry. many of us watching at home, across america, are angry because this show has degenerated into a farce. and as i said, the judiciary committee of my predecessors is dead. and i look to a former chairman daniel webster who said we are all agents of the same supreme power, the people, and it s the people who elected this president in 2016, and it s the people who should have the choice as to whether or not to vote for this president in 2020, not the members of the committee, not speaker nancy pelosi and not the members of this house of representatives. it should be the people of the united states who get to decide who their president is in 2020. i asked several questions about obstruction of justice to mr. mueller when he testified. mr. turley, i know that you mentioned obstruction of justice several times in your testimony. i want to yield to mr. ratcliff to ask a concise question about that issue. thank you for yielding. professor turley in the last few days we ve heard that despite no questions to any witnesses during the first two months of the first phase of this pea impeachment inquiry that the democrats may be dusting off the obstruction of justice portion of the mueller report. seems to me that we all remember how painful it was to listen to special counsel s analysis of the obstruction of justice portion of that report. i would like you to address the fatal flaws from your perspective with regard to the obstruction of justice portion of that. the gentleman s time is expired. the witz may answer the question briefly. thank you, mr. chairman. i ve been a critic of the obstruction theory behind the russia investigation because once again it doesn t meet what i think are the clear standards for obstruction. there were ten issues that mueller addressed and the only thing that raised a serious issue quite frankly was the matter with don mcgahn. there is a disagreement about that. but also the department of justice rejected the obstruction of justice claim and it was not just the attorney general, it was also the deputy attorney rod rosenstein. the gentleman s time is well expired. mr. correia. thank you. and i thank our witnesses for being here today. i can assure your testimony is important not only to this body but to america that is listening very intently on what the issues before us are and why is it so important that all of us understand the issues before us. professor feldman, as was just discussed, president trump has ordered the executive branch to completely blockade the efforts of this house to investigate whether he committed high crimes and misdemeanors in his dealings with the ukraine. is that correct. yes, it is. president trump has also asserted that many officials are somehow absolutely immune from testifying in this impeachment inquiry. on the screen behind you is the opinion by judge jackson, a federal judge here in d.c., that rejects president trump s assertion. professor feldman, do agree with judge jackson s ruling that president trump has invoked a nonexistent legal basis to block witnesses from testifying in this impeachment inquiry? i agree with the thrust of the judge s opinion. i think that she correctly held that there is no absolute immunity to protect a presidential adviser from having to appear before the house of representatives and testify. she did not make a ruling as to whether executive privilege would apply in any given situation. i think that was also appropriate because the issue had not yet arisen. and let me quote judge jackson, open quote, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded american history is that presidents are not kings, closed quote. professorfeldman, in the famers view does the president act for like a leader of democracy or a monarch when he orders officials to zeefy congress as they try to investigate abuse of power and corruption of elected. sir, i don t think the framers would think the president would refuse to participate in a impeachment inquiry given they gave the power of impeachment to the house of representatives and assumes the structure of the constitution would allow the congress to oversee the president. professor gerhardt must we understand whether the president must comply with the impeachment investigation. you could look throughout the entire constitution and the supremacy clause and the president takes an oath. he takes an oath to support and defend the constitution of the united states. that means that he s assuming office with certain constraints on what he may do and there are measures for accountability for any failure to follow his duty or follow the constitution. thank you. and the president has said that he is above the law. that article two of the constitution allows him to, and i quote, do whatever i want. that can t be true. judge jackson said that no one is above the law. personally, i grew up in california in the 1960s. it was a time when we re going to beat the russians to the moon. we were full of optimism. we believed in american democracy. we were the best in the world. and back home on main street my mom and dad struggled to survive day-to-day. my mom worked as a maid cleaning hotel rooms for $1.50 an hour and my dad worked at a local paper mill trying to survive day-to-day and what got us up in the morning was the belief and the optimism that tomorrow would be better than today. we re a nation of freedom, democracy, economic opportunity, and we always know that tomorrow is going to be better. and today i personally sit as a testament to the greatness of this nation, me, and others in congress. and i sit here in this committee room also with one very important mission which its to keep the american dream alive. to ensure that all of us are equal. to ensure that nobody, nobody is above the law and to ensure that our constitution and that our congressional oversight of the presidency is still something with meaning. thank you. mr. chair, i yield back. the gentleman yields back. mr. armstrong. thank you mr. chairman. you know, all day long we ve been sitting here and listening to my friends across the aisle and their witnesses claim that the president demanded ukraine do us a favor. by assisting in 2020 reelection campaign, before he would release the military aid. this is like everything else in the sham impeachment, purposely misleading and not based on the facts. so let s review the actual transcript of the call. they never mentioned the 2020 election and never mentioned military aid. it does, however, clearly show that the favor the president requested was assistance with the ongoing investigation into the 2016 election. those investigations particularly the one done being run by jeff durham should concern democrats. and the transcript of this call shows that the president was worried about the efforts of ukrainian related to the 2016 election. we know this. and notice i m using the word know and not the word infer from reading the transcript and he spoke about it ending with mueller. we know this because he wants the toerj attorney general to get in touch about the issue. we have a trade with ukraine governing these investigations and like so many other things these facts are inconvenient for democrats and they don t fit the impeachment narrative so they are misrepresented or ignored and i think it is important when we talk about this and whatever the burden of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, clear and convincing evidence or a judicial or quasijudicial hearing i think we need to start with how we look at it and i m not a constitutional law professor, i m just an old criminal defense attorney. but when i walk into a courtroom i think of three things. what is the crime charged, what is the con duck and who is the victim. and we manage to make it until 5:00 before we ve talked about the alleged victim of the crime. and that is president zelensky. and three different times president zelensky at least three different times has denied being pressured by the president. the call shows laughter, pleasantries, cordiality. september 25th president zelensky states, no, you heard that we had a good phone call. it was normal. we spoke about many things. i think you read it and nobody pushed me. october 10th president zelensky had say press conference and i encourage everybody to watch it, even if you don t understand it, 90% of communications nonverbal, you tell me if you think he s lying. there was no blackmail. december 2nd, this monday, i never talked to the president from the position of quid pro quo. so we have the alleged victim of quid pro quo, bribery, extortion, whatever we are dealing with today, repeatedly and adamantly shouting from the rooftops that he never felt pressure and he was not the victim of anything. so in order for this whole thing to stick we have to believe that president zelensky is a pathological liar or that the ukrainian president and the country are so weak that he has no choice but to parade himself out there demoralize himself for the good of his country. either of these two assertions weakened their countries and harms our efforts to help the ukrainian. and also begs the question of how on earth did president trump zelz with stand this illegal and impeachable pressure to begin with because this fact still has not changed. the aid was released to ukrainian and did not take any action from them in order for it to flow and with that i yield to my friend mr. jordan. i thank the gentleman for yielding. context is important isn t it. yes, sir. a few minutes ago when our colleague from florida presented a statement you made, you said well you have to take that statement in context but it seems you don t want to extend the same standard to the president. because the now famous quote, i would like you to do us a favor you said about an hour and a half ago that didn t marine us didn t mean us, it meant the president himself. but that is the clear reading of this i would like you to do us a favor though because you know what the next two words are? i don t have the document. because the country he didn t say i would like you to do me a favor, because our country has been through a lot. you know what this call happened the day after mueller was in front of the committee. of course our country was put through two years of this. and the idea that you re go fog say this is the royal we and talking about himself ignores the entire context of his statement. that whole paragraph and you know what ends with, talking about bob mueller. and this is the basis for this impeachment, this call. it couldn t be further from the truth. you want the standard to apply when representative gaetz makes one of your statements, you have to look at the context but when the president of the united states is clear you try to change his word and when the context is clear he s talking about the two years that this country went through because of the mueller report gentleman s tigentlema gentleman s time is expired. miss scanlon. i want to thank our constitutional experts for walking us through the framers thinking on impeachment and why they decided it was a necessary part of our constitution. i m going to ask you to help us understand the implications of the president s obstruction of congress s investigation into the use of the office of the president to squeeze the ukrainian government to help the trump reelection campaign and there are certainly hundreds of pages on how one reaches that conclusion. we know the president s obstruction did not begin with the ukraine investigation. instead his conduct is part of a pattern and i ll direct your attention to the timeline on the screen. in the left-hand column we see the president s statement from the july call in which he pressured ukraine, a foreign government, to meddle in our elections. then once congress got wind of it, the president tried to cover up his involvement by obstructing the congressional investigation and refusing to cooperate. but this isn t the first time we ve seen this kind of obstruction. in the right-hand column we could flash back to the 2016 election when the president welcomed and used russians interference in our election and again when the special counsel and then this committee tried to investigate the extent of his involvement, he did everything he could to cover it up. so it appears the president s obstruction of investigations is part of a pattern. first he invited foreign powers to ints fear in our elections and then covered it up and finally he obstructed lawful inquiry into his behavior whether by congress or law enforcement and then he does it again. so professor gerhardt, how does the existence of such a pattern help determine whether the president s conduct is impeachable. the pattern, of course, gives us a tremendous insight into the context of his behavior. when he s acting and how do we explain the actions by looking at patern and we can infer i think a very strong inference in fact is that this is deviated from the usual practice and he s been systematically heading towards a culmination where he could ask this question, by the way, after the july 25th call, the money is not yet released. and there is ongoing conversations from other testimony that essentially the money is being withheld because the president wanted to make sure the deliverable was going to happen. that is the announcement of investigation. and in addition to the money not being released there was also not the white house meeting which was so important to ukrainian security. yes, ma am, that is right. professor feldman we noted that a forward district court rejected the president s attempt to block witnesses from testifying to congress saying that presidents are not kings. the founders included two critical provisions in our constitution to prevent our president from becoming a king and our democracy from becoming a monarchy and those protections were presidential elections and impeachment, correct? correct. based on the pattern of conduct that we re discussing today, the pattern of inviting foreign interference in our elections for political gain, and then obstructing lawful investigation, has the president undermined both of those protections? he has. and it is crucial to note that the victim of a high crime and misdemeanor such as the president is alleged to have committed is not president zelensky and it is not the ukrainian people. the victim of the high crime and misdemeanor is the american people. alexander hamilton said clearly that the nature of a high crime and misdemeanor is they are related to injures to the society itself and we the american people are the victims of the high crime and mirds. and what is the appropriate remedy in such a circumstance. the framers created one remedy and that was impeachment. thank you. i ve spent over 30 years working to help clients and school children understand the importance of our constitutional system and the importance of the rule of law so the president s behavior is deeply, deeply troubling. the president welcomed and used election interference by russia publicly admitted he would do it again and did, in fact, do it again by soliciting election interference from ukraine and throughout the president has tried to cover up his misconduct. this isn t complicated. the founders were clear and we must be too, such behavior in a president of the united states is not acceptable. i yield back. the gentle lady yields back. miss cicilini will be recognized for a unanimous consent request. i ask consent that a document that lists the had 400 pieces of legislation and 80% languishing in the senate in response to mr. gaetz s claim. no objection. the document will be made part of the recognize. mr. biggs is recognized yeah, i consider a pact of 54 documents and items which have previously been submitted. without objection. the documents will be admitted into the record. i ask unanimous consent that this article just published 15 minutes ago provided jonathan turley said democrats are setting a record for impeachment and that is demonstrably false and that is false. who seeks recognition. mr. kachairman. for what purpose. a tweet that the first lady of the united states just issued within the hour. it said, quote, a minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. pamela carlin you should be ashamed of using a child to do it, unquote. without objection, the document will be entered into the record. mr. stuby is recognized for purpose of questioning the witnesses. i m sorry. oh, not here momentarily. mrs. garcia is recognized. thank you. and i want to thank all of the witnesses for the time and patience today. i know it has been a long day but the end is in sight. as my colleague miss scanlon observed, the similarities between the president s conduct in the ukraine investigation and this conduct in the special counsel investigation are hard to ignore. in fact, we re seeing it as a pattern of a presidential abuse of power. the president called the ukraine investigation a hoax. and the mueller investigation a witch hunt. he has threatened the ukraine whistle-blower for not testifying like he threatened to fire his attorney general for not obstructing the russia investigation. the president fired ambassador yovanovitch and publicly tarnished her reputation much in the same way he fired his white house counsel and publicly attacked his integrity. and finally the president attacked a civil servants who have testified about ukraine just like he attacked career officials of the department of justice for investigating his obstruction of the russia investigation. under any other circumstances, such behavior byfully american president would be shocking but here it is a repeat of what we have already seen, the special counsel investigation. i d like to take a moment to discuss the president s efforts to obstruct special counsel s investigation. a subject that this committee has been investigating since march. here are two slides, the first one will show as he did with as the president as he did with ukraine tried to coerce his subordinates to stop an investigation into his misconduct by foreign special counsel mueller. and the second slideshows that when the news broke out of the president s order, the president directed his advisers to falsely deny he had made the order. professor gerhardt, are you familiar with the facts related to the three episodes as described in the mueller report, yes or no, please. yes, ma am. so accepting the special counsel evidence as true, is this paltern of conduct obstruction of justice. it is clearly obstruction of justice. and why would you say so, sir? the obvious object is to shut down an investigation and the acts of the president according to the facts each time is to use the power that has unique to his office but in a way that will help him frustrate the investigation. so does this conduct fit within the framers view of impeachable offenses. i believe it does. the entire constitution including separation of powers is designed to put limits on how somebody may go about frustrating the activity of for forge branch. so you would say this is an impeachable offense. yes, ma am. thank you. because i agree with you. the president s actions and behavior do matter. the obstruction of justice definitely matters. as a former judge and member of congress, i ve raised my right hand and put my left hand on a bible more than once and i ve sworn to uphold the constitution and laws of this country. this hearing is about that but it is also about the core of the heart of our american values. the values of duty, honor, and loyalty. it is about the rule of law. when the president asked ukraine for a favor, he did so for his personal political gain and not on behalf of the american people. and if this is true, he would have betrayed his oath and betrayed his loyalty to this country. fundamental principle of our democracy is that no one is above the law. not any one of you professors, not any of us up here, members of congress and not even the president of the united states that is why we should hold him accountable for his actions and that is why i again thank you for testifying today and helping us walk through all of this to prepare for what may come. thank you, sir. i yield back. gentle lady yields back. mr. nag use. thank you, mr. chair and thank you to each of the four witnesses for your testimony today. i would like to start by talking about intimidation of witnesses. as my colleague congresswoman garcia noted, president trump has tried to interfere in both the ukraine investigation and special counsel mueller investigation in order to try to cover up his own misconduct and in both the ukraine investigation and special counsel mueller investigation, the president actively discouraged witnesses from cooperating, intimidated witnesses who came forward, and praised those who refused to cooperate. for example, in the ukrainian investigation, the president harassed and intimidated the brave public servants who came forward. he publicly called the whistle-blower a, quote, disgrace to our country. and said that his identity should be revealed. he suggested that those involved in the whistle-blower complaint should be dealt with in the way that we, quote, used to do, end quote, for spies and treason. he called ambassador taylor a former military officer with more than 40 years of public service a quote, never-trumper, end quote, on the same day that he called never-trumpers, quote, scum. the president also tweeted accusations about many of the other public servants who testified including jennifer williams, and ambassador yovanovitch and as we know the president s latter tweet happened literally during the ambassador s testimony in this room in front of the intelligence committee which she made clear was intimidating. conversely, we know that the president has praised witnesses who have refused to cooperate. for example, during the special counsel investigation the president praised paul manafort. his former campaign manager for not cooperating. you could see the tweet up on the screen to my side. as another telling example, the president initially praised ambassador sondland for not cooperating. calling him, quote, a really good man and a great american. but after ambassador sondland testified and confirmed that there was indeed a quid pro quo between the white house visit and the request for investigations, the president claimed that he, quote, hardly knew the ambassador. professor gerhardt, you touched on it previously but i would like you to just explain, is the president s interference in these investigations by intimidating witnesses also the kind of conduct that the framers were worried about and if so why. it is clearly conduct that i think worried the framers reflected in the constitution they ve given us in the structure of the constitution. the activities we re talking about here are consistent with the other pattern of activity we ve seen with the president either trying to stop investigations, either by mr. mueller or by congress, as well as to ask witnesses to make false documents about testimony and all of those different kinds of activities are not the kinds of activities the framers expected the president to be able to take. they expect a president to be held accountable for it and not just in elections. prefer turley, you ve studied ooirm of president johnson, president clinton and am i right that nixon allowed senior white house officials including the white house counsel and chief of staff to testify in the house impeachment inquiry. yes. and you re aware that president trump has prefused to allow his white house counsel to testify. yes. but various officials did testify and they are remaining in federal employment. and that does not include the white house counsel or the chief of staff. correct. that is correct. and during that impeachment inquiry? i believe that s sounds about right? you re aware the president refuses to answer any questions in this impeachment inquiry? are you aware of the letter by white house counsel written on behalf of president trump in effect instructing branch officials not to testify in this impeachment inquiry? yes. aim correct no president in the history of the republic, before president trump, has ever issued a general order instructed executive branch officials not to testify in an impeachment inquiry? that s where i m not sure president nixon went to court offer access of documents and like and he lost. professor turley, i would in court. i would refer you to each scholar today because president nixon did allow the chief of staff to testify and this president has not. at the end of the day, this congress and this committee has an obligation to insure that the law is enforced. with that, i yield back the balance of my time. the chair yields back. thank you for spending long arduous hours with us. thank you so much for being here. following