Day: November 9, 2019

House Republicans requested Saturday that several people, including Hunter Biden and the anonymous whistleblower, testify before select committees as a part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

The request came as lawmakers prepare to hold public inquiry hearings beginning Wednesday. Three House committees have been privately questioning witnesses for the last several weeks.

A resolution outlining the process of the impeachment inquiry that passed the House in late October affords Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee the right to request certain witnesses be brought to testify. Those requests can only be granted by the chair …

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton claims to have information of interest to those leading the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, but is refusing to share those insights until a judge rules on a case involving the powers of the legislative and executive branches.

Bolton was involved in “many relevant meetings and conversations that have not yet been discussed,” according to a letter to House attorneys Bolton’s lawyer Charles Cooper sent Friday. But Bolton will not testify until the completion of a lawsuit filed in October asking a judge to rule on whether witnesses should abide by the testimony …

Sometime after Amazon pulled the plug on plans for a New York City headquarters in February of this year, the city’s former mayor Mike Bloomberg received a call from a top company executive.

It wasn’t just any Amazon executive — it was Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO and the world’s richest man.

Bezos was calling with a question for his fellow billionaire and media mogul: Would Bloomberg consider entering the 2020 presidential race?

Bloomberg told Bezos no at the time, according to a person briefed on the phone conversation.

But he had a question of his own for …

An attorney for the whistleblower whose complaint kicked off House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry sent a cease-and-desist letter to the White House’s legal counsel Thursday, requesting President Donald Trump stop publicly attacking the whistleblower.

The letter lambasts Trump’s repeated calls to unmask the whistleblower and the president’s attempts to discredit him, calling both dangerous actions that could endanger the whistleblower and constitute crimes such as witness retaliation or obstruction of Congress.

Trump’s “calls to the public to identify my client by name and his suggestion that he would support acts of violence against my client are, candidly, some of the most …

Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of November 3, 2019.

Onetti’s contemporaries [described] him as a kind of visionary who saw into the heart of Latin America. “Nobody has found adjectives to describe our world with such an exact evil,” the young Argentine novelist Andrés Neuman has written. “In life there are days, or atmospheres, or images, of which one can only think, it’s as if Onetti wrote this.” His friend Julio Cortázar called him

If an elected official is found to have broken the law or abused the powers of office, is impeachment merited or should the judgment be left to voters?

As part of our podcast, Impeachment, Explained, Vox partnered with PerryUndem and Ipsos on a poll exploring Americans’ beliefs about when presidential behavior is impeachable, when it’s simply wrong, and how partisanship is shaping those perceptions. The results were fascinating and unnerving.

Yes, Americans believe in the impeachment power; 71 percent say we need a way to remove a politician who breaks the law or abuses power from office. That includes …

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The impeachment testimony transcripts

• House Democrats released the full transcripts of closed-door depositions with witnesses in the impeachment inquiry. They corroborate what we already know: There was a quid pro quo. [Vox / Lauren Katz]
• Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU and Trump donor, revised his previous testimony to say that — yep — there was a quid pro