they ve been through investigations almost since donald trump was elected. they went through the whole russia vest xwags and came out relatively unscathed in terms of what happened on capitol hill. are they more worried about this? is there a nervousness in the west wing you haven t seen before? yeah i think they understand this is a different beast at this point. that they did get through the mueller stage of the investigation without it reaching the heights we re already seeing in terms of a risk of impeachment. they don t have a coherent defense operation set up at this point. the president tried to hire tray goudy, tried to bring in, the former congressman from south carolina to join the president s legal team and that kind of fell apart about over loblying rules and when he could join the team, so they don t have sort of the clear cut lines of authority and structure for an impeachment defense that they would normally see in this kind of
political rival, let s put aside a couple of questions. what laws if any would be broen? zwl this is a good example of where impeach bable contact might not overlap with criminal law. this is something we saw during the mueller vest xwags. a lot of focus on did the president s conduct meet these specific statutory elements. what we have here is overt abuse of office exactly the type of impeachable conduct the founders had in mind. now that said, congress can t move to impeach based off of news reporting alone. so of course the president did in his own way appear to confirm part of that reporting. that said, congress does now need to establish its own record. but it doesn t need to find some new additional information. something worse than what we know. all congress needs to do is establish on the record and con dpirm for themselves that the president did in fact have this conversation that he did in fact in the course of official business, having a conversation
had done more to harm the investigation than his client s lies. the 31-year-old, now the first member of the president s team to be sentenced as part of the russia vest xwags and the whus and its allies had been b eager to down play papadopoulos role in the campaign. it was a volunteer position and again, no activity was ever done in an official capacity. i have no idea why people would think that a volunteer coffee boy like george papadopoulos would get to the top of this campaign. it was papadopoulos who reveal today a diplomat that he had been told the russians had thousands of e-mails about hillary clinton. that helped set off an fbi investigation that became robert mueller s special counsel probe. during the 2016, the young adviser attended a meeting of trump s new national security team including donald trump and jeff sessions. papadopoulos pitched a meeting between then candidate trump and putin. sessions would later say he discouraged papadopoulos from setting up the mee