The US’s former Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch testified to House committees on Friday behind closed doors as part of the on-going impeachment inquiry. Yovanovitch was abruptly fired from her position earlier this year but remains on staff at the State Department. Her decision to testify to Congress defies orders by the Trump Administration to refuse all cooperation with the impeachment inquiry. The Washington Post obtained her 10-page opening remarks to the committees in which the former Ambassador said that she was removed, “based, as far as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.” She implicated President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani saying, “I do not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.” She reflected on the poor morale within the State Department, saying, “Today, we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership, with Congress, needs to take action now to defend this great institution, and its thousands of loyal and effective employees.” Associated Press reported that, “Yovanovitch was removed from her post after insisting that Giuliani’s requests to Ukrainian officials for investigations be relayed through official channels, according to a former diplomat who has spoken with her.” On the same day as Yovanovitch’s testimony, a senior advisor to State Secretary Mike Pompeo, Michael McKinley has announced his resignation.

In other impeachment-related news, Gordon Sondland, the US Ambassador to the European Union and Trump loyalist now says he will testify to Congress, just days after he failed to show up for his scheduled hearing. Sondland’s lawyers announced, “Notwithstanding the State Department’s current direction to not testify, Ambassador Sondland will honor the Committees’ subpoena, and he looks forward to testifying on Thursday.” The lawyers also said that Sondland would not be able to provide Congress with the documents they have subpoenaed. And, news emerged that at least 4 national security officials had expressed concerns to a White House lawyer over the US’s Ukraine policy before and after the infamous July 25th phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelensky.

A day after two of Mr. Giuliani’s associates were arrested, reports have emerged of Giuliani being directly in touch with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman as they were about to leave the country. Giuliani had lunch with the two men at Trump International Hotel on Wednesday, the same day that Parnas and Fruman were scheduled to depart the US with one-way tickets.

FEATURING ANDREW WELLE – Sixteen young Alaskans have brought a major lawsuit against their state over their compromised future from the coming climate catastrophe. This week attorneys argued on behalf of the young plaintiffs at the Alaska Supreme Court. Alaska is a unique state in that its pristine glaciers and sensitive ecology faces a grave threat from climate change but its government is heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry and actively promotes the development of oil and gas.

Andrew Welle, Staff Attorney with Our Children’s Trust.

FEATURING JENNY VILLEGAS-GARCIA AND TANYA KANE-PARRY – A massive national series of actions this weekend are aimed at immigrant detention centers in the US. Thousands of undocumented immigrants are being held in various facilities around the US, many of them run by for-profit corporations. Conditions inside some of the detention centers are so severe that they have been dubbed “Concentration camps.” 

Organizing under the banner of “Close the Camps,” a broad coalition of immigrant rights, civil rights, anti-racist, and social justice organizations are gathering this weekend in various metropolitan areas including Newark, New Jersey, San Antonio, Texas, and Los Angeles, California. 

For more information about ‘Close the Camps’ event near you click HERE; and in Los Angeles, go to https://www.facebook.com/DSALosAngeles/.

Jenny Villegas-Garcia, Organizer at Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), Tanya Kane-Parry, Professor of Theater at CSU-LA, and a member of Al Otro Lado.

Two associates of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have been arrested and charged with campaign finance violations in the latest chapter of the impeachment related investigations roiling Washington DC. The two Russian born businessmen from Florida Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are charged with funneling Russian money into Trump’s election campaign and are also implicated in helping Mr. Giuliani with investigating Trump’s political rival Joe Biden’s ties to Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story on Thursday morning explained that, “Both men have donated to Republican campaigns including Mr. Trump’s, and in May 2018 gave $325,000 to the primary pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action, through an LLC called Global Energy Producers, according to Federal Election Commission records.”  Additionally, “Messrs. Parnas and Fruman had dinner with the president in early May 2018, according to since-deleted Facebook posts captured in a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They also met with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. , later that month at a fundraising breakfast in Beverly Hills, Calif., along with Tommy Hicks Jr. , a close friend of the younger Mr. Trump who at the time was heading America First Action. Mr. Parnas posted a photo of their breakfast four days after his LLC donated to the super PAC.” A group called Campaign Legal Center had apparently urged the FEC last July to investigate Parnas and Fruman. 