up on my colleague, mr. neguse s questions, i want to go through one particular example, the president s witness intimidation i find truly disturbing and very devastating, because i think it s important that we all truly see what s going on here. as the slide shows, on his july 25th call, president trump said former ambassador yovanovitch would, and i quote, go through some things. ambassador yovanovitch testified about how learning about the president s statements made her feel. what did you think when president trump told president zelensky you were going to go through some things? i didn t know what you think but i was very concerned. what were you concerned about? she s going to go through some things didn t sound good. it sounded like a threat. did you feel threatened? i did. and as we all witnessed in real-time, in the middle of ambassador yovanovitch s live testimony the president tweeted about the ambassador discrediting her service in somalia and the ukraine. ambassador yovanovitch testified that the president s tweet was, and i quote, very intimidating. professor gerhart, these attacks on a career public servant are deeply upsetting, but how do they fit into our understanding whether the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanor and how do they fit into our broader pattern of behavior by this president to cover up and obstruct his misconduct? one way in which it contributes to the obstruction of congress is it doesn t just defame ambassador yovanovitch, by every other account, she s been an exemplary public servant. what he s suggesting there may not be consistent with what we know as facts. one of the things that also happens when he sends something like this, it intimidates everybody else thinking about testifying, every other public servant that thinks they should come forward, they will worry they will get punished in some way and face things like she s faced. that is the woman president trump has threatened before you. i can assure you i personally know what it s like to be publicly attacked personally for your duty to america. ambassador yovanovitch deserves better. no matter your party, whether you re a democrat or republican, i don t think any of us thinks that this is okay. it is plainly wrong for the president of the united states to attack the career public servant just for telling the truth as she knows it. i yield back the balance of my time. gentle lady yields back. mr. stanton. thank you very much, mr. chairman and thank you for the outstanding witnesses today. president trump has declared he will not comply with these subpoenas. this part of the branch began with the president s refusal to cooperate with regular oversight and now extended to the constitutional duty on impeachment, the loans the reason we are here today. when asked if he would comply with the don mcgahn subpoena, president trump said quote well we re fighting all the subpoenas unquote. we discussed here today the obstruction of congress articles of impeachment against president nixon. i think i d like go a little bit deeper into that discussion and juxtapose it with president trump s actions. professor gerhart, can you elaborate how president nixon obstructed congress and how it compares to president trump s actions? i was discussing earlier including in my written statement, president nixon ultimately refused to comply with four legislative subpoenas. these were zeroing in on the evidence in his possession. the basis for that third article and he resigned a few days later. professor feldman, what are the consequences of this unprecedented obstruction of congress to our democracy? for the president to refuse to participate in any way in the house s constitutional obligation of supervising him to impeach him, breaks the constitution. it basically says, nobody can oversee me and nobody can impeach me. first, i ll block witnesses from appearing and then refuse to testify in any way and you don t have enough evidence to impeach me. ultimately it is to guarantee the president can t be checked. since we know the framers put in the constitution to check the president, if the president can t be checked he is no longer subject to the law. professor gerhardt, would you agree it invokes the president s worst fears and endangers our democracy? it does. one which way to understand that is put all his arguments together and see what the ramifications are. he says he s entitled to not comply with all subpoenas not subject to investigation while immune to that. immune from investigation from congress. he s blocked off all ways to hold himself accountable except for elections. the critical thing to understand is that is precisely what he was trying to undermine in the ukraine situation. anything to add to that analysis? i think that s correct. if i can say one thing, i want to apologizing for what i said earlier about the president s son. it was wrong of me to do that. i wish the president would apologize for the things he s said wrong but i do regret having said that. one more question every member of this committee must decide is whether we are a nation of laws and not men. it used to be an easy answer, one we can all agree on. when president nixon defied the law and obstructed justice he was held to account by both sides who knew for a public to endure we must have fidelity to our country and one party or one man. the obstruction we are looking at today is far worse than president nixon s behavior. future generations will measure us. every single member of this committee by how we choose to answer that question. i hope we get it right. i yield back. the gentleman yields back. mr. stube. thank you, mr. chairman. i ve om been in congress since the first of this year. on my first day the president of my class called for impeachment on day one using much more colorful language than i would ever use. since then they called on the mueller report. and we sat there as they said there was no evidence the trump campaign colluded with russia. that didn t work for the democrats and they then changed their talking poichbts ants and to obstruction of justice theory and that fizzled and then the whistleblower based completely on hearsay and overhearing people on a phone call talk about a phone call between two world leaders and led to the impeachment committee citing all past historical presidents and basically denied due process rights by conducting this so-called inquiry and denying the ability to call witnesses and denied the president his ability to have his lawyers cross examine all witnesses a right afforded to president clinton including rapists and murders. the republicans have repeatedly requested all evidence. as we sit here today we still don t have the underlying evidence we requested, again, a right afforded every criminal defendant in the united states. instead, we sit here getting lectures from law professors about their opinions, their opinions, not facts. i guess the democrats needed a constitutional law refresher course. the republicans don t. mr. chairman, you acknowledged and i quote the house s power of impeachment demands a rigorous power of due process, due process means the right to confront witnesses against you and call your own witnesses and have the assistance of counsel. those are your words, mr. chairman, not mine. what are you afraid of? let the minority call witnesses. let the president call witnesses. clinton alone called 14 witnesses to testify. let the president s counsel question the whistleblower and the intel staff who colluded with the whistleblower, rights that should be afforded to the president, rights every criminal defendant was afforded. even terrorists in iraq have been afforded more due process than you and the democrats have afforded the president. i know because i served in iraq and i prosecuted in iraq and we provided terrorists in iraq more due process than you and chairman schiff have afforded the president of the united states, no collusion, no obstruction, no quid pro quo, no evidence of bribery, except opinion, no evidence of treason, no evidence of high crime or misdemeanors. we have a bunch of opinions from partisan democrats who have stated from day one they want to impeach the president. not on this theory but a multiple other different theories. the american people are smarter than your abcs of impeachment you have on the screen laid out today. it s extremely demonstrative of your lack of evidence giving, you called law professors to give their opinions and not fact witnesses to give their testimony today to be cross-examined and the rights afforded to the president of the united states. mr. chairman, when can we anticipate you will choose a date for the minority day of hearing? mr. chairman, i m asking you a question. when can we anticipate you will choose a date for the minority day of hearing. the gentleman is recognized for the purpose of questioning the witnesses, not for colloquy with colleagues. well, then i will do that after my time. i yield the remainder of my time to mr. ratcliffe. thank you to my colleague from florida for yielding. professor turley, from my questioning across the aisle it does in fact appear democrats do intend to pursue articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice based on the mueller report. i asked you a question about that. you didn t really get a chance to give a complete answer. in your statement today, you make this statement. i believe an obstruction claim based on the mueller report would be at odds with the record and the controlling law. use of an obstruction theory
last word. the gentleman is recognized. i yield to the ranking member. the gentle lady from california misstieated somethin that i addressed head on last night. undersecretary stated this was perspective money, it was not interfering and dealing with this issue. for those of us who have been in a war, people die in a war zone. this money did not cause that. thank you, reclaiming my time. mr. chairman, the biggest difference in the clinton impeachment and this one is that president clinton committed a crime, perjury. this president isn t even accused of committing a crime. the constitution is pretty clear on what constitutes an impeachable defense, treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors. it s not, or whatever else nancy pelosi and adam schiff deem impeachable. i think we can all agree that no president should abuse the powers of his or her office, just like the chairman of the house committee shouldn t abuse the powers of his office to obtain and publish the phone records of the president s personal attorney, a member of the media and the ranking member of that same committee. but that doesn t make alleged abuse of power a high crime or misdemeanor. in their newly authored memo on constitutional grounds for impeachment, the majority of this committee goes to great lengths to explain why abuse of power is an impeachable offense, mentioning it was one of the charges against richard nixon and bill clinton. what they don t mention is that the house of representatives has never adopted alleged abuse of power as a presidential im impeachment. abuse of power is a vague, ambiguous term open to the interpretation of every individual. because abuse of power lacks a concise legal definition, there s a higher burden of proof on those pursuing such a charge to show the actions that the president rise to the level of impeachment. i believed that bill clinton had abused of power of his office but we failed to convince our colleagues in the house and that particular charge was rejected by the full house. in this case, the evidence provided is less convincing. in fact, i d argue it s nonexistent. first, there was no quid pro quo. second, it s a widely known in fact that ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet. it s why congress required the administration to certify that the ukrainian government had taken steps to clean up corruption before military aid could be provided to the country. president trump was well aware of that fact and quite skeptical of giving ukraine foreign aid long before the now famous july 25th phone call. third, ukraine actually received the aid after the president was satisfied that ukraine had taken meaningful steps to address corruption which again is an obligation required by law. based on the actual facts of this case as opposed to the hearsay and innuendo compiled by the intelligence committee, it s clear that no abuse of power ever took place and there certainly isn t enough evidence to support an article of impeachment. mr. chairman, as you know, there s another significant difference between the abuse of power charges against nixon and clinton and those presented here. in the nixon and clinton impeachments, abuse of power was a tacked on charge, far less important in those cases than the actual high crimes charged against both of them. here it s the main thrust of the house democrats entire case. let me put it another way. the entire argument for impeachment in this case is based on a charge that is not a crime, much less a high crime, and that has never been approved by the house of representatives in a presidential impeachment before ever in history. if that s the best you got, you wasted a whole lot of time and taxpayer dollars all because so many of you, mr. chairman, hate this president. one last thing, i guess we now know why nancy pelosi was focus grouping bribery as a potential charge, because she was desperately searching for a crime, any crime, to justify this sham impeachment. that effort was abandoned because she knows most members of congress know and now the american people know there simply wasn t a crime committed here and there shouldn t be an impeachment here either. i yield back. will the gentleman yield mr. chairman. what purpose does mr mr. swalwell seek recognition? to strike the last word. the gentleman is recognized. there are no crimes here? that s the defense my colleagues across the aisle are putting forward? how about the highest crime that one who holds public office could commit, a crime against our constitution. after all, the constitution is the highest, most supreme law of the land. every other law, statutory laws included, derive from the constitution, not the other way around. the president committed the highest crime against the constitution by abusing his office. cheating in an election. inviting foreign interference for a purely personal gain while jeopardizing our national security and the tintegrity of our elections. after all, we in congress are not criminal prosecutors, we do not prosecute crimes. we protect the constitution. but since my colleagues keep bringing up what potential crimes you could charge a president with, let s go through some of them because president trump s conduct overlaps with criminal acts. let s start with criminal bribery. 18 u.s. code 201-b2a. criminal bribery occurs when a public official demands or seeks anything of value personally in return for being influenced in the performance of an official act. additionally, the public official must carry out these acts corruptly. demands or seeks, president trump demanded and sought the announcement and conduct of politically motivated investigations by president zelensky. anything of value personally, for the purposes of anti-bribely law, the phrase anything of value have been interpreted by the courts broadly to carry out the purpose of abuse of public office. in return for being influenced, the third requirement, as the intel report demonstrated, president trump sought an announcement of these investigations in return for performing two official acts. first, he conditioned release of vital military assistance on president zelensky s investigations, and second, he conditioned a head of state meeting on these investigations. fourth, performance of an official act. the courts defined an official act as any decision, action, matter, cause, pursuit, proceeding or controversy that may be pending or brought before a public official. both the military aid an the white house meeting meet this requirement. finally, corruptly. president trump behaved corruptly throughout this course of conduct because he used his official office in exchange to seek a private benefit. a second crime, honest services fraud. 18 u.s. code section 1346, president trump knowingly and willfully orchestrated a scheme to defraud the american people of his honest services as president of the united states. this has been aligned often in the courts with bribery, except it also includes using a wider communication. clearly the july will the gentleman yield for a question? i will not yield. clearly the july 25 phone call constitutes a wire communication. there you have it. at least two criminal statutory crimes. however, all of these conversations about statutory crimes are moot because the president of the united states refuses to allow his own department of justice to indict him. so the president may be charged with crimes stat toerl one day but that s not what we re doing here on this day and we are not restricted like the department of justice is so we will uphold our duty to charge the president with the crimes against the constitution that he has committed using your taxpayer dallas, jeopardizing the integrity of your vote for a purely political purpose and a purely personal gain. with that i would yield to the gentle lady from california. i appreciate the gentleman s recitation of those facts as a former prosecutor. you speak with tremendous thofrt. authority. i would like to note that the argument about lying about an a sexual affair is misuse of presidential power but the misuse of presidential power to get a benefit somehow doesn t matter. if it s lying about sex, we could put stormy daniels case ahead of us. we don t believe that s a high crime the gentle woman yield. no, and it is not before us and it should not be before us because it s not an abuse of presidential power. i yield back. the gentleman s time is expired. will the gentleman yield briefly? the gentleman has the time. does the gentleman wish to yield? will the gentleman yield briefly? yes. the important thing is that bill clinton lied to a grand jury. that is a crime. the article of impeachment that passed the house accused bill clinton of lying to a grand jury, a crime, and something that obstructs the ability of the courts to get to the truth. this is not what is happening here. big difference. thank you. reclaiming my time. the gentleman reclaims his time. it is interesting though, we re here because of fraud, not by the president but from within the department of justice. i realize people on the other side of the aisle have been so busy trying to find some kind of criminal charge to bring geagait the president, none of which worked. they may not have been aware of the most recent horowitz report, but it is clear now that the whole investigation that has brought us here with crime after crime being alleged and then having to be dropped was a fraudulent effort before the fisa court to have a surveillance warrant done against carter page. they lied initially, said that he was a russian agent when actually he had been used by the cia as a spy against russia. so they lied. it was fraudulent and there hopefully will be people that will answer for their crimes and their fraud in the department of justice in the days to come and it sounds like that should be the case. there was fraud all the way through, but for three years we had been hearing about the crimes of the candidate trump and then the crimes of president trump, and we come now today based on the initial fraud that got this whole impeachment stuff started. and no one on the other side is willing to acknowledge the fraud that brought us here, nor the fact that so many people here have been screaming about the president s crimes, and we re even hearing today like we just did, oh, yes, there were crimes. then why aren t they in this impeachment document? it s because they don t exist. they ve been disproven over and over and over again, and that s why the gentleman s amendment is so well taken. you don t want to go down this ground. i think it s a bad idea when it was proposed before. high crimes and misdemeanors, if it s not treason even m misdemeanors are crimes. we had to drop it all. people saying here and in the public, gee, we re going to get the president because he colluded with russia, how terrible was that. well, that s all been disproved and dropped. now we re left with bribery and extortion and now we re even those had to be dropped because there were no crimes and i appreciate the gentleman bringing up crimes but those are not alleged here. let me just say, this is a day that will live in infamy for the judiciary committee. the days of exemplary chairs like daniel webster when he stood for principle, those are going to be gone because this became a tool of the majority to try to defeat use taxpayer funds to defeat a president. by the way, the ken starr report, 36 boxes, he came in and testified. we were kept out of hearing the witnesses. in watergate, these witnesses testified on television. it was public. it was not a starr chamber like the schiff chamber became. i would like to yield the reminder of my time to mr. jordan. when did it all happen? why isn t it in the resolution? democrats say there s some scheme to have an announcement made by president zelensky to get a phone call with the president to get a meeting with the president and to get the aid released. when did the announcement happen? they got the call on july 25. they got the meeting on september 25. they got the money on september 11. there was never an announcement from the ukrainians to do an investigation. so you can keep saying all this stuff and all the points that this happened, this happened. it didn t happen, not the facts. we know why the aid got released, because we learned that the new guy was the real deal and was going to are deal with corruption in his country. you can make up all the things you want but those are not the facts. the gentleman s time expired. let s actually go through the facts. we re here today because the president abused his power. we re here today because he solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election. he had welcomed foreign interference as it relates to russia. he solicited foreign interference on the white house lawn with china, and he did it with ukraine. he s a serial solicitor. let s go through the facts. congress allocated $391 million in military aid on a bipartisan basis to ukraine, currently at war with russian-backed separatists in the east. ukraine is a friend. russia is a foe. ukraine is a democracy. russia is a dictatorship. the united states is probably the only thing standing between vladimir putin and ukraine being completely overrun as part of putin s fantasy to reconstruct the soviet union which would be averse to the national security interests of the united states and every fact witness before this congress said so. you can t even dispute that. so we allocated aid on a bipartisan basis. then the aid was withheld. so the american people deserve to figure out why. in february there was a letter sent by the trump administration saying, okay, the aid is on the way. but it never arrived. in april he had a phone call, the president, with zelensky. the word corruption was not mentioned once. and then in may the department of defense wrote to this congress and said all necessary preconditions for the receipt of the aid have been met by the new ukrainian government including the implementation of anti-corruption protocols. we have that letter. it was sent to you and it was sent to us. then in july, on the 18th, at an office of management and budget meeting, the aid was officially frozen at the direction of the president. twice during the summer mitch mcconnell, the senate republican majority leader, publicly stated he called the trump administration, what happened to the aid? mitch mcconnell couldn t get a good answer. because there was no good answer. then on july 25 there s another call between president trump and president zelensky. the word corruption is not mentioned once. here s what was said. zelensky talks about defense. the immediate response is, do us a favor though. president trump says, i need you to look into some things, not related to procurement of defense arms but related to a wild conspiracy theory connected to the 2016 campaign and also says i want you to look into joe bid biden. then what s interesting, since you think it was such a perfect call, he mentions rudolph giuliani, i m looking at the transcript right now, not once, not twice, but three times. why on an official call would the president mention rudolph giuliani. he s not an ambassador. he s not the secretary of state. he s not a a member of the diplomatic core. he s