Lock Them Up, part quarante-cinq
New report finds Trump's Ukraine liaison appears to have lied under oath during the impeachment trial.
Kurt Volker, President Donald Trump's Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, appears to have lied under oath when testifying for the first impeachment trial of the former president, reported Mother Jones on Thursday.
When he testified in the trial, Volker said he didn't know that the president wanted Ukraine to look into unfounded allegations against then former Vice President Joe Biden.
This week, CNN released recordings of Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani and Volker speaking to a top Ukrainian aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky. The recording revealed Giuliani pressing Ukraine to announce the investigation against Biden and claim that Ukraine was behind the 2016 election hack, even though it was ruled by the global intelligence community that Russia was responsible.
Volker was on the call, making it clear that he was well aware of what Giuliani and Trump were working to do.
"Vice President Biden was never a topic of discussion," Volker said during an October 3, 2019 deposition to the House Intelligence Committee. He then said the same thing when the committee questioned him publicly.
"At no time was I aware of or knowingly took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden. As you know from the extensive real-time documentation I have provided, Vice President Biden was not a topic of our discussions," he told Congress.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA.) told Mother Jones that he too noticed the differences in what Volker said and what the Giuliani call revealed. He said that Volker's testimony to Congress was "a disingenuous revision of history."
"Volker claimed in sworn testimony during Trump's impeachment proceedings that, even as he helped push Ukraine to look into Burisma and corruption, he did not know that those topics related to Joe Biden—and, consequently, he was unaware that he was assisting in the Giuliani-Trump effort to smear a political rival," said the report.
While Volker is no longer serving in government, Mother Jones pointed out that the's still a top member of the "foreign policy establishment," he is part of the BGR Group's international advisory team. He also serves as a "distinguished fellow" for the Elliott School of International Affairs in the school of international relations, foreign policy, and international development of the George Washington University.
Volker was picked to do the same work being done by then-U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Trump was captured in a recording saying he wanted to "take her out." Trump ultimately fired her and attempted to destroy her, but she testified to Congress everything she witnessed, ultimately making one of the top witnesses in the impeachment trial.
Trump administration spied on Democrats in Congress — and even their children.
Shocking new information is coming out about the scope of Department of Justice efforts to track down leaks about the Trump administration.
"As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor," The New York Times reported Thursday. "All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel's top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry."
Two of Trump's attorneys general are implicated in the scandal.
The twice-impeached one-term president continues to insist the election was stolen from him through fraud, and his angry supporters have been terrorizing elected officials and low-level election workers through threats and intimidation, reported Reuters.
"You and your family will be killed very slowly," read one text message received April 24 by Tricia Raffensperger, the wife of Georgia's secretary of state, and another she received a week earlier said: "We plan for the death of you and your family every day."
An April 5 text warned that a family member would "have a very unfortunate incident."
Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state who resisted Trump's demands to undo his loss in Georgia, called on former Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) in January to apologize to his wife after she received death threats following the senator's demand for his resignation, but the Reuters report shows the intimidation campaign remains ongoing.
The Raffenspergers went into hiding in late November after intruders broke into the home of their widowed daughter-in-law, which they believe was connected to the Trump-provoked intimidation campaign, and self-described Oath Keepers militants went to their home that same evening.
At least two other election officials' families went into hiding, Reuters reported, and Democratic secretaries of state Katie Hobbs, of Arizona, and Jocelyn Benson, of Michigan, said they continue to receive death threats related to Trump's loss.
Election workers, including local volunteers, also continue receiving harassing phone calls, emails and texts -- and Richard Barron, who oversaw Fulton County, Georgia's election, reported 150 hateful calls between Christmas and early January.
Barron's registration chief, Ralph Jones, has worked elections for three decades, and he's never experienced the racist threats he faced since Trump's election loss, including threats to drag his body behind a truck and strangers showing up at his house.