In other news, Bloomberg reported that in 2017 Trump himself tried to use his position to demand a favor for one of Giuliani’s client through then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Specifically, Trump pressured Tillerson to, “persuade the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, according to three people familiar with the 2017 meeting in the Oval Office. Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.” Bloomberg opined that the “2017 episode bears [the] hallmarks of Trump[‘s] approach to [the] Ukraine call.”

In other news, Fox News conducted a new poll spelling more bad news for President Trump. The Fox News poll results show 2 percentage points higher support for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office than a poll done just days earlier by the Washington Post. The new poll also found that, “51 percent of voters think the Trump administration is more corrupt than previous administrations, up from 46 percent last month.” Trump fretted on Twitter about the poll results from his favorite news network saying, “Whoever their Pollster is, they suck.” In remarks to reporters at the White House Trump said on Wednesday that, “if the rules are fair,” and “If Republicans get a fair shake,” he would cooperate with the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry. Just a day earlier White House Counsel Pat Cippolone sent an 8-page letter to lawmakers putting them on notice that the White House wou...

FEATURING WENDELL POTTER – President Trump recently signed an executive order on Medicare that was cast as a counter to the proposed Medicare-for-All Act of 2019 but was in fact was a stealthy attempt at weakening the existing Medicare program that seniors rely on. Promoting “market-based pricing” Trump announced his plan at a raucous political-style rally in Florida amid signs that read, “Great Healthcare for you.” He triumphantly signed his order surrounded by smiling seniors. But what exactly has Trump proposed? 

Wendell Potter, author and journalist who spent more than two decades in the health insurance industry, at Humana and Cigna. He became a whistleblower in 2008 when he left Cigna and wrote the tell-all book Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. Since then he also wrote Obamacare: What’s In It for Me/What Everyone Needs to Know about the Affordable Care Act; and Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It. 

FEATURING DANIEL GALINDO – As the political drama over an impeachment inquiry aimed at President Donald Trump unfolds in Washington DC, some have asked why Trump’s other wrongdoings are not the subject of impeachment. Indeed, Trump’s most egregious misdeed may be his cruel policy of separating thousands of immigrant families at the border and causing irreparable mental and physical trauma in young children and their parents. 

Now the ACLU has launched a massive federal lawsuit over just this policy, seeking damages from the government on behalf of thousands of immigrants who were affected. 

Daniel Galindo is a Staff Attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sent an 8-page letter to the Democratic leaders of House committees who are pursuing an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. The letter calls the inquiry “unconstitutional,” despite the fact that the US Constitution clearly lays out that the power of introducing articles of Impeachment lies with the House of Representatives. The letter also states that the White House will simply not cooperate, saying, “Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it.” Trump, through the letter, accused Democrats of seeking, “to overturn the results of the 2016 election.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded in a statement saying, “The White House letter is only the latest attempt to cover up his betrayal of our democracy, and to insist that the President is above the law. The letter is manifestly wrong, and is simply another unlawful attempt to hide the facts of the Trump Administration’s brazen efforts to pressure foreign powers to intervene in the 2020 elections.” House leaders had already put Trump on notice saying that a refusal to comply with the inquiry would amount to obstruction. Representative Raja Krishnamurthy of Illinois who sits on the House Intelligence Committee said this on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show. Multiple analysts and media pundits are now declaring we are in a state of constitutional crisis.

The Trump administration has specifically blocked the testimony of Gordon Sondland, the US Ambassador to the European Union and former hotelier. Wisconsin’s Democratic Representative Mark Pocan has now suggested that Congress withhold State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s salary until Sondland is allowed to testify. Meanwhile top Republican Senator and ardent Trump fan Lindsey Graham has said that he found nothing in Trump’s controversial phone call to Ukraine’s President to be “impeachable.” Graham is apparently gathering signatures for a letter to Pelosi that will say, “We do not believe the transcript of the phone call between the president and the Ukraine is an impeachable offense.” While Graham apparently supports the White House decision to prevent Sondland from testifying, he has expressed interest in Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee which he heads. Giuliani is deeply implicated in the scandal involving Ukraine and has indicated he too will defy House Committee subpoenas. 