president trump s political enforcer. then what happens? you said you want to talk about the facts. in august, giuliani travels to madrid and meets with the ukrainian government as a followup to trump saying to ukraine go meet with giuliani. then a statement is drafted by this phony investigation and sent to the ukrainians, but what happens? in august the whistle-blower complaint is filed. then on september 9 the whistle-blower complaint is made public to congress. two days later, on september 11, all of a sudden the aid is released. why was the aid released? because the president was caught red-handed trying to pressure a foreign government to target an american citizen. i yield back. the gentleman yields back. for what purpose does mr. gates seek recognition? strike the last word. the gentleman is recognized. there were five meetings that we have detailed that show why the aid was released. there was a belief on the administration previously that ukraine was one of the most corrupt countries in the world, that they had not engaged in sufficient reforms, and after a number of events with the vice president, with a bipartisan senate delegation, there was a resolution of that aid. but this debate just lacks a certain sincerity. i heard earlier mr. swalwell list out all these crimes. if i m watching at home i m thinking, well, where are they in the impeachment? that is just a democrat drive-by, to go and list crimes that you don t allege and that you don t have evidence for. if there is ever a microcosm of how to consume this day and the importance of it with the american people, it s that they re naming crimes in debate that they don t even have in their impeachment resolution because they can t prove them, because there are no underlying facts. then i hear my friend from new york, mr. jeffries, bring up russia, the residue of impeachment hearings passed and failed. how are we even here debating about military aid, javelins, that president trump delivered that president obama withheld? i hear them crying these alligator tears, clutching their pearls over this notion that trump didn t give this aid, we got to impeach him for it. where was all this concern when obama was president? you want to know our substantive defense? it s four things. they ve never changed. i think mr. jordan dreams of them in his sleep. both president trump and president zelensky said there was no pressure. we saw the call transcript and there s no conditionality. there was never awareness on the part of the ukraine that there was a delay in aid. and the ukraine got the aid without opening the investigation that seems to be so troubling to democrats. everything you re going to hear them say today can be pretty much categorized into three areas. first, it s either stuff people presumed and had no direct evidence of, kind of their water cooler theory of the case. second, it s hearsay. somebody told somebody told somebody else that created some concern about the president s conduct. or, it is reflective of a sincere policy, this agreement about how to make the ukraine great again. i heard all these folks come by their part of the diplomatic core and they seem to believe that we ought do everything for the ukraine but if the president disagrees with that it is not impeachable conduct. essentially they re alleging a shakedown but i think most americans know that you cannot have a shakedown if the person allegedly being shook down doesn t even know about the shakedown. you have president zelensky himself saying i felt no pressure. and then, talk about bad timing, we got this time article that comes out on the 10th of december because their theory of the case is, well, even if zelensky didn t know there was pressure, there s this other guy, yermack, and yermack knew from gordan sondland that there was pressure, but the same day that they introduced their articles of impeachment, yermack gives this interview with time magazine and says, and i quote, gordon and i were never alone together. we bumped each each other as i was walking out and i remember everything. we talked about how well the meeting went. that is all we talked about. so here they are with no crime, with no victim, with no witnesses, with no knowledge of any shakedown, and yet they proceed. to accept the democrats theory of the case, you got to believe that the ukrainians are lying to us, when they say there s no conditionality, no pressure, nothing wrong, that they re so weak and so dependent on the united states that we can t believe a word they say. again, where were you during the obama administration when this weak ally didn t get javelins that were then withheld. i support the jordan amendment because this article one, this abuse of power that they allege in the impeachment theory is a total joke. they have to say abuse of power because they don t have evidence for obstruction. they have to say abuse of power because they have no evidence for bribery or treason. they have to say abuse of power because all those specific crimes that the gentleman from california named cannot be supported by the evidence. this is sort of the rorschach ink blot of impeachment so everybody can stare at the ink blot and see what they want to see. this notion of abuse of power is the lowest of low energy impeachment theories. heck, i don t know any political party that doesn t think when the other side is in the white house that they abuse power, they do too much. i got a lot of constituents that think that barack obama abused his power, but you know what, we didn t do this to the country. we didn t put them through this nonsense and this impeachment. you all set the standard. we didn t set it. you said this would have to be bipartisan, compelling, and overwhelming. it ain t that. and this looks pretty bad. i yield back. the gentleman yields back. thank you, mr. chairman. in response strike the last word? yes, move to strike the last word. the gentle lady is recognized. in response to my colleague from florida, you cannot argue things both ways. you cannot say that the president was so concerned about ukraine that he released aid, which is true, he released aid in 2017. he released aid in 2018, and then suddenly he became concerned in 2019 right after vice president biden announced that he was going to run. so if your argument is that he was so concerned about ukraine that he released aid in 2017 and 2018, then why in 2019 after the department of defense cleared ukraine on charges of corruption, why then did he decide he was so concerned about corruption that he was not going to release aid? because i m sorry, i m not yielding. i m not yielding. i am not yielding. they got a new president, that s why. the gentle lady has the time. people will be in order and people will not interrupt. that is not proper here. the gentle lady will continue. thank you, mr. chairman. they got a new president who was known to be an anti-corruption fighter, so that argument has no weight whatsoever. now, if you want to argue that the president was so concerned about corruption at that particular moment you have to look at the whole record of u.s. policy and our agreement that the department of defense would look under certain conditions before they released military aid to determine whether or not a country had satisfied those requirements around corruption and the department of defense released that report. nowhere between the time that donald trump withheld aid and the time that he released that aid was there an additional assessment required or done. in fact, the department of defense decided they didn t need to do another assessment because they had already done the assessment. so at the end of the day i have only two questions for my colleagues on the other side and these are the two questions. forget about president trump. forget about president trump. will any one of my colleagues on the other side say that it is an abuse of power to condition aid, to condition aid on official acts, forget about president trump. forget about president trump. is any one of my colleagues willing to say that it is ever okay for a president of the united states of america to invite foreign interference in our elections? not a single one of you has said that so far. i ll say it. i yield to my colleague from texas. will the gentle lady yield so we can answer the question? yeah, i ll be glad to answer it. she asked it. the gentle lady has the time she asked us a question. the members know perfectly well it is out of order to interrupt members who have the time. unless they ask you a question. the gentle lady has yielded to whom? she asked us a question. the gentle lady yielded to whom? ms. escobar now has the time. thank you, chairman. thank you, representative. i want to break this down in simple terms for the american public because our republican colleagues are working overtime to try to convince us that we didn t see what we saw with our own eyes and we didn t hear what we heard with our own ears. let s bring it down to an example that was used during the hearing. if a governor if a community suffers a natural disaster and the governor of the state has aid that will help that community but calls the mayor of your community and says, i want you to do me a favor though, and conditions giving the aid to the community on the police chief smearing his political opponent, has there been a crime, the answer is yes. and that governor would go to jail. if that governor later releases the aid after he got caught, it doesn t matter. he still committed the crime. furthermore, if that governor says during the investigation, i m going to defy the subpoenas, we re going to fight the subpoenas, guess what would happen to that governor. he s committed a crime. he would go to jail. is it the sd if the governor then tried to cover up his wrongdoing so that his people couldn t see his wrongdoing, what would happen to that governor? did he commit a crime? yes. he would go to jail. so as wildly as they re trying to convince you that there was no wrongdoing, i want the american public to understand what is going on here. it s clear as day. we ve seen it with our own eyes. we ve heard it with our own ears. facts matter. i yield back. thank you, ms. escobar. i would just again close with this single question. is it ever okay for a president to condition official action on personal gain? i yield back. mr. chairman. mr. chairman. who seeks recognition? for what purpose? unanimous consent request. i d like to ask anonymous consent to introduce into the record i cannot hear you, sir. i d like to introduce ask anonymous consent to introduce into the record the transcript of the call where the president says i would like you to do us a favor. without objection the transcript will be introduced. i seek to strike the last word. the gentleman is recognized. thank you, mr. chairman. i want to address mr mr. swalwell s thank you for coming back mr. swalwell s comments that there are definitely crimes. first of all, i believe mr. swalwell during the mueller investigation went on national tv and said something to the affects effect of an indictment is coming. he knew it, an indictment is coming. i know mr. swalwell knows crimes. he was a prosecutor. he also knows the obligation that a prosecutor has not to bring a crime, not a bring a charge unless there s reasonable probability of conviction. i would direct mr. swalwell to the elements of bribery, whoever being a public official krupts or demands or seeks personally anything of value in person for being influenced in the performance of an official act, the department of justice s criminal division public integrity section opines that something as nebulous as an investigation is not of sufficient concrete value to constitute something of value under this statute. also, the other element at question here and one of the reasons i think that we need more than one week as the committee of jurisdiction to look into this matter is because if there are crimes we should be bringing experts. we should be bringing in testimony. if there is a crime, i think it is far more fair to charge a to pass articles of impeachment on a president where the president can defend against specific elements as opposed to something as vegague as abuse o power. mr. swalwell, the official act that you talk about under the mcconnell supreme court s mcconnell decision, that decision says setting up a meeting, talking to another official or organizing an event without more does not fit the definition of official act. there are two elements missing in your analysis. but that doesn t surprise me because there were no elements that were that the special counsel found in this situation. i think that it is unfortunate when the gentleman from rhode island talks about the president sending mr. giuliani to the ukraine to smear, to smear vice president biden, let s talk about what vice president biden did. his son sat on a board and made an outrageous amount of money for someone that had no background in energy, no background in the ukraine while his father was the vice president. if that is not a fair topic for discussion in the world of politics, i don t know what is. smearing is trying to conjure up false information or making a vague argument based on false information. this isn t smearing. this is seeking the truth about corruption. not a single member on the other side of the aisle has been willing to condemn the conduct of the former vice president how frustrating it must be to be president trump and have your son spend over a million dollars on attorneys fees when the special counsel is investigating something that never happened. there was no collusion. there was no conspiracy between russia and the trump campaign, but there was clear there is clear evidence of wrongdoing between hunter biden, the former vice president, joe biden would the gentleman yield? no, i will not. and the ukraine and the corporation burisma. so the idea that there was a smear going on, let s look at the facts, and i will yield to my friend in arizona. thank you very much. let s talk about what was going on in 2017, 2018 and 2019, there was a pause put on aid. you have a new administration in the ukraine and the anti-corruption benchmarks were done under the previous administration, poroshenko. that was testified to in this committee. we know that several of the previous corrupt administrators and cabinet level officials including some oligarchs have close relationships to zelensky. there was a concern whether mr. zelensky was the real deal. the aid was prospective and the pause was unknown. the u.s. officials continued to meet with ukrainian officials and determined that zelensky was the real deal and made every effort to convince president trump that that was the case. once two new anti-corruption measures were released within two days, so was the funding. that s what changed. yield back. mr. chairman, unanimous consent request what purpose does the gentleman from california seek recognition? request for a vox 2019 article, all of robert mueller s indictments, including the 34 people and three companies that he indicted in his lengthy investigation. without objection. i object. i want to see it. i ll reserve it. the gentleman reserves an objection. he wants to see it. that s fair. thaler seek? i move to strike the last word and yield to my friend and colleague from florida. i thank the gentleman for yielding. i just got to come back to this interview with yermack because it s like the tree that fell in the forest that nobody heard that completely demolished the entire democratic case. they have no evidence that the ukrainians ever knew that this aid was withheld. so they re literally trying to prosecute an impeachment against the president for a shakedown when the alleged people being shook down, one, said they felt no pressure, and two, did not even know it was happening. time and again you heard them in debate, in press conferences and the whole circus show that s going on here say, well, we ve got this testimony from gordan sondland we all remember glo glo gordon wandering his way to an escalator with a guy who speaks english as a second language and gordon says, well, maybe i said something to him about this. that was the whole deal for them. then, you talk about embarrassing, the same day that they introduced their articles of impeachment that we knew they were going to introduce one way or another the moment they took the majority, it comes out that yermack denies the whole thing. show me the ukrainian that was pressured. show me the ukrainian that knew that any of this was tied to any condition conditionality. there s no conditionality in the call. so it s quite easy to answer the gentle lady from washington s question, very easy. in this case, there is no conditionality. you can t prove it. you have no evidence of it. frankly, even the ukrainians, even your purported victims are coming out in the press and saying their theory of the case is wrong. their fundamental premise has been rejected. i yield to the gentleman from pennsylvania. yes, i yield to my friend from ohio. exactly what changed is we got a brand new president who ran zelensky ran on anti-corruption. let s see if he s the real deal. that s exactly what happened in the 55 days the aid was paused. we talked about five critical meetings that took place, five meetings. the last one i think is the most important because you have a democrat senator and a republican senator meet with president zelensky in kyiv. they knew the aid had been paused at that time. the ukrainians learned a few days before that and the issue never came up. what did come up is both of these senators came back and said this guy is the real deal, worth the risk, worth sending the hard earned tax dollars of the american people to ukraine. that is what happened and the facts are very clear. you can make up all the stuff you want but the facts are on the president side and have always been on the president s side. democrats keep saying to get the call, the meeting, the money, there had to be an announcement. it s december 12th. there is yet to be an announcement from ukraine about any type of investigation into burisma or the bidens yet, because it s not going to happen because its never needed to happen. that wasn t the point. but they got the call july 25. they got the meeting september 25 and they got the money 1e september 11. the other thing i want to proponepoint out, i don t know how many times i heard the democrats talk about the one famous sentence in the president s call to president zelensky, i would like you to do us a favor though. your star witness who was here last week, she talked about this being the royal we. she read the sentence the way you guys tried to portray the sentence, she said it said i would like you to do me a favor though. that s not what it says. it says i would like you to do us a favor though because and guess what the next two words are. it says because our country, not i. he doesn t say i want you to do me a favor because i ve been through a lot. very clear, i would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and that is the understatement of the year. heck yeah, our country has been through a lot. this is the day after bob mueller sat in front of this committee and we learned the there was nothing there but two years he put our country through turmoil because of you guys. at the end of this paragraph he references bob mueller. that s what he s talking about. heck yeah our country had been through a lot and the president was ticked about it and wanted to find out what was going on. that s very legitimate, working on behalf of the american people. but as i said last night, you guys don t respect the 63 million people who voted for this guy. that s why the speaker of the house called the president an imposter. that s what s wrong. i would like you to do us a favor because our country has been through a lot. i yield back. the gentleman yields back. for what purpose does mr. johnson seek recognition? move to strike the last word. the gentleman is recognized. i just want to slow this down and be very methodical because most of us are attorneys and we re supposed to be finders of fact and supposed to carefully and objectively analyze the claims against the record so let s do that. there are two articles to this impeachment, abuse of power and obstruction of justice. on the first, democrats know there is zero evidence to show that president trump engaged of any scheme or that he intended with his dealings with ukraine to influence the 2020 election. no impeachment should ever proceed on the basis of hearsay and conjecture and speculation that wouldn t even be admissible in a local traffic court. to my friend ms. jayapal, there is no evidence of any condition and i guess i need to repeat the four indisputable facts in this record because repetition is apparently necessary here. first, both the president and zelensky say there was no pressure exerted. number two, the july 25 call transcript shows no conditionality between funding and investigation. three, ukraine was not aware of the aid being delayed. number four, they never opened an investigation, still received the aid and got the meeting. our colleagues keep misrepresenting the facts. not only do they misrepresent the do me a favor versus do us a favor, but only three people listened in on the call. contrary to the assertions we ve heard this morning, they didn t provide firsthand testimony of what happened on the call. all three of the testimonies continued indict contradicted each other. the evidence shows that president trump holds a deep-seated and reasonable skepticism have ukraine due to its history of corruption. the president sought that the newly elected president is a reformer. president trump wanted to ensure that the american taxpayer-funded security assistance would not be squandered by what hash reported as the third most corrupt nation in the world before zelensky, and the discussions they had were never about what happened or what will happen in 2020 but what happened in 2016. the second claim of this resolution is that the president obstructed congress but he simply did what virtually every other president in the modern era has also done. what s his big infraction? he asserted a legitimate executive privilege and legal immunity to request subpoenas issued to various white house officials. there s no evidence of any impeachable conduct. it s commonplace. the natural impasse that exists between the executive and legislative branches in our constitutional system has been easily and calmly resolved either by good faith negotiation or a simple filing with the third branch of our government, the judicial branch. in spite of their allegations here democrats know president trump has lawful cause to challenge those subpoenas in this matter. house democrats are trying to impeach president trump for seeking judicial review over whether the direct communications between high ranking advisers and a president under these circumstances are privileged or should be disclosed. that could be would be expedited in the courts. it wouldn t take that long, but democrats said they don t have time for that. why? because they promised their base an impeachment by christmas. this whole thing is absurd. it should be noted that president trump has consistently cooperated with congress in fulfilling its over sight and investigation spots herresponsi here. at the start of the impeachment inquiry the white house produced more than 100,000 pages of documents to the oversight committee and quickly declassified and produced to everyone the call transcript. democrats know this is an absurd charge about obstruction and the truth is in the history of the republic there s never been a single party fraudulent impeachment process deployed against a president like the one being used against donald trump. they re the ones seeking to nullify our vital constitutional safeguards with a sham. their objective is to nullify the votes of the 63 million americans who voted to elect donald trump the president. they violated due process and all the rest. my colleague, sheila jackson lee, evoked and quoted barbara jordan but she said during the watergate inquiry, impeachment quadrupl quadrupled. this impeachment is going to fail and the democrats will pay a heavy political price for it but the pandora s box they ve opened will do irreparable damage to our country in the years ahead. i yield back. the gentleman yields back. mr. chairman, i move to strike the last word. the gentle lady is recognized. mr. chairman, i m opposed to this amendment. it s incredible to me that the other side of the aisle has not seen the facts and has not apparently read some of the evidence before us. it is obvious to me that this president has put his personal interests above this country, and with that i ll