A4 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
waived or shortened.
Otherwise, there will be little
time in December for the Senate
to consider major legislation, if
an impeachment trial happens
then.
Some of the must-pass
legislation will provide potential
for side confrontations with
Trump. The House has approved
its share of the federal spending
bills with several restrictions on
the administration, including a
prohibition on federal money
that would have gone toward the
now-canceled Group of Seven
meeting at Trump’s Florida
resort.
A Democratic amendment in
the House-passed version of the
Pentagon policy bill includes
stricter sanctions on Russia for
election interference, an issue
that has always irked Trump.
If things go completely
sideways in the Trump-Congress
relationship, even easy-to-pass
measures might run into trouble.
The 2017 tax bill, for instance,
included $17 billion worth of tax
breaks that will expire at year’s
end, including the paid family
leave measure and legislation
that ended a tax on medical
devices that was originally
imposed in the 2010 Affordable
Care Act.
Under normal circumstances,
those popular credits would just
be extended, but nothing seems
normal in the current
environment. After Wednesday’s
blowup between Trump and
Pelosi, the Cowen group’s
analysts warned their clients
that anything could happen.
“From a domestic political
perspective, yesterday events in
Washington are likely to cast a
negative pall over the remainder
of the year,” t he Cowen analysts
wrote Thursday morning.
By week’s end, the pall had
grown only more negative.
[email protected]The most obvious obstacle
created by impeachment is
simply time. The House schedule
already has two week-long
breaks between now and
Christmas, leaving fewer than
30 planned days to be in session,
and quite a few of those planned
days are actually half-days to
allow for travel to or from
Washington.
Once the initial phase of the
impeachment investigation is
complete, Schiff’s committee
would most likely send some
report or recommendations to
the Judiciary Committee, which
traditionally handles articles of
impeachment, and then that
panel would vote out whichever
articles it wanted the full House
to consider.
Pelosi then has to figure out
when to hold the debate for the
full House, and that process
would almost certainly take a
full week, or longer, to handle.
For now she is not making a
deadline for when the process
would play out, although most
insiders believe it should be
complete by early February,
when voters start casting ballots
in the 2020 presidential primary.
“The path — the timeline will
depend on the truth line,” Pelosi
told reporters Thursday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.) has indicated
that if the House votes to
impeach before or right after
Thanksgiving, he would like to
use those next several weeks
before Christmas to hold a trial.
By rule, an impeachment trial
begins each day in the Senate
just after lunch, six days a week.
Te chnically, there would be a
couple of hours each morning to
process legislation, but it would
have to be pretty
noncontroversial bills that
would get widespread agreement
so the usual long procedural
votes and debate time could beapproved every year since 1946.
l The 12 bills that fund all
federal agencies, which expired
Oct. 1 but have been given a
temporary extension until
Nov. 21.
l A collection of tax breaks,
from the health-care industry to
paid family leave, will expire
Dec. 31.
l A World Trade Organization
appellate body will cease to exist.
And this doesn’t even include
ongoing efforts to approve a new
North American trade pact that
is the president’s highest priority
and for which Pelosi has been
expressing optimism of late,
although both sides agree that
waiting too far into next year
will probably torpedo its chances
of passing during an election
year.have “taken control” of oil in the
Middle East.
All that leaves congressional
leaders fearful that any of these
must-pass bills could turn into a
hostage situation if Trump sees it
as possible leverage against
impeachment.
“We are proceeding on our
legislative agenda, what we told
the people we would do,” House
Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer
(D-Md.) said Thursday. “We have
done a lot to date on making
sure that we’ve addressed wages,
we did the minimum wage bill.”
Here’s a list of must-pass
items, as maintained by a
political intelligence firm, Cowen
Washington Research Group:
l The National Defense
Authorization Act, which sets
Pentagon policy and has beenon Thursday night turned into a
greatest hits parade of issues he
has long pushed (border wall
funding) and grievances against
his political enemies (Rep. Adam
B. Schiff of California, the
Democratic chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee).
By Friday, at a photo
opportunity supposedly
promoting the first all-female
spacewalk, Trump took a
reporter’s question about his
acting chief of staff’s conflicting
answers about Ukraine security
aid and turned it into a montage
of ongoing crises. Trump
discussed his talks with Turkey’s
president, Recep Ta yyip
Erdogan, about a pause on
attacking Kurds in northern
Syria, railed against the Schiff-
led investigation and claimed toCongress is
heading toward a
multicar collision
that could leave a
lot of collateral
damage if lawmakers aren’t
careful.
So much of the current
political oxygen is being sucked
up by the House’s impeachment
inquiry into President Trump’s
actions related to his effort to
pressure Ukraine into
investigating his domestic
political rivals. But the list of
must-do items between now and
year’s end is long and expansive,
touching on every aspect of the
federal government and beyond.
Chances for a government
shutdown before Thanksgiving
once seemed impossible but,
with no progress reported on any
of the 12 spending bills, the risk
grows each week of a showdown
that would be far more sweeping
than the 35-day partial
shutdown earlier this year. But
many other laws are expiring or
lapsing, from some foreign
surveillance laws to the potential
reinstatement of a very
unpopular tax on medical
devices.