House Democrats are also demanding access to grand jury evidence gathered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team in its investigation into the 2016 election. The Trump Justice Department has blocked access to the material and earlier this week a federal judge expressed shock that the DOJ questioned legal precedent in the similar case around Richard Nixon’s 1974 impeachment. Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell denounced several of the Trump administration’s positions as “extreme,” and said that it was, “taking extraordinary positions in this case.” 

FEATURING THOM HARTMANN – The United States Supreme Court has touched just about every aspect of Americans’ lives. Right now, justices are hearing arguments in cases concerning the right of LGBTQ Americans to have a discrimination-free workplace. Although the court is meant to uphold the rights of individuals under the Constitution, historically the body has on numerous occasions violated its own principles. In recent years the court’s justices have taken it upon themselves to empower corporations to such an extent that our entire political system has been perverted to preserve and expand the power of corporate profiteers at the expense of people and the planet. How did we get here and what can be done about it?

For more information about Thom’s latest book visit https://www.thomhartmann.com.

Thom Hartmann, renowned progressive radio talk show host, New York Times bestselling author of two dozen books including, ‘The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment’ and his latest, ‘The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.’

President Donald Trump continued his tactic of obstruction in the impeachment inquiry by barring Gordon Sondland, a State Department official from testifying to three House committees. Sondland is the US Ambassador to the European Union and was expected to testify regarding Trump’s withholding of US military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt on his rival Joe Biden. Writing on Twitter Trump said, “I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away.” House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff spoke to reporters on Tuesday morning saying this. Ahead of the scheduled testimony a dozen Democrats had called on Sondland to resign saying that the text messages in question suggest he has been complicit in Trump’s attempt to extort political information from Ukraine.

Meanwhile Democrats are considering taking steps to protect the identity of the original whistleblower who filed the complaint about the Ukraine scandal. The Washington Post reported late on Monday that, “House Democrats are weighing extraordinary steps to secure testimony from [the] whistleblower …masking his identity to prevent President Trump’s congressional allies from exposing the individual.” Additionally, “The steps under consideration include having the whistleblower testify from a remote location and obscuring the individual’s appearance and voice.” On Monday Trump continued to dig his heels in claiming that his conversation with Ukraine’s President, whose rough transcript he released, was perfectly above board and acting as though he has nothing to hide. In fact a major new Washington Post/Schar School poll on Tuesday found that for the first time a majority of Americans now support pursuing an impeachment inquiry: “by a margin of 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans say the House was correct to open the inquiry. Among all adults, 49 percent say the House should take the more significant step of impeaching the president and calling for his removal from office.”

In other news hearings are underway at the US Supreme Court this week on several cases involving workplace discrimination aimed at LGBTQ Americans. Justices are examining whether the 1964 Civil Rights Law applies to protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, rather than just sex. The conservative Justice Samuel Alito has been outspoken on the issue reportedly saying to the lawyer in the case that, “You’re trying to change the meaning of what Congress understood sex to mean… It’s sexual orientation — it’s not sex.” Attorney Pamela Karlan retorted, “When a man is discriminated against for being gay, he is discriminated against for not conforming to an expectation about how men should behave.”

On Monday disability rights activists won a major victory when the Supreme Court declined to take up an appeal by the fast ...

FEATURING BRENT LAURENZ – A North Carolina trial court has determined the their state’s severely gerrymandered districts have to be redrawn, just months after the US Supreme Court walked away from regulating the maps. Republicans have so effectively drawn district maps to benefit their party that they are retaining political power in North Carolina despite losing the popular vote. 

But three state court judges just issued a 357-page unanimous ruling concluding that the existing maps, “do not permit voters to freely choose their representative, but rather representatives are choosing voters based upon sophisticated partisan sorting.”

The North Carolina judges had access to a trove of files belonging to a Republican operative named Thomas Hofeller who recently died. Now, a legal battle is shaping up over making all of Hofeller’s files public. 

For more information visit www.CommonCause.org/north-carolina.

Brent Laurenz, deputy director of Common Cause North Carolina.

**This segment was originally broadcast on September 6, 2019.