yield back to the gentleman from maryland. rhode island. oh, rhode island. i thank the gentle lady for yielding. we ve just heard our republican colleagues claim that there was no demand, no conditionality for the release of this aid and in fact it was motivated by this president s deep desire to ferret out corruption. that is laughable. the president of the united states had two phone calls with president zelensky. he never once even uttered the word corruption because it wasn t about corruption and the reason we know that is the department of defense had already certified that steps had been taken to combat corruption back on may 23 and despite that certification that hold remained in place. in fact, the professionals testified about them trying to figure out how is it possible it s legal to hold this aid, because the certification happened and there s no basis to hold it other than the president ordered it. so it s not about corruption. it was about extracting a commitment to announce publicly that they were launching an investigation of president trump s chief political rival, a smear against vice president biden. so this notion that really what happened is the president just satisfied himself that mr. zelensky was for real is nonsense and betrayed by all the evidence collected. let me remind you of it because you apparently don t remember it. ambassador sondland testified under oath, mr. giuliani s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a white house visit for president zelensky. mr. giuliani demanded that ukraine mr. giuliani by the way, the president s counsel. he demanded that ukraine make a public statement announcing the investigation of the 2016 election, the dnc server and burisma. mr. giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the united states and we knew these investigations were important to the president. on the july 25 call president zelensky himself recognized the connection between the meeting and the investigation. he said i also want to thank you for your invitation to visit the united states, specifically washington d.c. oefr i also want to ensure you that we ll be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation, and the president spoke on that call about the bidens and burisma. the omb ultimately announces that aid was being withheld and all the national security team recommended the release of the aid. this is an important ally of the united states facing an active war with the russians that took part of their country and has killed people in eastern ukraine. american military aid was a life line for this emerging democracy. you know the only people who benefitted from this scheme? president trump because he thought he was going to get an announcement to smear his political poopponent, and vladir putin who was trying to weaken the ukrainians. there was recent article that said president zelensky facing president putin all alone. so this benefitted russia, weakening ukraine. but this notion that the reason that the aid was released because the president was satisfied is defied in the report by the intelligence committee. it was released because the president got caught. the whistle-blower filed report, a complaint alleging an elaborate scheme by the president that betrayed the national interests of the country, undermined our national security, that advanced the personal political interests of the president, not the national interests of our country, that attempted to corrupt our elections by dragging in foreign interference. it s the highest of high crimes and misdemeanors. our framers spoke about this abuse of power, abusing the office of the presidency to advance your own personal interests and to undermine the public interest. i ll yield to mr. rasken. i yield to mr. rasken. thank you very much. just to flesh out the detail from what the gentleman from right si rd rd w rhode island, one of the depositions was with someone who was with gordan sondland who testified there was a quid pro quo but he saw him on the phone with president trump and he reported right at that time to him. he said the president doesn t give a blank about ukraine. he s interested in the big stuff. what s the big stuff? whatever can benefit him. the gentleman yields back. for what purpose does mr. biggs seek recognition? move to strike the last word. the gentleman is recognized. last night and today we ve heard my colleagues on the other side saying the facts are not contest contested, but they really are. an exam is one just pointed out, highlighted from my colleague from louisiana just a moment ago. on the telephone call, of the 17 witnesses that came in, only three actually listened in on the phone call. each one of them have contradictory testimony. so even the three witnesses that heard the call conflicted. and why is that important? why did i bring that up? i bring it up because of this, many of my colleagues, in fact, most of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle take every inference in the light most negative to the president of the united states. that s because there s an animus there that has been manifested since november 9, 2016, the day after he was elected. so having watched this procedure closely on the heels of the other procedures in the attempts to impeach this president and investigate, i am left wondering, you want every inference to go against the president. why should the american public give you any inference of credibility? the reality is when my colleague from california said was talking about the russian issue, not a single american was indicted for conspiring with russia to influence the elections, not one. he still believes there was some kind of collusion with the trump campaign. what do the facts actually get to? when my colleague just talked about the money was released, the aid was released, again he takes this inference based on a timeline and he s citing rank hearsay. i guy says, i overheard this conversation, sitting on a patio at a restaurant, lots of people, but boy, i could hear everything. i knew what was said. i was so concerned about it, i didn t tell anybody. i came in once this really got going and revved up. you want to take every inference against the president. why should we give you any inference of credibility. the only direct evidence in this case remains the same after all this time. no pressure. no pressure on the phone call. mr. zelensky has said that pree repeatedly. he spent one press conference talking all day long about no pressure, there was no pressure. yermack said there was no pressure. are they lying? no. but we know the whistle-blower was lying. we know that mr. schiff was lying. mr. schiff came out the day before and said eight times the president put direct pressure on the ukrainians. oops, the transcript is released, not true. that would be the facts being contested, absolutely. we know there was no conditionality. everybody said there s no conditionality, everybody that participated, everybody that listened. ukraine was unaware of the hold so how can you leverage them if they were unaware of the hold and there was never any investigation. but what happened? what triggered it? you have high ranking officials going to the ukraine, meeting with them, convinced the president. you have the president of the ukraine signing two pieces of legislation, reinstituting the anti-corruption tribunal and removing immunity from prosecution of the legislative branch in the ukraine. significant anti-corruption measures worthy, worthy of convincing this president that, yes, they re worth a chance. so with that, you have nothing. your credibility is in tatters quite frankly. i yield to my friend from colorado. i thank my friend for yielding and i want to ask my friends on the other side, mr. sondland, ambassador sondland is your star witness? really? you re basing an impeachment on ambassador sondland s testimony? his first statement, his first deposition, he said 325 times, i don t remember, i don t know, i m not sure, 325 times. you don t think when this gets over to the senate that he s going to be impeached on all the things he didn t remember? then, then, his testimony impeached, not his office. i see the smirk. then what does he do? he reads and he listens to what ambassador taylor says that he knows and what ambassador yovanovitch says that he knows and what all these people say that he knows and then his memory is refreshed. i yield back. the gentleman yields back. what purpose does mr. radcliffe seek recognition? move to strike the last word. the gentleman is recognized. i want to respond to my good friend congressman sis aileen s comments when he said that president trump s demand can t be explained by corruption because the word corruption is never uttered anywhere in the transcript. the problem with that is that the democrats have built this entire fake impeachment scheme around an alleged demand. guess what word is not anywhere in the transcript, demand. nowhere in that transcript does the president make a demand. do you know where the word demand came from? from the whistle-blower. that s the first time we heard the word demand, when he notified the inspector general for the intelligence community. he said president trump made a demand. he thought he could do that because he thought no one would be able to prove because what presidential would take the unprecedented step of releasing a transcript with a foreign leader. this president did, something that the whistle-blower never expected. president trump, we keep hearing, got caught. president trump, we keep hearing, is obstructing justice. the president that took the unprecedented step of releasing a transcript so that everyone could see the truth is not obstructing congress. the president didn t get caught. the whistle-blower got caught. the whistle-blower made false
eceding was a paid commercial program for rotorazer, sponsored by razor tools llc. for rotorazer, sponsored by razor tools llc. captioning sponsored by cbs garrett: tonight, the christmas crush. travelers fill the highways and airports. dense fog caused all flights to be grounded at one of the country s biggest airports. shoppers pack the stores, but the season s far from over as two thirds of americans plan to shop after christmas. reunited. new pictures of a baby girl who was kidnapped and now back with her father as friends and relatives mourn her mother, who was murdered. we appreciate all the love that everybody s showing. garrett: lashing out. with the impeachment at a standstill in congress, the president takes aim at house speaker nancy pelosi. she hates all of the people that voted for me and the republican party. garrett: plus his message for north korea over a possible missile launch. reaching out. why a reliably republican state is defying president trump by putting out the welcome mat for refugees. this is not about red or blue. this is about from the heart. garrett: now you see them. prince harry, megan, and archie in their new christmas card. but they re missing from a prominent royal event. and neighbor helping neighbor. after a devastating fire, how a community saved the holiday for a christmas tree farmer. this is the cbs evening news with norah o donnell, reporting from the nation s capital garrett: good evening to our viewers in the west. norah is off tonight. i m major garrett. as we come on the air, it is already christmas in many parts of the world. thousands have gathered in bethlehem s manger square in the west bank, revered by christians as the birthplace of jesus. at the vatican, pope francis celebrated christmas eve mass at st. peter s basilica. his message: god loves everyone, even the worst of us. here at home, shoppers filled the stores. and by one estimate, 74 million americans waited until the last day to buy at least some of their christmas presents. christmas eve travel came to a halt in chicago today when fog shut down both city airports. mola lenghi has been following the holiday getaway and leads us off tonight. reporter: at airports across the country this morning there was the final push to make it to holiday destinations. by the afternoon, most airport traffic had eased. same for the nation s roads and railways. foot traffic has been slow. train was easy on time, no problem. reporter: but christmas eve has not been without a few unwelcome surprises. you can see the line is super long. i guess due to the fog this morning. reporter: a blanket of fog shut down all flights in and out of o hare and midway airports for about two hours. my grandmother s 90th birthday party is actually on christmas day and i got an email at about 3 o clock this morning explaining that all the flights had been cancelled. reporter: but you can t disappoint grandma. leading to plenty of frustration all around. from philadelphia international airport i thought is this a joke, am i going to make my flight? reporter: to minneapolis-st paul international we had to come to here almost three hours early just to get through the t.s.a. reporter: to los angeles international, where a massive traffic log-jam outside led to high anxiety inside. it was like kind of a nightmare because i was like kind of nervous i was like i m gonna miss my flight. but then luckily my flight got delayed. reporter: how bad does it have to be when you re grateful for a delay?! well, tis the season. while most travelers are likely already at their holiday as you can see, there are a lot of people on the move. here, people making their way from new jersey into manhattan. but look out, it s the days after christmas, thursday and friday that are expected to be the busiest travel days and they will collide with some inclement weather, major, not just on the west coast but also out east. garrett: mola lenghi at the traffic-clogged mouth of the holland tunnel. as for christmas, the storm will move through the southwest tonight, and tomorrow more than a foot of snow will fall in the mountains. that s good for the ski resort. phoenix will see heavy rainfall. for much of the nation, it will be warm, not a white christmas. 66 in wichita, 53 in chicago, 71 in nashville. if you were looking for crowds today, all you had to do was go shopping. adriana diaz is in chicago tonight. adriana, those 74 million americans who are still buying their gifts on christmas eve. at this point, other than gum and maybe gift cards, what are their options? reporter: major, at this point, not many. now, most stores as you can imagine are closing early and will remain closed tomorrow, but not all is lost. cvs and walgreen s will be open tomorrow for at least part of the day if you re in a pinch. but if you re willing to wait, you can join two-thirds of holiday shoppers who will be hitting the stores after christmas, also in time for the last days of hanukkah. half of those people will be hunting for deals, whereas more than a quarter will be, not surprisingly, using gift cards. now, all of those shoppers will be adding to what s already been a record-breaking shopping season. this past saturday, nearly half of the u.s. population, nearly half, went out and bought something, making it the busiest shopping day in u.s. history and, of course, more gifts means more gifts to be discreetly returned. get this, about 77% of consumers expect to return at least some of their gifts, i don t know who would possibly do that, and that s 26% more than last christmas. so tis the season for giving and also returning. major. garrett: adriana diaz with the vital shopping statistics. thanks so much. in a related story, president trump still has shopping to do, more on that in a moment, but the president spent this christmas eve speaking with u.s. troops and firing away at a political rival. chip reid is with the president in florida. merry christmas, fantastic job. reporter: president trump sent christmas greetings to service members stationed around the globe today then took questions from the press. he bitterly criticized house speaker nancy pelosi for leading the charge on his impeachment. she s doing a tremendous disservice to the country, she s not doing a good job. reporter: pelosi has refused to send the articles of impeachment to the senate until she s convinced the senate trial will be fair, but the president said that s not up to her, it s up to senate republican leader mitch mcconnell. he has the right to do whatever he wants, he s the head of the senate. reporter: the president was also asked about north korean leader kim jong un s promise of a christmas gift. which intelligence sources fear could mean a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. that would be a major setback in the president s campaign to convince him to denuclearize. this satellite image from last week shows a new structure at a factory where north korea is believed to be manufacturing mobile launchers for long-range missiles. we ll find out what the surprise is, and we ll deal with it very successfully. let s see what happens. everybody s got surprises for me. reporter: in an apparent joke, the president said maybe kim really will give him a gift. maybe it s a present where he sends me a beautiful vase. reporter: one of the service members asked the president what he got first lady melania trump for christmas. he said he got her a beautiful card. he then added that he needs to start working on a gift real fast. major. garrett: chip reid, thank you so much. tonight an infant girl is back with her father in texas after being kidnapped along with her mother, who was found murdered. the mother s friend is under arrest in the case. mireya villarreal reports the baby s return is a moment of comfort for a family in pain. reporter: these newly released photos say it all, along with three simple words: finally! such joy! baby margot returned to her father the same night that dozens gathered to mourn the death of her mother heidi broussard. she was beautiful. she was kind. she had hope for people that no one else would have. reporter: broussard s body was found on thursday, a week after she disappeared, in the trunk of a car outside a houston home. she d been strangled. inside, police found magen fieramusca, a longtime friend of broussard, and 3-week old margot. megan fieramusca reporter: fieramusca was arrested charged with kidnapping and tampering with a corpse. authorities say fieramusca had acted like she was expecting a child at the same time as broussard as part of a plot to kidnap the infant. (singing amazing grace) news of the reunion came at last night s vigil, from margot s grandfather, ty carey. the light is shining through. it s such a blessing. reporter: the support of a community easing some of the pain. we appreciate all the love that everybody s showing and it turned out to be a terrible thing that nobody saw coming. reporter: heidi broussard s funeral will be in louisiana, where she grew up. so far, fieramusca has not been charged with murder, but investigators say more charges could be coming. major. garrett: thank you. state and city governments face a christmas deadline to inform the federal government if they ll accept new refugees. president trump has reduced the number of refugees who can legally enter the country next year to 18,000, down from 85,000 in 2016. it s a sensitive political issue. but we visited a state where republicans and democrats are putting out the welcome mat. hello, how are you? garrett: kiki sharma was born in a refugee camp in nepal after her parents fled bhutan more than 25 years ago. it s an amazing journey i ve lived. garrett: they resettled in utah and about two years ago, with help from the international rescue committee opened bhutan house, a restaurant serving cuisine from nepal, india and bhutan. the dream came true here for us. garrett: but that dream may be available to fewer and fewer. an executive action issued by president trump gives state and local governments power to refuse refugees. no other president would be doing that. garrett: but not in utah.where the state s republican governor sent the president a letter asking for more refugees. i think our president would like for it to be partisan but it just is not. reporter: jackie biskupski is the democratic mayor of salt lake city. when we see there is a need for other refugees around the world to have a safe place to land, we want to be that place. garrett: michelle kaufusi is the mayor of heavily republican provo. they are some of the most hardworking, dedicated people you ll ever meet that s what i hope president trump would see. garrett: the mayors also hope the president would see people like asma dahir, born in utah within weeks of her somali mother arriving from a kenyan refugee camp. this land gave me all these opportunities to get a higher education, to really solidify my identities and i really appreciate that. are you going to go to college? yeah. garrett: she s on track for a degree in public health and volunteers with newly arrived refugees in salt lake. i want to lend a hand and help my brothers and sisters become successful the way i have. garrett: despite utah s open arms policy, refugee resettlements in the state are now about a third of what they were during the obama administration. now to paris where for the first christmas since the french revolution, notre-dame cathedral will be silent. the building is still closed to the public. cleanup and repairs from the april fire will take years to complete. imtiaz tyab reports from paris. ( singing ) reporter: a hymn of happiness sung with sorrow. for the first time in over two centuries, notre dame s choir is celebrating mass in a nearby church after christmas at the cathedral was canceled. to think that i was ill last christmas and i missed christmas at notre dame thinking that i would go again this year with no problem. no, i can t believe i m not going to do christmas. ( sirens ) reporter: following the devastating fire back in april, it quickly became clear it would be a long time before christmas would be celebrated there again. the only other time midnight mass was canceled was during the french revolution of 1789. not even during world war one and two did notre dame shut completely. but france s government is confident services will resume again by 2025. despite the collapse of lead roof and wooden steeple. in the grand scheme of things five or six years of restoration for a cathedral that s 855- years-old doesn t seem all that long but reconstruction experts say it could likely take longer. brazilian student eduarda barrea, who lives in paris, hopes worshipers use the time to reconnect with god elsewhere. people are trying to reconstruct and give everything to rebuild it, and it is maybe the opportunity to go to other churches to rebuild your faith. reporter: something notre dame s choir and congregation are doing until they can return to their spiritual home. imtiaz tyab, cbs news, paris. garrett: a fallen soldier will be flown home tomorrow, christmas day. sergeant first class michael goble was killed yesterday by a roadside bomb in afghanistan. goble, a 33 year old green beret from new jersey, was on his fourth tour of duty and was due home in less than a month. he is the 20th american to die in afghanistan this year. a gofundme page has raised more than $50,000 for his family. the u.s. military has some of the best musicians in the world. the navy band just held its annual holiday show in the nation s capital and paula reid met some of the players. reporter: these aren t your typical sailors and this is not your typical band. the navy band has been around, informally almost as long as the navy, serving through song at presidential inaugurations, funerals and other government functions. captain ken collins is the band s commander. the most rewarding thing for me, honestly, is getting the opportunity to work with these outstanding individuals reporter: musician first class chelsi vanderpol is one of those faces. chelsi, there s easier ways to join a band. bootcamp?! i was terrified to go to boot camp, so i also trained a lot. reporter: the band s 170 members and its 11 ensembles perform more than 1,300 shows per year all around the globe. ( singing ) in my first year, we learned a japanese piece, we had selected a song that was written in honor of those they had lost in the giant tsunami in 2011. and they came up and they shake our hands through broken english, they re thanking us for honoring them. we shared an experience, established good faith and we created a relationship. (singing) paula reid, cbs news, washington. garrett: there is much more ahead on tonight s cbs evening news. for example, look who s making his debut in a royal christmas card. and why a bus driver is being hailed as a hero, even though she let two riders on for free. man: sneezes skip to the good part with alka-seltzer plus. now with 25% more concentrated power. nothing works faster for powerful cold relief. oh, what a relief it is! so fast! where everything is just a few clicks away,il, buying a car should be no different. that s why, at carvana, you can buy a car 100% online. we made it easy to browse, view, and buy from over 10,000 cars. you can even trade-in your old car all while binge watching your favorite tv show. afterwards, we ll deliver your car to you. or you can pick it up from one of our car vending machines. either way, your car comes with a 7-day return policy. so grab a seat, relax in your comfy pants, and enjoy the new way to buy a car at carvana. when i lost my sight, my biggest fear was losing my independence. mmm. good. so i ve spent my life developing technology to help the visually impaired. we are so good. we built a guide that uses ibm watson. to help the blind. it is already working in cities like tokyo. my dream is to help millions more people like me. audrey s on it. eating right and staying active? on it! audrey thinks she s doing all she can to manage her type 2 diabetes and heart disease, but is her treatment doing enough to lower her heart risk? 