It's Happening

Yesterday was memorable with so much happening in Washington, but by the end of the day, the biggest news of all was when Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would begin a formal impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump (details here and here).

This was a major shift in the Speaker's and senior leadership's stance, triggered by the explosive revelations that Trump compromised national security in order to extort a foreign nation to smear his political rival.

For his part, Trump claims the White House will release the full, unredacted transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian president. It is worth nothing, however, that the Trump White House has doctored official transcripts multiple times in the past (details here) so their veracity is immediately suspect.

And as Reuters noted, the "transcript" will likely not be verbatim because it will be cobbled together from various people's notes and will be a long way from a word-for-word record of the actual call (details here). The article notes: "not only would any so-called transcript be based on notes, but it would also likely be incomplete because the note-takers usually do not include issues that could be controversial if they became public." Unlike all other previous Presidents, Trump has no official stenographer so he can alter "official" transcripts at will (details here).

As a result, lawmakers on Capitol Hill from both parties and both houses want to see the full, unredacted whistleblower report that triggered this latest scandal, something the White House is not willing to release as of this writing. The document is believed to include many details the phone transcript would not. In an extraordinary move, the GOP-controlled Senate voted unanimously for the White House to release the full, unredacted report to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The impeachment inquiry will also likely trigger a wide variety of new reporting about the unsavory dealings the Trump White House has been using leading up to the 2020 election. Late last night, for instance, the Washington Post broke an important story about how US government officials have been sidelined in conducting official business so that Trump loyalists and his private attorney could extort Ukraine into doing their bidding (link here).

So it's only Wednesday morning and it's been a historic, memorable week. Keep an eye on headlines today and the rest of the week for late-breaking developments.