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As President Trump's legal team and the Republican party argue against evidence, witness testimonies, and documents from being shared during the initial phase of the impeachment trial let's review what we learned during the House impeachment hearings. A lurid picture of the President's abuse of power was described throughout the impeachment hearings. President Trump attempted to extort Ukraine through the establishment of an unofficial diplomatic line, through the President's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, to carry out the President's domestic political errand while diverging from official U.S. policy in Ukraine.
Summary of first day of the Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump, President of the United States

President Trumps impeachment trial began with acrimony as lawyers for the president and House members known as impeachment managers clashed in personal and bitter arguments over the rules that will govern the trial.

The Senate voted to block attempts by Democrats to subpoena documents and witnesses for the impeachment trial that the White House has refused to provide to the House investigators. The votes were cast along party lines.

Under the rules, orchestrated by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the House managers and Mr. Trumps lawyers will each have 24 hours starting Wednesday afternoon to argue their cases for and against the articles of impeachment. Senators will have 16 hours to ask questions, submitted in writing, most likely early next week. After that, the Senate will again consider the matter of whether to subpoena witnesses or documents, at which point a few Republicans have signaled they may be open to doing so.
Summary of the House Impeachment Testimonies

David Holmes testified the importance of a White House meeting for newly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky and President Trump extorting Ukraine by withholding aid while asking Zelensky to publicly announce an investigation into Biden on CNN.
It is important to understand that a White House visit was critical to President Zelenskyy. President Zelenskyy needed to show U.S. support at the highest levels in order to demonstrate to Russian President Putin that he had U.S. backing, as well as to advance his ambitious anti-corruption reforms at home. President Zelenskyys team immediately began pressing to set a date for the visit.
...Within a week or two, it became apparent that the energy sector reforms, commercial deals, and anti-corruption efforts on which we were making progress were not making a dent in terms of persuading the White House to schedule a meeting between the presidents. On June 27, Ambassador Sondland told Ambassador Taylor in a phone conversation (the gist of which Ambassador Taylor shared with me at the time) that President Zelenskyy needed to make clear to President Trump that President Zelenskyy was not standing in the way of investigations. I understood that this meant the Burisma/Biden investigations that Mr. Giuliani and his associates had been speaking about in the media since March.
...Upon reading the transcript, I was deeply disappointed to see that the President raised none of what I understood to be our inter-agency agreed-upon foreign policy priorities in Ukraine and instead raised the Biden/Burisma investigation and referred to the theory about Crowdstrike, and its supposed connection to Ukraine and the 2016 election.
...On September 8, Ambassador Taylor told me, now theyre insisting Zelenskyy commit to the investigation in an interview with CNN, which I took to refer to the Three Amigos. I was shocked the requirement was so specific and concrete. While we had advised our Ukrainian counterparts to voice a commitment to following the rule of law and generally investigating credible corruption allegations, this was a demand that President Zelenskyy personally commit, on a cable news channel, to a specific investigation of President Trumps political rival.
On September 11, the hold was finally lifted after significant press coverage and bipartisan congressional expressions of concern about the withholding of security assistance. Although we knew the hold was lifted, we were still concerned that President Zelenskyy had committed, in exchange for the lifting, to give the requested CNN interview. We had several indications that the interview would occur.

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Official nosy neighbor and gossip
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