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yeah, we re done. reporter: but this community wasn t going to let that happen. he s a personal friend. i ve known larry pretty much my whole life. it s just kind of a family deal. reporter: they gathered around the christmas tree farmer, donating four wheelers, generators and bow saws. he has enough friends that we were going to get together and make it happen. reporter: ryerson sold 900 trees the first weekend. the response was just tremendous. a lot of friends and relatives, you know. reporter: you ve touched a lot of families over the years, and they wanted to help. i don t know how to repay them. reporter: he already has. his trees will greet them once again on christmas morning. mark strassmann, cbs news, medford, oregon. garrett: echoes of it s a wonderful life. we ll be right back.if are you ok? yah, it s just a cold. it s not just a cold if you have high blood pressure. most cold medicines may raise blood pressure. coricidin hbp is the. .#1 brand that gives. powerful cold relief without raising your blood pressure. and now for their service to the community, we present limu emu & doug with this key to the city. 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and conservatives don t want to be around each other and so they have to spread out, you may not see this from like the ivory towers of your law school, but it makes the actual people in this country when the president calls you don t get to interrupt me on this time. let me also suggest that when you invoke the president s son s name here. when you try to make a little joke out of referencing trump, that does not lend credibility to your argument. it makes you look mean. it makes you look like you re attacking someone s family. the minor child of the president of the united states. so let s see if we can get into the facts, to all of the witnesses. if you have personal knowledge of a single material fact in the schiff report, please raise your hand. and let the record reflect no personal knowledge of a single fact. and you know what? that continues on the tradition that we saw from adam schiff where ambassador taylor could not identify an impeachable offense. mr. kent never met with the president. fiona hill never referenced anything regarding military aid. mr. hill was never aware of any nefarious activity. colonel vindman rejected that bribery was involved here. mr. morrison said there was nothing wrong on the call. the only direct evidence came from gordon sondland who spoke to the president of the united states and the president said i want nothing, no quid pro quo. and you know what? if wire tapping the political opponent s an impeachable offense gentleman s time is expired. professor feldman, let me begin by stating the obvious. it is not hearsay when the president tells the president of ukraine to investigate his political adversary, is it? it is not. it is not hearsay when the president then confesses on national television to doing it, is it? it is not. thaef they hear the president say he only cares about the investigations of his political opponent, is it? no. that is not hearsay. and there s lots of other direct evidence in this 300-page report by the intelligence committee. professor, wrote on august 1st, 2014 in a piece called five myths about impeachment. one of the myths he was rejecting was that impeachment required a criminal offense. he wrote, and i quote, an offense does not have to be indictable. serious misconduct or a violation of public trust is enough, end quote. was professor turley right when he wrote that back in 2014? yes, i agree with that. now, next i d move to professor karlan. at the constitutional convention, l. bridge jerry said foreign powers will meddle in our affairs and spare no expense to influence them. james madison said that impeachment was needed because a president might betray his trust to a foreign power. can you elaborate on why the framers were so concerned about foreign interference, how they accounted for these concerns and how that relates the facts before this committee? so the reason that the framers were concerned about foreign interference i think is slightly different than the reason they are. they were concerned about it because we were such a weak country in 1789. we were small, we were poor, we didn t have an established navy. we didn t have an established army. today the concern is a little different, which is that it will interfere with us making the decisions that are best for us as americans. thank you, professor. there are three known instances of the president publicly asking a foreign country to interfere in our election. first in 2016 the president publicly hoped that russia would hack into the email of a political opponent, which they subsequently did. second, based on the call with president zelensky, we know he asked ukraine to investigate against his chief political rival. and third the president then publicly urged china to begin its own investigation. professor feldman, how would it impact our democracy if it became standard practice for the president of the united states to ask a foreign government to interfere in our elections? it would be a disaster for the functioning of our democracy if our presidents regularly, as this president has done, asked foreign governments to interfere in our electoral process. i d like to end from a powerful warning from george washington, to be constantly awake since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes. the conduct at issue is egregious and warrants a commensurate response. the president has only and repeatedly solicited foreign interference in our election. of that there is no doubt. this matters because inviting foreign meddling into our elections robs the american people of their sacred right to elect their own political leaders. americans wait in long lines to exercise their right to vote and to choose their own leaders. this right does not belong to foreign governments. we fought and won a revolution over this. free and fair elections are what separate us from authoritarians all over the world as public servants and members of the house, we would be negligent in our duties if we let this blatant abuse of power go unchecked. we ve heard a lot about hating this president. it s not about hating this president. it s about our love of country. it s about honoring the oath that we took to protect the constitution of this great country. so my final question is to professor feldman and to professor karlan, in the face of this evidence, what are the consequences if this committee and this congress refuses to muster the courage to respond to this gross abuse of power that undermine the national security of the united states, that undermine the integrity of our elections, and that undermine the confidence that we have to have in the president to not abuse the power of his office? if this committee and this house fail to act, then you are sending a message to this president and to future presidents that it s no longer a problem if they abuse their power. it s no longer a problem if they invite other countries to interfere in our elections. it s no longer a problem if they put the interest of other countries ahead of ours. i agree with professorfeld man. i should say just one thing and i apologize for getting a little overheated a moment ago. but i have a constitutional right under the first amendment to give money to candidates. at the same time, we have a constitutional duty to keep foreigners from spending money in our elections. and those two things are two sides of the same coin. thank you. and with that i yield back. mr. johnson. thank you. i was struck this morning by the same thing as all my friends and colleagues on this side of the room. chairman nadler actually began this morning with the outrageous statement that the facts before us are undisputed. of course, everyone here knows that that s simply not true. every person here, every person watching at home knows full well that virtually everything here is disputed from the fraudulent process and the broken procedure to the democrats unfounded claims. and the full facts are obviously not before us today. we have been allowed no fact witnesses here at all. for the first time ever this committee, whistle the one in congress that has the actual jurisdiction over impeachment, is being given no access to the underlying evidence that adam schiff and his political accomplices claims supports this whole charade. this is just a shocking denial of due process. i want to say to our witnesses i am also a constitutional law attorney, and under normal circumstances i really would greatly enjoy an academic discussion with you about the contours of article 2 section 4. but that would be an utter waste of our time today. this whole production is a sham and a reckless path to a predetermined political outcome. and i want you to know it s an outcome that was predetermined by our democrat colleagues a long time ago. the truth is house democrats have been working to impeach president donald j. trump since the day he took his oath of office. they have introduced four resolutions seeking to impeach the president. december 6th, 2017, 58 house democrats voted to begin impeachment proceedings. of course that was almost 20 months before the famous july 25th phone call with ukraine s president zelensky. and this other graphic up here is smaller, but it s interesting too. i think it s important to reiterate for everybody watching at home that of our 24 democrat colleagues and friends on the other side of the room today, 17 out of 24 have already voted for impeachment. so, i mean, let s be honest. let s not pretend that anybody cares anything about what s being said here today or the actual evidence or the facts as congresswoman lofgren said we come with open minds. that s not happening here. so much for an impartial jury. several times this year leading democrats have frankly admitted in various interviews and correspondence that they really believe this entire strategy is necessary because, why? because they want to stop the president s re-election. even speaker pelosi said famously last month that, quote, it is dangerous to allow the american people to evaluate his performance at the ballot box. speaker pelosi has it exactly backwards. what is dangerous here is the precedent all this is setting for the future of our republic. i love what professor turley testified to this morning. he said this is simply not how the impeachment of a president is done. his rhetorical question for all of our colleagues on the other side is still echoing throughout this chamber. he asked you to ask yourselves where will this and where will you stand next time when this same kind of sham impeachment process is initiated against a president from your party? the real shame here today is that everything in washington has become bitterly partisan, and this ugly chapter is not going to help that, it s going to make things really that much worse. president turley said earlier that we are now living in theira that was feared by our founders, what hamilton referred to as a period of agitated passions. i think that says it so well. this has indeed become an age of rage. president washington warned in his farewell address in 1796 that extreme partisanship would lead us to the ruins of public liberty. those were his words. this hyperpartisan impeachment is probably one of the most divisive and instructive things that we could possibly do to our american family. let me tell you what i heard from my constituents in multiple townhalls just two days ago. the people of this country are sick of this. they are sick of the politics of personal destruction. they are sick of this toxic atmosphere that is being created here. and they are deeply concerned about where all this will lead us in the years ahead. rightfully so. you know what the greatest threat is? the thing that ought to keep every single one of us up at night? is the rapidly eroding trust of the american people in their institutions. one of the critical presuppositions and foundations of a self-governing people in a constitutional republic is they will maintain a basic level of trust in their institutions in the rule of law, in the system of justice, in the body of elected representatives, their citizen legislators in the congress. the greatest danger of this fraudulent impeachment production is not what happens this afternoon or by christmas or in the election next fall. the greatest danger is what this will do in the days of head to our 243-year experiment in self-govern, this pandora s box will have upon our nation six or seven years from now, a decadade from now and the ruins of public liberty that are being created by this terribly short-sighted exercise today. god help us. i field back. mr. swalwell. professor turley is a former prosecutor. i recognize the defense attorney trying to represent their client, especially one who has very little to work with in the way of facts. and today you are representing republicans and the president. that s not my intention, sir. you have said that this case represents a dramatic turning point in federal impeachment precedent, the impact of which will shape and determine future cases. the house for the first time in the modern era asks the senate to remove someone for conduct for which he was never charged criminally and the impropriety of which has never been tested in a court of law. but that s actually not a direct quote from what you said today. it sounds a lot like what you ve argued today. but that s a quote from what you argued as a defense lawyer in a 2010 senate impeachment trial. professor, did you represent federal judge thomas porteous? i did, indeed. and he was tried engaging in ranging in a pattern of conduct that is incompatible with the trust and confidence placed in him as a federal judge to engaging in a long-standing pattern of corrupt conduct that demonstrates his unfitness to serve as the united states district court judge. on each count the judge was convicted by at least 68 and up to 96 bipartisan senators. thankfully that senate did not buy your argument that a federal official should not be removed if he is not charged criminally. and respectfully, professor, we don t buy it either. but we are here because of this photo. it s a picture of president zelensky in may of this year standing on the eastern front of ukraine as a hot war was taking place and up to 15,000 ukrainians have died at the hands of russians. i d like to focus on the impact of president trump s conduct, particularly with our allies and our standing in the world. this isn t just a president, as professor karlan has pointed out, asking for another foreign leader to investigate a political opponent. it also is a president leveraging a white house visit as well as foreign aid. as the witnesses have testified, ukraine needs our support to defend itself against russia. i heard directly from witnesses how important the visit and aid were, particularly from ambassador taylor. these weapons and this assistance allows the ukrainian military to deter further incursions by the russians against ukrainian territory. if that further aggression were to take place, more ukrainians would die. professor karlan, does the president s decision to withhold from ukraine such important official acts, a white house visit and military aid, in order to pressure president zelensky relate to the framers concerns about abuse of power and entanglements with foreign nations? it relates to the abuse of power. the entanglements with foreign nations is a more complicated concept for the framers than for us. professor karlan, i think you d agree we are a nation of immigrants? yes. today 50 million immigrants live in the united states. i am moved by one who recently told me as i was checking into a hotel about his romanian family. he came here from romania and said that every time he had gone home for the last 20 years he would always tell his family members how corrupt his country was that he had left and why he had come to the united states. he told me in such humiliating fashion that when he has gone home recently they now wag their finger at him and say you are going to lecture us about corruption? what do you think, professor karlan, does the president s conduct say to the millions of americans who left their families and livelihoods to come to a country that represents the rule of law? i think it suggests that we don t believe in the rule of law. and i think it tells emerging democracies around the world not to take it seriously when we tell them that their elections are not legitimate because of foreign interference or their elections are not legitimate because of persecution of the opposing party. president bush announced that he did not consider the elections in belarus in 2006 to be legitimate for exactly that reason because they went after political opponents. thank you. and finally, professor feldman, professor turley has pointed out that we should go to the courts. but you would acknowledged that we have been in the courts for over six months, many times on matters that are already settled in the united states supreme court, particularly u.s. v nixon where the president seems to be running up the clock. that is right? yes, sir. thank you. and i yield back. the gentleman yields back. in a moment we will recess for a brief five minutes. first i ask everyone in the room to please remain seated and quiet while the witnesses exit the room. i also want to remind those in the audience that you may not be guaranteed your seat if you leave the hearing room at this time. at this time the committee will stand in a short recess. we have been watching as the questioning has become a little more fiery, a little more intense. each side using their side s witnesses to bolster their arguments. obviously the republicans a lot less to work with. congresswoman swalwell there just before this break undermining professor turley s standard for that which was impeachable with a case that he was all too familiar with. people in the community were waiting for this moment. you predicted it a couple hours ago. yeah. you know, turley is in a very difficult position. he s been all over the map on this issue. and that s been pointed out now i think pretty effectively. there is still more that he has said that they can feedback to him, especially his position he took on impeachment with clinton. bill clinton. and some of the language he used around the impeachment trial that i was involved in where he represented a federal judge. and it s interesting that he is really saying there is not enough evidence when we all understand that the reason there is not enough evidence is another impeachable offense, which is obstruction of justice. yeah. obstruction of the ability of congress who has the sole power of the house to impeach that, you know, that s the irony of this is his defense is the president has succeeded in avoiding impeachment by blocking your ability to get documents and witnesses. and we are lucky. we have been joined by andrew weissmann, former senior fbi official. we have made a list of the people who are so far refusing subpoenas or refusing to go and testify. they include mulvaney, the act s white house chief of staff, robert blair, senior adviser to the chief of staff. ambassador bolton has not been subpoenaed but he s waiting for a lawsuit of his deputy charles kupperman. john eisenberg, the person in the counsel s office who shoved this questionable sketchy dodgey transcript into a server where another witness testified. there are a dozen witnesses who, as you said, are possibly committing the additional impeachable offense of obstruction who could answer a lot of these concerns that republicans have. andrew? for one, professor turley just got it wrong when he said they just didn t issue subpoenas. there were subpoenas that have been issued both for witnesses and for documents. so he s just wrong on that. it s not like the democrats didn t try. but this comes up at trials all the time as we were talking about on the break where the defense lawyer doesn t have a lot to work with and said they should ve called more witnesses. well, that actually is the last thing they would want. this is the case where really do the republicans really want mike pompeo on the stand? i don t think so. and this is the kind of thing where you can be sure if he had something positive that he could say for the president, the president would be the first one to say hop on over and take the stand. that is there is no legal principle that the president understands enough to fight for that would keep him from sending someone to capitol hill who would make a good tv moment for him. i mean, to me, for a republican party that likes to talk about a lack of smoking guns, this is a list of 13 of them. because these bodies would be sitting there if they could say anything good about donald trump. of course. why is it an argument that they are even making? because when you don t have a lot to argue, you say, well, let s see if there could be more evidence. but it s actually not logical. but it s because, one, that way you can kind af void talking about the evidence that is in the record because it s overwhelming to just say, gee, i wonder if there is more out there. well, you know what? the republicans could actually say, fine, come on in and testify. and it really is the case if there was anything useful, the republicans would have them there. i wish one of the members of the committee would take that list and say, you know, professor turley, are you aware we have subpoenaed mulvaney? professor turley, are you aware that we have subpoenaed, and are you aware the president has instructed them to ignore that lawful subpoena? in your experience in looking at impeachment, wouldn t that, in fact, be an impeachable offense? i think that would be a really effective cross of turley reading this long list of subpoenaed witnesses that have just said forget it, we won t be involved. and the importance of these people. they answer all of the republican complaints. these are the first hand witnesses of what the president has admitted to doing, which is conditioning military aid in a meeting on investigations into biden. and i read some of them. it s mulvaney, john bolton, john eisenberg, michael ellis, preston wells griffith, charles kupperman, russell voigt, brian mccormack and a couple of other advisers to mike pompeo. do you think there is any chance that we will see these people? if donald trump is watching, he says, oh, yeah, get them there to defend me. the only way we will see any of these people is if they decide to do the right thing. and i don t see that happening. if you peel back what professor turley is actually arguing here since there is a ton of evidence, to andrew s point, including direct evidence. he keeps talking circumstantial evidence is powerful evidence, but there s also direct evidence, as andrew said. so what he s really saying is unless you have a sitting president on tape or video saying the words i m committing a crime now, then you don t have sufficient evidence for impeachment. and that would mean all of the things that lawyers do every day in court. they would never ever, no prosecutor would win a case. chuck, we have talked about this countless times that there are plenty of criminal cases and other kinds of cases brought with circumstantial evidence. it s a bogus standard and one that even the evidence doesn t support. in fact, the judge at the end of the trial will instruct the jury that you hear all kinds of evidence. sometimes it s circumstantial, sometimes it s direct evidence. sorry for that high-pitched buzz if that made your golden doodle wince. it wasn t me. [ laughter ] i don t believe i m responsible for that. but the judge will tell the jury you will hear two kinds of evidence, circumstantial, direct evidence. they are entitled to equal weight. the law makes no distinction. and you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, use your common sense. you don t have to suspend common sense when you walk into a courtroom. if things sound wrong, then they probably are wrong. common sense still matters. to maya s point, there s nothing wrong or bad or ill about circumstantial evidence. i think the analogy we used on your show once was that if you walk outside and see snow in your front lawn, it s pretty good evidence that it snowed. it s not direct evidence that it snowed because you didn t stay up all night to watch it. but it s circumstantial evidence, and it s compelling circumstantial evidence. but, andrew, i think where we are is you ve got a republican party that would go on their favorite network and say nah-ah. not only does that not smell, but saying it snowed means you hate america. the attacks on law professors were really stunning. look, what s disspiriting is that you look at what s going on and you sort of say to yourself i wonder if we are in a world where facts don t matter and the law doesn t matter. there is a responsible position that republicans could take that this doesn t rise to the level that he should be removed, given that there is an election coming up. i disagree with that. but that s a responsible position. but i think that professor karlan asked exactly the right question, which is if you think that he held up your congressionally approved military aid in order to have a political favor, which was having a bogus investigation on vice president biden, would you find that to be impeachable? i think if they can t answer that question, then we really are in a sort of post fact post law world. jason johnson, i love this point because what professor karlan did is she is telling them to look in the mirror. you decide if you want to pull on your big boy, big girl pants and be congress. do you want your authority? do you want the money that you appropriate to go where it s legally obligated to go or don t you? and i think what she is saying is, yeah, i donated to democrats, i exercised my first amendment rights. by the way, your guy does that all day every day on twitter so i m not sure why you are looking at me. but i think she made a strong argument that, don t look at me, look at yourselves. well, and, nicole, she not only made that argument. but she also said by the way your implication is you already decided too. because, remember, you shifted from first saying there was no quid pro quo quid pro quo to now saying well there was quid pro quo but we don t necessarily think that s impeachable. congressman buck was probably the only person. he s the only person who actually made a decent coherent functional point that i have seen so far from the republicans. when he went for a list of behaviors from nixon to kennedy to obama, of all sorts of shady things that presidents do to influence elections. that actually is a compelling argument. if the republicans want to say, yeah, trump did this, but it falls in line with things that presidents have done in the past in order to sort of tip the scale in their favor, that is a much stronger or more reasonable and sort of ethical argument to make than claiming the president hasn t done anything. and that s not something that kennedy or obama or bush or anybody else could ever be accused of doing. but at least it was a substantive argument. i wish they had spent more time on that than the ridiculous antics of jim jordan and meat gaetz. i rarely get to disagree with you. but i was watching that and thinking so all they ve got is oppo on mostly deceased american presidents, not so great. i think i would push back in a serious manner by saying that the witnesses held their ground on that question by saying absolutely that would have in the definition we are applying today to trump s conduct, that would have justified looking at all of that conduct. well, yeah. and here s the thing. just because someone wasn t accused of robbing banks five times in the past doesn t mean they didn t rob a bank today. just because previous congresses did not take these crimes, did not take this behavior as seriously, doesn t mean that what donald trump is doing today is as much of a problem. and i also think this is really compelling and certain members have said this effectively. we now, unlike the past, have very clear evidence. we have the mueller report. we have investigations that foreign entities are trying to influence elections. so if you have a president who actively encourages china and russia and other countries to get involved in our elections and then uses its influence to get other countries involved in our elections, we can now say that this is an impeachable offense, where in the past it could ve been something considered just oppo or dirty tricks. we are lucky to be joined now by garrett haake, our man in the room. garrett, can you take me inside the room? this does look like, as a former staffer, i am noticing some of the staff work that s gone into the production. the audio/visual is all there. the testimony that underscores some of the arguments they are making is there. and to jason s point, the republicans that are sort of landing some blows seem prepared with arguments that whether they are good or bad, have at least been thought through. reporter: yeah. look, i mean, i think from the moment we got past the opening statements in the several parliamentary efforts that republicans made to slow down these proceedings, you saw that this is a choreographed production, the audio/visual elements, which, to the embarrassment of a lot of people, didn t work very well in the intel committee hearings when the fact witnesses were here. were all smooth today going back to some of those more powerful moments with bill taylor s testimony, the testimony of other witnesses. we were seen that all played out on video, the democrats in particular have been quite coordinated in their line of questioning, as have republicans, at least coming with their research, given the fact especially that these witnesses, the names were not known of these witnesses until shortly before the hearing. everybody has done their homework here. and i think you can give credit a little bit to both sides that this has been a much more professionally run endeavor from doug collins compared to devin nunes staying focused on the topic at hand here and going through these questions engaging with at least their one witness here. i think the one thing that threw the hearing off the rails here a little bit was the one professor s joke about president trump s son was obviously something you saw matt gaetz seize on, come at her very hard for and almost immediately send a fundraising email to point out that he was out defending president trump and his family. republicans i think are going to try to make that a viral moment from this hearing to have something else to talk about coming out of this here. and, nicole, i will tell you that while this is going on in the house side, there s a lot of other impeachment related activity happening across campus here, both senate republicans and senate democrats had impeachment trial-themed lunches today. the republicans had white house counsel pat cipollone in the room for their lunch. democrats got a briefing from chuck schumer and aides about how an impeachment trial would go. there is only a handful of senators left on the democratic side from the clinton trial. so, while this hearing is happening, the wheels are turning all over this complex getting ready for the next phase of this thing. i think it s very easy to see both from members that i have talked to on the house side and these factors happening on the senate side that this train is definitely moving, and i think moving again at a very quick pace. garrett, is there any sense that on the fact pattern, which it s just remarkable, we are in hour eight of testimony, as you said both sides came prepared, both sides called witnesses that showed up and are taking questions from democratic and republican members of the committee. nobody has said that there is any sort of chink in the case laid out by the witnesses or even the case in the intel report last night. you were on air for hours like a news bombshell. is there any consternation that on the facts there is no defense for this president? reporter: well, look. republicans have continued to hit a couple of points on this. you heard it from some of their members here today that only gordon sondland of all the witnesses who were called during the fact-finding part of this had spoken directly with donald trump and sondland s point was that the president told him he didn t want anything from ukraine. republicans are going to go back to that again and again. one of the things that i d be interesting to see, turley in his opening statement said he didn t find that call by president trump to be perfect. he said far from it. republicans have been very united since the minute really before this but especially since their minority report on the intel committee came out that they are going to stand with the president on this. they are going to back up the idea that the president says this was a perfect call. the republican witness in front of them today does not agree that it s a perfect call. right. and it might be interesting to see if anyone tries to, you know, get into that space between the republican witness here and the republican talking points here. but, now, i mean, republicans have seized on i think what may be a better argument for them, which is the question of do you want to go down this road constitutionally? do you want to have impeachment based on this kind of information as opposed to what we saw with richard nixon or even andrew johnson, bill clinton? i am hearing jerry nadler in my ear. you better get back in there. garrett haake, thank you for spending time with us. we are going to listen in as this hearing gets underway. you already made that determination decision. and i will give you, for instance, until a recent colloquy, several of you consistently said that the president said during that july 25th conversation with president zelensky you said the president said i would like you to do me a favor. but that is inaccurate. it was finally clear in that colloquy. and i m going to read it to you. i would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot. one of you said, well, that s because the president was using royal we. here the president s talking about the country. that s what he s talking about. it s audacious to say it s using the royal we. that s royal all right. but it ain t the royal we. and i ll just tell you when you come in with a preconceived notion, it becomes obvious. one of you just said, mr. feldman, it was you who said, and i m going to quote here, roughly i think this is exactly what you said though. until the call on july 25th i was an impeachment sceptic too. i don t know, i m looking at an august 23rd, 2017 publication where you said if president donald trump pardons joe arpaio, it would be an impeachable offense. he did ultimately pardon him. in 2017 the new york book review, review of books professor feldman said defamation by tweet is an impeachable offense. and i think of the history of this country. and i think if defamation or lible or slander were an impeachable offense, who routinely pilaried their political opponents. at the time the factions or parties actually bought newspapers to attack their political opponents. so this rather expansive and generous view you have on what constitutes impeachment is a real problem. this morning one of you mentioned the constitutional convention. and several of you mentioned mr. davies and you talked about the constitutional commission. it s been a while since i read the minutes so i just briefly reviewed because i remembered the discussion on the impeachment as being more pervasive, a little bit more expanded. and on july 20th, 1787, it wasn t 1789 by the way. it was in 1787, july 20th, benjamin franklin is discussing impeachment of a dutch leader. and he talks specifically about what he would anticipate an impeachment to look like. he said it would be a regular impeachable inquiry. it would ve taken place, and if guilty, then there d be a punishment, if acquitted, then the innocent would be restored to the confidence of the public. that needs to be taken to account as well. so, i look also, and on may 17th, 2017, bbc article, which is a discussion about impeachment, because president trump had fired james comey. alex whiting of harvard said it was hard to make the obstruction of justice case with this sacking alone. the president had clear legal authority and there was arguably proper or at least other reasons put forward for firing him. and yet what we have here is this insistence by ms. gerhart that that was impeachable. may 17th, 2017, bbc article. what i m suggesting to you today is a reckless bias coming in here. you are not fact witnesses. you are supposed to be talking about what the law is, but you came in with a preconceived notion and bias. and i want to read one last thing here, if i can find it, from one of our witnesses here. and it s dealing with something that was said in a maryland law review article in 1999. and basically if i can get to it, he is talking about this being critical of lack of self-doubt and an overwhelming arrogance on the part of law professors who come in and opine on impeachment. that would be you, mr. gerhart who said something like that. i can t find my quote or else i d give it to you. and so what i am telling you is, is that has what s been on display and with that i yield back. the gentleman yields back. a little while ago mr. gaetz asked that certain material be inserted into the record by unanimous consent. i ask for an opportunity to review it. we have reviewed it. the material will be inserted without objection. mr. wilieu. i first swore an oath to the constitution when i was commissioned as an officer in the united states air force. and the oath i took was not to a political party or to a president or to a king. it was an oath for a document that has made america the greatest nation on earth. i never imagined we would now be in a situation where the president or commander in chief is accused of using his office for personal political gain that betrayed u.s. national security, hurt our ally ukraine and helped our adversary russia. now the constitution provides a safeguard for when the president s abuse of power and betrayal of national interests are so extreme that it warrants impeachment and removal. it seems notable that of all the offenses they could have included and enumerated in the constitution, bribery is one of only two that are listed. so, professor feldman, why would the framers choose bribery of all of the powerful offenses they could have included to list? bribery was the classic example for them of the high crime and misdemeanor of abuse of office for personal gain. because if you take something of value when you re able to effect an outcome for somebody else, you are serving your own interests and not the interests of the people. and that was commonly used in impeachment offenses in england, and that s one of the reasons that they specified it. thank you. now earlier in this hearing, professor karlan made the point that bribery, asned by the framers, was much broader than the narrow federalot in a proceeding. we are not deciding whether to send president trump to prison. this is a civil action. it s an impeachment proceeding to decide whether or not we remove donald trump from his job. and so, professor karlan, it s true, isn t it, that we don t have to meet the standards of a federal bribery statute in order to meet the standards for an impeachable offense? that s correct. i m sorry. that s correct. thank you. yesterday scalia law professor j.w. verret who is a lifelong republican, who advised the trump pre-transition team made the following public statement about donald trump s conduct. the call wasn t perfect. he committed impeachable offenses including bribery. so, professor karlan, i am now going to show you two video clips of the witness testimony related to the president s withholding of the white house meeting in exchange for the public announcement of an investigation into his political rival. as i testified previously, mr. giuliani s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a white house visit for president zelensky. by mid-july it was becoming clear to me that the meeting president zelensky wanted was conditioned on the investigations of burisma, an alleged ukrainian interference in the u.s. 2016 elections. and i ll show you one more video clip relating to the president s decision to withhold security assistance that congress had appropriated to ukraine in exchange for announcement of public investigation of his political rival. in the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, i later came to believe that the resumption of security aid would not occur until there was a public statement from ukraine committing to the investigations of the 2016 elections and burisma as mr. giuliani had demanded. mr. karlan, does that evidence as well as the evidence in the record tend to show that the president met the standards for bribery as envisioned in the constitution? yes, it does. i m also a former prosecutor. i believe the record and the evidence would also meet the standards for criminal bribery. the supreme court s decision was primarily about what constitutes an official act. their key find wag it must exercise a formal governmental power before a public official. pretty clearly got that here. we have hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid that congress specifically appropriated. the freezing and unfreezing of that aid is a formal exercise of governmental power. but we don t even have to talk about the crime of bribery. there s another crime here, which is the solicitation of federal assistance of a government at 52 usc 3101. and, oh, by the way that also gives one reason why michael cohen is sitting in prison right now. i yield back. mr. mcclintock. thank you, mr. chairman. could i be, just with a show of hands, how many on the panel actually voted for donald trump in 2016? i don t think we are obligated to say anything about how we cast our ballots. just show of hands. i will not i think you have made your positions, professor karlan. we will suspend the clock too. i have a right to cast a ballot. let me rephrase the question. how many of you support it? the gentleman may ask the question. the witnesses don t have to respond. how many of you supported donald trump in 2016? show of hands. not raising our hands is not an indication of an answer, sir. professor turley, this impeachment inquiry has been predicated on some rather disturbing legal doctrines. one democrat asserted that hearsay can be much better evidence than direct evidence. speaker pelosi and others who have said that the president s responsibility is to present evidence to prove his innocence. chairman schiff, we heard a discussion from some of your colleagues today, that if you invoke legal rights in defense of criminal accusations ipso facto, that s an obstruction of justice and innocence of guilt. what does it mean to our american justice system if these doctrines take root in our country? well, what concerns me the most is that there are no limiting principles that i can see in some of the definitions that my colleagues have put forward. and more importantly some of these impeachable offenses i only heard about today. i m not too sure what attempting to abuse office means or how you recognize it. but i am pretty confident that nobody on this committee truly wants the new standard of impeachment to be betrayal of the national interest. that that is going to be the basis for impeachment. how many republicans do you think would say that barack obama violated that standard? that s exactly what james madison warned you against is that you would create effectively a vote of no confidence standard in our constitution. well, then are we in danger of abusing our own power of doing enormous violence? my democratic colleagues have been searching for a pretext for impeachment since before the president was sworn in on this panel, professor karlan called president trump s election illegitimate in 2017. she implied impeachment was a remedy. professor feldman advocated impeaching the president over a tweet that he made in march of 2017. that s just seven weeks after his inauguration. are we in danger of succumbing to the maxima of lewis carol s red queen, sentence first, verdict afterwards? this is part of the problem of how your view of the president can affect your assumptions, your inferences, your view of circumstantial evidence. i am not suggesting that the evidence, if it was fully investigated, would come out one way or the other. what i am saying is that we are not dealing with the realm of the unknowable. you have to ask we have burned two months in this house, two months that you could have been in court seeking a subpoena for these witnesses. it doesn t mean you have to wait forever. but you could have gotten an order by now. you could have allowed the president to raise an executive privilege. i need to go on here. the constitution says the executive authority shall be vested in a president of the united states. does that mean some of the executive authority or all of it? well, obviously there s checks and balances on all of these. but the executive authority primarily obviously rests with the president. but these are all shared powers. and i don t begrudge the investigation of the ukraine controversy. i think it was a legitimate investigation. what i begrudge is how it has been conducted. well, i tend to agree with that. the constitution commands the president take care that the laws be faithfully enforced. that does in effect make him the chief law enforcement officer in the federal government, does it not? that s commonly expressed. so if probable cause exists to believe a crime s been committed, does the president have the authority to inquire into that matter? he has. but this is where i think we would depart. i have been critical of the president in terms of crossing lines with the justice department. i think that has caused considerable problems. i also don t believe it s appropriate. but we often confuse what is inappropriate with what s impeachable. many people feel that what the president has done is obnoxious, contemptible. contemptible s not synonymous with impeachment. the national defense authorization act that authorized aid to the ukraine requires the secretary of defense that the government of ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms, among other things, for purposes of decreasing corruption. is the president exercising that responsibility when he inquires into a matter that could involve illegalities between american and ukrainian officials? that s what i m referring to as unexplored defenses. part of the bias when you look at these facts is you just ignore defenses. you say well those are just invalid. but they are the defenses. they are the other sides accounts for actions and that s what hasn t been explored. the gentleman s time has expired. mr. raskin? i want to thank the witnesses for their hard work on a long day. i want to thank them especially for invoking the american revolution, which not only overthrew a king but created the world s first anti-monarchical constitution. tom payne said that in the monarchies the king is law. but in the democracies the law will be king. but today the president advances. he says that article 2 allows him to do whatever he wants. he not only says that but he believes it because he did something no other american president has ever done before. he used foreign military aid as a lever to coerce a foreign government to interfere in an american election to discredit an opponent into advance his relaction campaign. professor karlan, what does the existence of the impeachment power tell us about the president s claim that the constitution allows him to do whatever he wants? it blows it out of the water. if he s right and we accept this radical claim that he can do whatever he wants, all future presidents seeking re-election will be able to bring foreign governments into our campaigns to target their rivals. and to spread propaganda. that s astounding. if we let the president get away with this conduct, every president can get away with it. do you agree with that, professor feldman? i do. richard nixon sent burglars to break into the democratic national committee headquarters but