23 hours ago · Feb. 23, 2022. The two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his business practices abruptly resigned on Wednesday amid a ...
Feb 18, 2022 · A Manhattan judge Thursday called Donald Trump “just a bad guy” in a scathing rebuke to a lawyer arguing that the former president was being unfairly singled out for investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Attorney Alina Habba had argued that James was discriminating against ...
Feb 17, 2022 · Last summer, spurred by evidence uncovered in James’ civil investigation, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged Weisselberg and the Trump Organization with tax fraud, alleging he ...
Feb 17, 2022 · Feb. 17, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC. By Steve Benen. As break-ups go, this one was ugly. Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, decided this month that it no longer wanted anything to do ...
By July 18, 2019, Trump had—without explanation—put a hold on $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine. In a July 25 phone call, Trump repeatedly asked Volodymyr Zelensky to launch two investigations in cooperation with Giuliani and Attorney General Barr. One proposed investigation would concern a conspiracy theory —which originated on 4chan in 2017 and was spread by blogs, social media, and Fox News — that connected the American cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike to Ukrainian actors supposedly interfering in the 2016 election. Trump had been repeatedly told by his own aides that this allegation is false, but refused to accept those assurances. The other proposed investigation would concern Joe and Hunter Biden. At the time of the inquiry, Joe Biden was the leading presidential candidate in Democratic Party primary polling, making him Trump's most likely 2020 opponent.
An analysis of polls showed that support for impeachment among the public grew after the Trump–Ukraine scandal first became public knowledge in September 2019, but through mid-December, Americans remained sharply divided on whether Trump should be removed from office.
In 2018, Florida businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman hired Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani as a consultant in their security company, paying him $500,000. In turn, Fruman and Parnas assisted him in his search in Ukraine for damaging information about Trump's political opponents. Giuliani sent Fruman and Parnas to Ukraine to seek information to undermine the Special Counsel's investigation and damage Biden's presidential campaign. At the same time, Fruman and Parnas were being paid by Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, with alleged ties to Russian organized crime and the Kremlin, who is facing federal bribery charges in the U.S. and is fighting extradition from Austria.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi initially continued to resist calls for impeachment. In May 2019, she indicated that Trump's continued actions, which she characterized as obstruction of justice and refusal to honor congressional subpoenas, might make an impeachment inquiry necessary. An increasing number of Democrats and a then-Republican representatives of the House, Justin Amash (who later became an independent ), were requesting such an inquiry.
On September 27, 2019, the White House confirmed an allegation by the first whistleblower that a record of the call between Trump and Zelensky was sealed in a highly classified computer system at the advice of NSC lawyers . This came alongside media reports that the White House had used the most highly classified system to store memorandums of conversations with the leaders and officials of countries including Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Russia. Administration officials had begun storing these transcripts into this system after Trump's conversations with Australia's prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and Mexico's president Enrique Peña Nieto leaked earlier in 2017. This was seen by critics and the media as a deliberate attempt to hide potentially damaging information.
Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, testified on October 11, 2019, in defiance of the White House although she remained an employee of the U.S. State Department until her voluntary retirement some months later. Yovanovitch told House committees she was "incredulous" at having been dismissed in May. She described the State Department as "attacked and hollowed out from within". Yovanovitch testified that she had never met or spoken with Hunter Biden and that Joe Biden had never raised the subject of his son or the Ukrainian gas firm that employed him. During his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump called Yovanovitch "bad news" and mentioned that " [s]he's going to go through some things".
On September 20, 2019, Roman Truba, head of the Ukraine State Bureau of Investigations, told American news and opinion website The Daily Beast that his agency had not investigated the Biden–Burisma connection and there were no signs of illegality there. Anton Herashchenko, a senior advisor to the Ukraine interior minister, told The Daily Beast that Ukraine will open such an investigation if there is an official request, along with details of why an investigation is needed and what to look for; Trump's requests had come through unofficial representatives such as Giuliani.