president trump just made a direct phone call to the president of a foreign country and sought his intervention in an american election. so this is a big moment for america, isn t it? if elijah cummings were here, he would say, listen up, people. listen up! how we respond will determine the character of our democracy for generations. now, professors feldman, karlan, and gerhardt tell us there were three dominant reasons invoked at the founding for why we needed an impeachment power. broadly speaking, it was an instrument of popular self-defense against a president behaving like a king and trampling the rule of law. but not just in the normal royal sense of showing cruelty and vanity and treachery and greed and avarice and so on. but when presidents threaten the basic character of our government and the constitution, that s wh that s what impeachment was about. and the framers invoked three specific kinds of misconduct. so serious and egregious that they thought they warranted impeachment. first, the president might abuse his power by corruptly using his office for personal, political, or financial gain. well, professor feldman, what s so wrong with that? if the president belongs to my party and i generally like him, what s so wrong with him using his office to advance his own political ambitions? because the president of the united states works for the people. and so if he seeks personal gain, he s not serving the interests of the people. he s rather serving the interests that are specific to him. and that means he s abusing the office and he s doing things that he can only get away with because he s the president. and that is necessarily subject to impeachment. well, second and third. the founders express fear that a president could subvert our democracy by betraying his trust to foreign influence and interference. and also, by corrupting the election process. professor karlan, you re one of america s leading election law scholars. what role does impeachment play in protecting the integrity of our elections, especially in an international context? in which vladimir putin and other tyrants and des pits are interfering to destabilize around the world. enacted a series of laws to make sure there isn t interference in our elections and allowing president to circumvent that principle is a problem. and as i ve already testified several times, america is not just the last best hope as mr. jeffries said. but it s also the shining city on the hill. and we can t be a shining city on the hill and promote democracy around the world if we re not promoting it here at home. any one of these actions alone would be sufficient to impeach the president according to the founders. but is it fair to say that all three causes for impeachment explicitly contemplated by the founders. abuse of power, betrayal of our national security, and corruption of our elections. are present in this president s conduct? yes or no, professor feldman? yes. and professor gerhardt? yes, sir. and professor karlan? yes. you all agree. okay. and are any of you aware of any other president who has essentially triggered all three concerns that animated the founders? no. no. no, as well. mr. chairman, it s hard to think of a more monarchical sentiment than i can do whatever i want as president. and i yield back. gentleman yields back. ms. lesko. thank you, mr. chair. mr. chair, i ask unanimous consent to insert into the record a letter i wrote and sent to you asking, calling on you, to cancel any and all future impeachment hearings. and outlining how the process the letter will be entered into the record. thank you. during an interview, mr. chairman, on msnbc s morning joe, on november 26th, 2018, chairman nadler outlined a three-prong test. that he said would allow for a legitimate impeachment proceeding. now, i quote chairman nadler s remarks. and this is what he said. there really are there really are three questions, i think. first, has the president committed impeachable offenses? second, do those offenses rise to the gravity that s worth putting the country through the drama of impeachment? and number three, because you don t want to tear the country apart, you don t want half of the country to say to the other half for the next 30 years, he won we won the election. you stole it from us. you have to be able to think at the beginning of the impeachment process that the evidence is so clear of offenses so grave that once you ve laid out all of the evidence, a good fraction of the opposition, the voters, will reluctantly admit to themselves they had to do it. otherwise, you have a partisan impeachment, which will tear the country apart. if you meet these three tests, then i think you do the impeachment. and those were the words of chairman nadler. now, let s see if chairman nadler s three-pronged test has been met. first, has the president committed an impeachable offense? no. the evidence and testimony has not revealed any impeachable offense. second, do those offenses rise to the gravity that s worth putting the country through the drama of impeachment? again, the answer is no. there is nothing here that rises to the gravity that s worth putting the country through the drama of impeachment. and third, have the democrats laid out a case so clear that even the opposition has to agree? absolutely not. you and house democrat leadership are tearing apart the country. you said the evidence needs to be clear. it is not. you said offenses need to be grave. they are not. you said that once the evidence is laid out, that the opposition will admit they had to do it. that has not happened. in fact, polling and the fact that not one single republican voted on the impeachment inquiry resolution or on the schiff report, reveal the opposite is true. in fact, what you and your democratic colleagues have done is opposite of what you said had to be done. this is a partisan impeachment and it is tearing the country apar apart. i take this all to mean that chairman nadler along with the rest of the democratic caucus is prepared to continue these entirely partisan, unfair proceedings. and traumatize the american people all for a political purpose. i think that s a shame. that s not leadership. that s a sham. and so i ask mr. turley, has chairman nadler satisfied his three-pronged test for impeachment? with all due respect to chairman, i do not believe that those those factors were satisfied. thank you. and i want to correct something for the record, as well. repeatedly, today and other days, democrats have repeated what was said in the text of the call. do me a favor, though. and they imply it was against president biden to to investigate president biden. it was not. it was not. in fact, let me read what the transcript says. it says president trump, i would like you to do as a favor though because our country has been through a lot and ukraine knows a lot about it. i would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with ukraine. they say crowdstrike. i guess you have one of your own wealthy people. it says nothing about the bidens. so please stop referencing those two together and i yield back. gentle lady yields back. thank you, mr. chairman.
there she is. and it s a full bag. if anybody wants another checkay and look at my bus straight here. so it looks likene. can t h you can t hold this with one arm. let s trd y straight out. no, straight out. so i told you it first came o out. i thought in myn mind, newton, but it didn t do anyou of the women on the show, huh?fh why straight?y bu be careful with my posturest. . i like gus s bling. i think that s pretty good. that icloss. nine: do men close, though?ne if you didn t know that he s got a necklace on.have g all right, that s it for us. everyone, i m tired of us. have a great night, everybody. we ll see you tomorrow. we ll be here later. welcome to jesse watters. primetime tonight. hunter biden convicted of twounts o counts of lying on a form. the combination of gun as and drugs made his conduct dangerous. sno one in this country is abovi the law. hunter finally faces s the the music. what s this mean for the big guy? have yo a pardon for your son? yes. since the founding of our ideals, we don t know fully what american soil is. happy juneteenth. joe biden, you know, lost. you know, so long as i see that night. they took everything from us. there s nothing that could ever replace my son. it s just the face of evil. just do whatever you can. to keep this monster behind bars. plus, my name is wanda. yes, it is. but that s not what you told me, man. u? l, yeah, but who are yo fox news alert. guilty. guilty. guilty. was the verdict handed down by a jury of huntes thrdict r bh peers for the first time in his life? hunter facede n hi the music.two two counts of lying on a gun for one count of possession of a firearm by a drug user. rearm byhunter biden appeared wd and motionless as he became siti the first child of a sitting president to be convicted of a crimnge. three felonies. hunter now facing a maximum5 of 25 years in prison. but the sentencing guidelineriss suggest just a couple. although the judge could deviate and dojue althou whateve wants, sentencing will probably occur before september 5th whenl hunter goes on trial in l.a. for tax evasion lan. that means hunter could be sentenced to prison justd prs days before the second presidential debate. he ll obviouslyid appeal. here s special counsel david weiss. after today s verdict. y s ve hunter biden wasrd convicted of two counts of lyingbiden wa on a form submr to a federal firearms dealeral c about his addiction or use oraf crack cocaine and possessing a firearm while a user or addict. no one in this country is above the law. everyonen thiss abov must be ach for their actions. even this defendanis t. however, hunter biden should be no more accountabler shoul y other citizen convicted of this same conduct. that s the same biden prosecutor who tried the h to hand hunter probation and lifetime immunity for the guns and the tax felonieund s. e wond so we re wondering where this newfound concept newfm. e jubility came froer here s what one juror had to say after the verdict. watcd to sayh. biden was on trial and he was just like anybody else.w, nobody s above the law. you know, and matter who you are. whattics played me no part in this issue ever. the jury followed the law. the judge ran a tigh ft triald t and justice was served. but justic because one democrat was convicted doesn t mean the american legal system isn dt being abused. the feds are still throwing dozens of republicans in prisonp on trumped up charges and trying to incarcerate the republicanedup nominee for a crime they cooked up with black magic to hocus pocu s an election. hunter s judge didn t donate to a groupno called stop democrats either. the media celebrated the trump verdicmedit like a juy 4th barbecue, but treated hunter s like a funera a funerle this trial inside the courtroom, like virtually every criminal trial, was a personal story, a personal tragedy, a famil, way tragedy. every presidential family is part of the american family. that s the way it workresidents this is a tragedy for the biden familya that family drama playd out in a courtroom in ways we have never seen beforein way. iu it doesn t make it any less painful for the nation or bue r the family. but the verdict is now real now and the consequences will apply. this public life of this family, which bega tn a half century ago, after all, w with the car accident the wifeo sons lateit and his daughter, injured his two sons. you now fast forward all the way to today and this really dramatic and ultimately painful. process continues to hunter s everything: hunter the media cli to despise a white, privileged, sexist t, spoiled brad who barkb don t you know who my daddy is?s but he s a democrat. the so the media circles the wagons. the media ha cis more sympathy for a a crack addict who dumped a gun by a school than for gun a president who just wants to make america great again. moments t again. ago, hunter and joee we were seen hugging on the tarmac in delawar oe, where they ll be spending the night together. i m sure this father s dayttle a weekend is going to be a little awkward. biden wishedwk he could have ben there sooner, but in an act i of poetic injustice, he had gun to attend a gun control event just hours before the verdict. there s never been a timeayso that says you can own anythinguo you want. never. you couldn t own a cannon during the civilt own war. think about it. how much you hear this phrase, o the blood of liberty. a wash it down. give me a break. if they want to think, to take on government, if we get out of line, which they re talkingte about, well, guess what? they need f-150s. agd a rifle. e i mean, the bottom line, hard times. no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.n wa biden s son was so cocked, loaded and high. he s lucky no one died. but he wants to restrict the second amendment for sober, law abiding americans. and by the way, s. our government had f-15s in afghanistan and the talibanoy one with rifles. we re not looking a to overthrowre n joe just to thw them out. after a jury found hunter guiltyry of gun felonies,prou joe biden said he is proud of them. i quote, jill anlod i love our son and we w are so proud of the man he is today. there s no contrition at all by the biden family. hunter didn t. show any remorse. he was smiling afterwards. his father is not ashamed. wouldn t even gently condemnm his son s actions. hunter has committed more crimes and we can count. and al l biden says is he s proud. the reason honor s broken, the law for 30 years and not paid the piper is because of his dad because. if every time i screwed up and my dad s response wa s, ov i m proud, son. i love you, i d keep screwing up. bailing somebody out over and over again doesn t mean you love ther over agat m. hunter was kicked out of the navy for cocaine on and administrativeou dischargeof a instead of a dishonorable one because his dad greased ats. ras hunter got caught with cocaine at the jersey shore way back in the 80e wans, and the senator sn had his record expunged when he left his crack pipe in a rental car. police investigated and dropped the charges when he put 20 grand on his dad s amex foree russian escorts. the secret service cleaned it up when he lostcr cleaned hi. the fbi and cia covered it up when he owed millions in back taxes as sugar brother footed fn he needed money for alimony and child support. daddy s donors bough dadt his his dad s own justice department tried to make the gutedae trien tax case go ag a year ago today. what makesday. you think daddy won t save them again? will you accept the jury s te outcome, their verdict, no matter what it is? yects. a pard and have you ruled out a pardon for your son? woyour sons. biden never used the word commute. commuting a sentence means sprin you just spring him out of prison. the charge is still on theirt os record. biden s going to have to save gg his son to savo sae his own hid. remember the taxes in the gun? only a fractioann of the crimes hunter and joe biden would be guilty of if prosecutor wouls were allowed to followal the facts. whistle blowers have testified that investigatorsw th w were br at every turn from following leads that led to jowinge. the cia and fbi and the treasury department s are all in on the cover up. a strong case could be made for trump. prosecutor cs to investigategate money laundering, racketeering, bribery, foreign lobbying conspiracies. donald trump calls the gun case don. tractio quote, the trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the rea a dl crimes of the biden crime family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from china, russia and ukraine. crooked joe biden s reign over the biden family criminal empire is all coming to an end on november 5th. and never again will the bidens sell government access for personal profit. hunter biden may have faced musi c today, but the verdict on joe biden will come november 5th. co-host of the five, judge jeanine pirro is here and she s matching mere. we coordinated judge will this judge sentenced hunterident biden to prison? o well, there are thosethin who think that the sentencing guidelines, which are no longeka mandatory, can call for between 15 and 21 months. enand, of course, if the judgedo wants to do a downward departure, she can do so. but she s got to give a reason to do so. i don t know that she would be inclined to do so, given a couple of things. n hunter biden could have pled guilty, admitted it took responsibility and admitted remorse. this judge also is a judge who was the one who first saw through the fact that the depaer biden team and the department of justice was trying to pull the wool over her eyesstic and create this immunity in perpetuity so that hunter biden would never be prosecuted for a crime for the rest of his life pro. i want one of those deals.s. yeah, who doesn t? right. and then in addition who to that, the nullification argument, i mean, the defense wentation ao this courtroom, justified any kind of reasone. and it was really an insult to the jury that saw right through it. t th i mean, you ve got you ve got the defendant whose voice whmbellowing in the courtroondan basically saying, i was addicted to drugs. you ve got all kinds of evidence. to drug kinyou got a laptop that the biden administration and everybody in so-called intelligence said was fake. so this judge may say, said wa e what, enough of pulling the wool over everyone s eyes. maybe i ll give hi seyes, i will time. so if the sentence comes sentence the fifth where he goes on trial for servs in l.a., does hunter immediately appeal? when does he serve a sentence orntence oul is dad come in com? i don t think his dad is goinggo to do anything before the election because he doesn n have to. if there is a sentence that is imposed that calls forsentence some jail time, even a small amount, the defendant has the right to request the appellate bail. it will probably be granted. so he will not bte have to serve any any jail time. and, of course, joe biden cane n wait until the end of his term or he can commute a sentence. who knows? joe s changed his mind. we don t even understood d. tingtion but, you know, it s very interesting. i just want to say one thing. you know, that whole t the bidet family stood there and sat there in the front row with thi ins united front. you know, we love hunterd ever and every one of them is negatively impacted by huntem har biden being a crak addict and getting a gun. but in addition to that, everyonen to is part of thatha united front was getting money fromfr what you call the crimewl family from all over the world. everyone got some money from anl llc. so that family is nolct what the appear to be. and i think that the jury saw right through it. ju, nullificationti this guy. this is a very easy case. s s within whichhe they brought back this verdict tells me that they weren t pulling any punches. thi why do you think the president of the united states at a time like think unites when his son has been convicted of a serious gun charge that could have wound up havinga se a kid it fromth the trashcan and maybe shoot himself or his sister in the headnd may? e why doesn t he say anythingt contrite like my son made a mistake or i m sorryjust that we re putting the country through this? just a gently worded phrase to show the american people that the family takes ftr some responsibility and has some remorse because hunter biden was considered the prince in delaware. everyoneed the princ called himd he s never been held accountable for anything. he s don anythinge. he s 54 years old. right. in addition to that, they d admt have to admit the hypocrisy, because within hours of this sentencesy, joe biden was sayinr we ve got to have stronger gun laws. we ve got to make sure thesewe f guns are secure and kepte in safe places. i mean, come on, tell that tmeao your son. judge jeanine, we ll see you onn rrow the five tomorrow.. no more tries for a while or out of trials. i don t knowor what i m going to do. what are we going to talk about? i ll see you tomorrow. see you tomo. congressman james comer joins me now. all right. songressmas comer jo, congressme actually sent referrals to garland, the attorney general, on perjury because h depoied to you guys in a sworn deposition. so he s got a lot hanging over his head heron.t e. shak how do you think that s going to shake out in light of this conviction? f thiswell, it s it s more problems for hunter biden. loo wel fork what hunter bidd in his deposition is he clearly lied. and why dition is hed he he lien to protect joe biden. but the fact that he lie d under oath is clearly perjury. this will be used to determine his sentencing. so not only do you have the gu so nn clear trial where he clearly lied on a gun application, the jury saly w right through that. now he s got his tax evasion charges where we know he didn ta pay his taxes. we know to this daxes,y, yethi he hasn t paid his taxes. his taxes were paid years latesr by a major democrat donor, kevin moore, prior to the presidential election to help alleviate a problem joe biden haa probled in the presidential election against trump. so this what we ve done with the criminal referrals, as you know, is the first step. errals ait s just the beginning. but it s a major problem foror hunter biden and it s going accu to be taken into account when it comes time for his sentencing. ann it thow do you feel as an investigator who cracked this case i wide open with the lapto, followed every lead as far as you could? ran into some roadblockse and they re only focusedar on a narrow tax delinquency and a a gundn charge, which they hade bs to prosecute because he had pictures of it all over the internetd pictur. how does that make you feel? well, justice has not been served. justice will not be served until the department of justic l noe takes into account all of the financial crimes that the fina biden family committed. w it wasn t just hunter biden. it was alsasn t io joe biden am biden. the entire family benefited from the biden the influence. peddling scheme. we had three people testify who were onc he partnersn with hunter biden in these schemes. they testified under oatinh that the bidens were selling the biden brand. big access tolin joe biden. there was never a legitimate business. we know from the irs whistleblowersr a they never ps any taxes on the tens of millions of dollars t they took from our adversaries around the world. we have laws in congresshe where i am right now that prevent people from doing this. froms.d the foreign agents registration act. it s called the foreign corrupt practices act. wen know that the bidensviolat have violated these law. so untiled the department of justice takes the real serious crimes into account, reale has not been served. if i listed the top ten crimese that the president sona committed, lying on the gun application wouldn t even makegn it so true. iunter biden taking the fall to save his dad? well, it sure lookthats like th, he, and he looks like someone that s got a pardon in his back pocket. you knows back pt., people ask e well, will the president pardon hunter biden? well, they re not finished. the department of justice isn t finished with him. first of all, they got this this tax n evasion trial.t th then they ve got these criminal referrals. and as i v crimine said many timeshed. over the past week, we re not finished. the criminal referrals were just referrals the beginning of the accountability phase. we ve gonewe ve go through great lengths and we ve been very transparent and substantive with the american peopleth about the money this family s taken in. we ve been very transparent about the 20 shell companies, the llc, that ththe e bidens hah that appear to serve no purpose thy. r i n to launder moneer and when i say launder, i m using the word that six different banks usedg in those suspicious activity reports. th money to tenbiden different biden family members. and according to the irs whistleblowersfa , they never pay any taxes. and you re still looking at new bank recordand you s thae just gotten your hands on. yes, we found new accounts ery day. all right. thank you very much, james comer. keep us posted. j thankmer, hyou.s secret let s bring in former white house press secretary and outnumbered co-hoseight kelly mcinerney. how do you think president biden is feeling toda bid y? oh, i imagine it s prettybecs rough because there has been reporting for a yeare evlus jesse saying that every single day he has been following hunter biden and the lega hs bel matter, so mucht that aides will bring it up to him and he will kinto himd of erupt. so aides kind of tiptoe around him. they don t wanf tiptoe at to bra poen though it is a live political story, one that wewhie talk about often. and the white house press briefing there was supposed house one today. there wasn t one. t i imagine they didn t want to field questions on this oneae so i imagine as a father, thisa is a tough moment. ab doesn t even want to talkughe about the politics of this, but he ll have to at some points . but the verdict does contains the potential thrust into his own personal o and financial affairs, and so do the tax charges. they have been walled off from anything against joe biden. so at the same time, as distraught as he is about co his addiction and his conviction, he must feel politicallnv musy insulated froy future exposure. i think he does. look, i think i would be stunned, jesse, if hunter biden did not take a plea deal ahead of the tax charges. really, that is tax c where you start getting subpoena power. yes, that is where you start thg subpoena power all over all of these bank accounts accou that combentr is talking about.b he subpoenaed them on the congressional level, but they start cominpo on g in o a live court case. there is simply no way livwhen they allow that to go to trial when they know they ve got to your point, iw they v tf yout want to pardon hunter, you ve got a commutation in your back pocker, youat. r pa you re either going to be a lame duck president or a second term term president. more likely the first. his son he s going to pardon his son. his son is going to takeon i a a deal. i would be stunned if he allowed that and he would take a ple and he wa deal to serve any time, because, remember, in thected serving time first plea deal that blew up. hk yeah. look, i think he learned a lesson. learned a d his hand. today. the facts are supposed to match the law in ordere s arh to getin a conviction. this was a slam dunk case. thw. acts match the la. he lied on a gun form. tax evasion. either you paid your taxestax e you didn t. in his case, he didn t. this is a slam dunk. if he would have taken a pleawoul deal today, it would have been much better for him when itld came to sentencing, would have gotten a much lighter sentence. so why would you note gott do that with the tax evasion where it s slam dunk? 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house. no they didn t bring back the trans flasher. it was juneteenth.nth, n nine days early. it s a celebratione days of the of slavery after the civil war. so the event is meant to be energeti tc, even though it s not but sleepy. j. e to his name for nearly a minute, joe biden froze like he was in the trump courtroom . watch this. i think this is a black book on the class. must ve come out with it. i mean, this is a black book] on the court. that s too big a shout right now. what about even though i see a smile, i know how to smile, even though i. but not people that voted party had to look up with you. but now i need to say about this. i would hate to see it the same up here, but it s so much better. bring a smile. it was so uncomfortableeo that george floyd s brother philonisrgfloyd e had te the president one of those. you re right, bro. you good? does not and snapped joe out of it. no matter what, you don tf it get it handed down. what is it? o then biden had to speak. hourank use wordsand even. 24 hours later, we still can t decipher. they re all ghost and new guards trying to take us back. well, there are taking away your freedoms. make it harder for black people to vote. t harder fwell, have your vote . you can believe it. banning books about black experiences, the myths openly as well. your grandmother, juneteenth . she knows laws. she knows the laws as nine. fro he s jetlagged from france and tormented over his son s triace and tr hil. be he doesn t want to be at a juneteenth party, and it shows r the man with the nuclear codes is cracking. it wasis crackin the biden admin who made juneteenth a federal holiday, and they re not even celebratinth federalholiday g i. what the heck is going on here? rea new poll shows how much how black americans distrust the biden government muc. three quarters of black americans believe that policelie do little to stop guns and drugs in black communities, aka. they want more thorough police work. over half of black americans think the government encourages single motherhood to eliminate k the the need for black men. and over half of blac.keve th americans believe the government promotes birth control and abortion to keepof t the black population small. the founder of planned parenthood, sanger agrees. what do you know? black and white americans both think biden s government s deviousls bothiny corrupt foundn of conserve the culture. mikayle tha montgomery joins us now. mikayla, have you ever seen anybody celebrate juneteenth like joe bidene joe? ver seen i ve never seen a more lackadaisical celebration whene it comes to my people. s so, no, not at all. abl right. well, are you worriedooke about the president? because it looked like for a second there he forgot he was alive. i m definitely worried. about the president s cognitive abilities to lead this country. when you look at everything that s going on internationally, i don t know how i could feel safe livini how fg in a countre my president doesn t seem to even know where he iss no, lc alone be able to keep track of everything that s going on in the worlerythingd. la these poll numbers, i m so bead we showed them, because a majority of black americans believe police don t do enouge the mah to keep gunsrs and drugs out of those communities. in othe our words, they want more aggressive policing. they want police to do a good job to have the resources and crack down on crimvee. that s what republicans and all americans have been sayingthat s across the country for years. nr yeah, i never thought the defund the police movement made tt s sense because, i meaa when something happens, who else are you going to call? soppenu go and even here in atlw have a public training facilityl being built so that we can better train our officers bed give theanm the resources that they need to better serve our communities. so, yeahtt, it is, you know,, yo pretty interesting how now everybody s more so shifting to something that was originally conservative valuat e as i was telling one ofr, my friends earlier. there s no reason why the hoodad was the hood when your grandma was a child. and it looks like it s still going to bks le e the hood whenkids h your kids have kids. you know, these people are tired of seeing their communitieave kids s rundown.in they re tired of seeing addiction take over. you know ke, their loved ones.. so, yeah, they they would encourage that. the taxe yeas that they pay go o better law enforcement, to better policies and a better communitrcement,y relations.s. black americans getting tired of joe biden in the democratic party: blacs. tk why do you think it s taken until now, until right afters te the trump presidency and four years into the biden presidency until no theen presiw, for blacs to say, hey, we re not wedded to the democrat part are y. e have we have been for decades. i mean, one of the first thingsf is, of course, joe biden telling us we re not black if had a we don t vote for him, that a lot of us like. what do you mean i m not black? so, you know, that started l to raise a lot of questions. but then, of course, you know, but e of thes noth to economy is not helping. everybody s really frustrated with the fachelpiny is frut tha. three jobs to pay one mortgage. so, yeah. my all right. mikayla, do you like my pink tie? getting a lot of complimentsg a i love it.ow you know, the pink is my thing. that s right. real men and women wear pink. mikayla, have a great night. igr eight isis fighters caught and released by the i w biden administration at the border right bacasd k. that was fish in the. i don t care if we ever come back that i always remember the fun we had. i love fishing with them. ps and i love fishing with them. ps and now through june c 14th, save 1% on that favorite gift. special father s day gift card really s, past projects, and cabela s. i never knew your cat was sop . cuddly, right? she really loves these she really loves these delectable squeeze up treats deliciously delectable, delectable. you re hilarious. delectable squeeze up deliciously delectable, delectable. introducing new advil, targeted introducing new advil, targeted relief th. the only topical pain reliever with four powerful pain of p that start working on contact to target tough pain at the source for up to 8 hours of powerful relief. new advil targeted relief. this is a premium hand-selected bacon wrapped mignon that s aged for tenderness and trim to perfection. this is a necktie. what do you think dad wants for father s day? 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my secret luminol whiteningth strips. i mean em more ofte that is whit. and because there s no sensitivity, i feel like i canrt use them more often. and you can get this th . but the seat.is the seat is leather and we get it. you love your bike. we do too. we do too. that sinds me the brushstrokete number one motorcycle insurer. but do you have to wedge it but do you have to wedge it into everything? this reminds me of my bike.obles look out of brushstrokes. yo tank. i had no idea this waurs fre a motorcycle exhibitguve had t three called gutters can cause big problems fast. big problems fast. until nowon my po call it three three lee filter today for your free gutter inspection. i ve had terrible floodinganen problems on my porch. ution, right now lee filter is offering a free inspection is offering a free inspection on your schedule lee filter is a permanent gutter solution so you never have to worry about costlyil damage from clogged gutters again. call us today and scheduleter.co your free inspection to schedule your free inspection. calling three three lee filter today or visit lee filter icon. the dentist s office just lost my crown, but that s not what concerns. it s that they have my social security number the dmv that hasn t updated their computers since they were invented. next has two forms of my i.d. and the online pet store that was breached. if my payment information. think of all the places that can expose your info. lifelock monitors millions of data points for identity theft. if there s a problem, we fix it. guaranteed. fox news alert. eight illegals with suspected asis ties crossed over the border and into the country. ice just arrested them in philly, l.aborder. and in ner new york. national correspondent bill illusion has the latest. onal billbill. well, jesse, a federal source nath knowledge to this case tells fox news that eight nationals of tajikistatin with suspected ties to ice weres all arrested by ice and thise fbi s joint terrorism task force in recent days. as you said in new york, philly and right here in los angeles now, tajikistan is over 7000 miles away from the southern border. and fox is told that all eight of these tajik nationals crossed illegally into the u.s. and received full vetting by dhs during, which time we re told, no derogatory information on the awhich m was flagged. we re told potential tiesd. to terrorism and security concerns flagged later on after they were apparently released into the u.s.. in a joint statement to fox.b news, the fbi and dhs confirmed the arrest, saying in part the, as the fbi and dhsy have recently described in public and partnein pubr buls ,the u.s. has been in a i heightened threat environment. the fbi and dhs will continuei n working around the clock with our partners to identify, investigate and disrupt potentiatifyl threats to nation security. now, you might remember back in april, fbi director christopher wray told a house subcommittee that the threats against house i us have increased since israel was attacked by hamasl on october 7th. given those calls for action, our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw some kind of twisted inspiration from the events in the middle east to carryation frevents i out ate at home. r: and and jesse, the fbi, dh ts and or sources haven t said when and where these eight tajikistan nationals crossed our southern border, but our sources tell us they did cross illegalls y. they were not visa overstays. this is exactly what people have been worried about. sure is, bill. unbelievable. is,th thanks for that reporting. yeahank yo, the election is lesc five months away and the mediato thinks the most important question about the last election is thisabout th . n as a journalist, as an american, what do you think is the most important question that needs to be answeren d froo both candidates who won the last election? yeah, very simple. yeah. and won the last election. let s just let s just let s discust tes and debate and we ll see. i mean, look, it s been aske d by donald trump. he refuses to answer it correctly, but we ll see what he does when he s givenans that opportunity in front of 140 million people. you know, it s a littlelion different on a stage like that. stephanopoulos thinksr 5th is november 5th is a referendum on january sixth. ndum on also, rachel maddow ths trump s going to put her in internment camp. p she s saying this i m worried about the country broadly. if we put someone in powecour who is openly vowing that he plans to build camps, to hold millionss to of people, forconvn that matter. what convinces you that these missive campces theses he s plag are only for migrants? so about me, worriedgr but only as much as i m worried about all of us. anyon don t flatter yourself. if anyone s going to a camp, it s acoste a campa that only w. mondays is not like anybodyso miss her. no one s sending anybody to camps. ne is sendyou silly goose, excer our sons and daughters. so we can get some peace. quiet this summer. this preemptive strike against the next trump presidency is nothing compared to the preemptive strike againsthe ne t the supreme court, which has been relentless and vicious, includinsupreme g everything frm triggering armed psychos to hunt down justices to flagging recusal from the trump cases. is the goal secondarily, to delegitimize the cour t? so t the trump opinionstr are discredited. the latest dirtyump op trick, a liberal activist went undercover and secretl ye recorded justice alito and his wife during a private event. sh she pretended to be b a conservative and tried to baiting the justice intolous. saying something scandalous. watchwatch.. beke people in this country who believe in god have gotn our to keep fighting for that, to return our country to a plac a placee of godliness. oh, i agree with you. i agree with that. i support the george ruling by god. i support like i have verye brid i don t know how we bridgege that gap. i w you know, like, how do weis get people squeezed? i wish i knew. i would say i don t know. it s not i don t think it s something we can do to do anything. - i mean, we have a very simple, defined goal. we need to do our best to dos nothing controversial here about alito s answer. ia he doesn t think we re goingge to be able to change pro-choice people s mind, and he thinks weigio should have more religion in the country. o what?e but the media seized on it as disqualifying. we know alito is essentially a fox host on the court. new developments about supreme l court justice samuel alito s compromised ethicsop and open support and comfort with extreme far right cause ans formeres presidential candidate vivek ramaswamy join ers now.i did no i didn t think they d have this kind of dirty tricldk in theirg bag, but they re going undercover now. what do you think rcover ns viv? well, look, the reality is this radical left will stop at nothing to implement their agenda. yesthing to, they will go thh the law system. they will go through prosecutorial system s. stems, they will go through the financial system, and they will go through administrative agencies tial systhroughministr but the reality is thee am american people are seeing through the force that they have putericin up. and you fool me once, shameon on you. fool me twice, shame on me you. most people in this country now understand that the media s histrionics countrunderstas aren more extreme because they realize the people aren t falling for it they rea. but that s actually going to backfire, i believe, heading into november. and i m fine e headembe with undercover journalistic tactics. that s been bread and butter founournaliseen brear for decad. but it s not like a big exposé. if he likes god and doesn t think he can change the minds of pro-choice americans. lik and earlier, i want to getg your take on this because we had some breaking news i earlie. the big one, hunteramerican biden found of three gun bre felonies this morning. in delawar e and could be facing up to two years, possibly more,y in prison if m judge no ricoth sentence him that way. what do you thin k this is going to do to the biden campaign? ii well, look, i think there snk a couple of things going on here, jesse. i actuallycouple g think thisd particular trial and conviction is a bit of a farce. s ofit s a bit of a feignedo th retreat. note the timing. it came right after the trume tp trial and the trump verdict. the purpose of this is ine the public eye to actually eye legitimize the trump conviction. it s also designed, to legit too attention away from what they should actually going be going after the biden for which is selling off our foreign policy to make their family plae rich in places like ukraine, where hunter biden has in no business serving on the board of burisma, a state affiliated energy b company, which happens to beou the same country that we re non sending $200 billion of american taxpayer money to. so that s what this is aboubt . it s a bit of f a deflection all against the backdrop that these are federal charges nst thl charge when his father is the sitting president of the united fas thythose n absolutel pardon those actual convictions. convictionrd not fall fo that trick. and i think that s what this is really about. timing is everything: timingeryd in life. vic, thank you so much.hank have a great night. you too. wanda is back every body wanda is back every body weight and body, you know, th siri, a city client, uses citi s financial expertise to help drive its growth and keep its supply chain moving. moving. so more pet parents cand. get everything they need right when they need it. keeping more pets and families happy for the love of moving our clientrping)s for, . for the love of progress. well, this isn t going to work. try this. this will work. score, pick up score at walmart features like the people they re made for are meant to move groundbreaking. targeted compression and an anatomical design for a custom like fit all backed by a lifetime guarantee 15% off your first order at features .com. hello i m former arkansas governor mike huckabee. a lot of times you can t control the amount of sleep that you re getting. you can t fall asleep or you re tossing and turning all night. you can t get the sleep. you need to stay healthy. i know it s scary unless you use relaxium sleep relaxium. sleep is a product that s made from natural ingredients and it usually works from the very first night. you try it. it helps you fall asleep, stay asleep and wake up refreshed, earning your body those quality hours of sleep that it desperately needs. join the hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced the relief and health benefits from getting a great night s sleep and get relaxium sleep. the first time i took relaxium and i slept through the night, i thought, wow, this worked for me. i could not believe it. relaxium sleep is studied, tested and designed by a neurologist to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer and wake up refreshed. relaxium sleep worked from the very first night i took, i had more focus and mental clarity than i ve had in years. relaxium is drug free and not addictive, so you can take relaxium every night and never worry about side effects. and the best part is it can start working from the very first night when i take relaxium sleep, i sleep better than i have in years. i wake up feeling like i ve had the best night s sleep. stop being afraid and start sleeping your fears away with relaxium sleep your body and your mind. well, thank you. mike huckabee is so confident that relaxium will work you. he s asked us to give away 1000 bottles. if you re not getting calm enough to go to sleep, take relaxium sleep. i promise you it ll work. get your risk free bottle of relaxium sleep now. it s guaranteed to work your money back. visit. try relaxium rt.com or call 889 eight 9322. that s try relaxium dot com or call 808 nine eight 9322 when you can watch. listen. get the latest news business and news headlines on sirius xm. any time anywhere. fox news audio on sirius xm america is listening. jesse watters saying what most want. 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[sfx] ambient / laughing. so do your thing like a pro pain free absorbing pro. fox news alert. wanda has been arrested. the democrat operative on cameraught allegedly stuffing ballots in bridgeport, connecticutcaugh last year was charged with unlawfully possessing another person s ballot and witness tampering. but this has nothing to dosti with her alleged stuffing in 2023. this goes all the wangn 2023y back to 2019. wanda was arrested for ballo tt. fraud in the city s 2019 democrat primary for the same candidate helped elect in 2023. mayor joe ganim. accus wanda is accused of filling out someone s absentee balloint telling them to not vote in person and then askingn themtell to not tell investigators about what she said. wanda isn t the only democrat arrested for fraud. were three other bridgeport democrats were charged. one of them is a citycoun councilman. wanda has been suspendedcilmanit with pay from her city job for months. she works for the front des k for the mayor that she got into office. fox 61 reporter matt karen paid mayor joe a visit today. watch watch this. we d like to talk with theth w mayor aboue h tht some of the cf workers being arrested for election fraud. raud hi, i m. i ll be right with you. thanks. we waited. fast. orward rep we wait mayor ganim didn t want to talk to us. but as 2019 and 2023 mayoral opponents did well, i always felt liknde i had been cheated.i i didn t know the depth of it.ei we caught it live on video directly from city hall. the players and the actors remained the same. reporten saymoore and joh they believe they should be occupying bridgeport says corner office. well, actually, i m going down to city hall until joe can. get out of my chair. hmm. candidates were cheated. voters don t trust the system. h this is why you need squeakyeaky clean elections every time. we need everyone to locked up before november. a cleveland woman was in court yesterday forold bo the murder of a three-year-old boy and attempted murder of the attee s. what she did next was disgusting. t seniorn co national correspondent kevin corke with more. rke with morkevin, even evening. you know, sometimes it really takes every ounce of youy ouncr being to not sayty what you really want to say about a person because a it woud be profane or perhaps even worse, which is why tonight there s precious little i canbia say about bianca ellis. she is that cleveland woman who e.t cls charged with killig a sweet three-year-old little boy named julian wood and for stabbing his mother, margot. but if you thought she d or show any remorse for the crime or any ounce of humanity or regretf humani, you d be sadlyee mistaken. because at her arraignment yesterda at arraigy, she did noh thing. in fact, she did the opposite, smirking and preenind th g the cameras without a care in the world. a vulgar, repugnantworl of sr evil. none of this, frankly, should have happened in thenone ove fid place, because ellis already had a warrant. becaus warrane of a theft conviction. and though she d previously been taken into custodoughy copa she was later released. then just four days later,te she s little julian to death and wounded his mother, margotdo . authorities are calling it a random act of violence forauir has been set at $5 million. really with no bail period at extended to the next one, that possible violence that you can at the very least stay wherever you can to keep this monster behind bars. boy, your heart really goes i out to that dad there. now, to top it all off, back in february, ellil ofs, who also hs a felony battery rap on her jacketry wra, ended up in a woms shelter and allegedly told officers there she wanter and to kill someone and eat their flesh. flesh.f convicted in this case,d she could face the death penalty. jesse. and some argue that s not tha enough. back to you. not enought . e chai give her the chair twice. yeah. kevin, thank your . t hank y more prime time ahead. general we have something. what is it? 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