The rational minds in
Washington — yes, there still are
quite a few — see each of these
issues as separate and distinct
from the House’s potential
impeachment of Trump. But the
president has increasingly
demonstrated the past few
weeks that he regularly sees
issues as one large negotiation,
linking together seemingly
disconnected threads into one
massive ball of legislative wax.
His blowup with House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
on Wednesday at a White House
meeting about the unfolding
crisis in northern Syria clearly
had undertones of her push to
impeach Trump in the House
later this year. His rally in Dallas
l Nancy Pelosi said, ‘Well,
that’s what he said. Isn’t it?’ But
she was angry as hell when she
got to read the transcript.
Because she said, ‘Wait a
minute, that’s not what I was
told.’ But she was stuck, she was
stuck.” (Oct. 11, Lake Charles,
La., campaign rally)
l “It was a terrible, terrible
fraudulent thing. And then
Nancy Pelosi went on television.
She was very angry when she
read the actual call, because this
was an exact — I guess
stenographers, they took it
down. And she was very angry
because she got led — she was a
day early when she started
talking about impeachment.”
(Oct. 12, Value Voters summit)
Trump offers no evidence for
his supposed knowledge of
Pelosi’s “angry as hell” closed-
door conversations. Drew
Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman,
said Trump’s account is fiction.
When the rough transcript
was released, Pelosi’s
assessment was tough: “The
release of the notes of the call by
the White House confirms that
the President engaged in
behavior that undermines the
integrity of our elections, the
dignity of the office he holds
and our national security. The
President has tried to make
lawlessness a virtue in America
and now is exporting it abroad.”
The White House did not
respond to a request for
comment.The Pinocchio Test
We’ve gone well beyond irony at
this point.
To make his case against
impeachment, Trump argues
that the whistleblower did not
get his phone call correct, when
key elements of the complaint
are confirmed by the rough
transcript released by the White
House. The rest of the
whistleblower complaint checks
out well, too.
Then Trump alters the
timeline to make it appear as if
the release of the transcript
came after Schiff ’s dramatic
reenactment, in a false effort to
claim he played gotcha on the
Democrats.
Finally, in complaining that
Schiff concocted the words used
in the call, Trump conjures up
an invented conversation of
Pelosi with her staff. That
further undercuts whatever
complaint he might have about
Schiff’s description of the
conversation with Zelensky.
The president earns Four
Pinocchios, yet again.
[email protected]the hearing Sept. 26.
Republicans at the hearing were
able to call out Schiff’s
embellishments precisely
because they had the recorded
words in front of them.Pelosi’s reaction
While Trump has been knocking
Schiff for putting words into his
mouth, he has also been putting
fake words in the mouth of
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-
Calif.). In Trump’s dramatic
telling, Pelosi authorized the
impeachment inquiry Sept. 24
— only to be shocked when the
rough transcript was released a
day later.
l “They came out with a
whistleblower report before they
saw the conversation. Had they
waited one day, Nancy Pelosi
wouldn’t have made a fool out of
herself, and she would have been
able to say what I said. Because
when she saw it, she said, ‘This
is not what the whistleblower
said.’ ” (Oct. 7, remarks at White
House)
l “Nancy Pelosi said, a day
before seeing the transcript of
the call with the Ukrainian
president, ‘We’ve got to impeach
him. We’ve got to impeach him,
right?’ And then she saw the call
and she said to her people,
‘What the hell? Nobody ever told
me this was the call.’ But she
keeps going anyway because the
press is fake, and they play
right into their head.” (Oct. 10,
Minneapolis campaign rally)was going to release the real
conversation. And when it did,
the whistleblower turned out to
be totally inaccurate.” (Oct. 12,
Fox Interview)
l “This crooked Adam Schiff
made a statement — long,
beautiful statement — and it
was a fraud. He repeated my
call, but it wasn’t me. He made
it so bad.... But then I did
something that they didn’t
expect. I immediately called up
Ukraine, through my
representatives.... I got
approval to immediately make
that call public.... By the way,
he only did it because he never
thought that I was going to
release the transcript.... He did
it and then I released the
transcript. They never thought
in a million years, even in terms
of violation with another
country, but we got approval.”
(Oct. 12, Value Voters summit)
l “When Schiff goes out and
speaks before Congress, they
never thought I was going to
release the transcript of my
call.” (Oct. 11, campaign rally in
Lake Charles, La.)
l “Democrat’s game was foiled
when we caught Schiff
fraudulently making up my
Ukraine conversation, when I
released the exact conversation
Transcript.” (Oct. 14, tweet)
But this is totally mixed up.
The rough transcript — which
the White House acknowledged
was not verbatim — was
released Sept. 25 and Schiff heldsupposedly a Democratic
National Committee server has
been spirited to Ukraine. Trump
also said three times that his
lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani or
Attorney General William P.
Barr would get in contact with
Zelensky.
So there were a number of
requests — ABC News counted
eight — but not seven about
Biden. Trump also did not
request that Zelenksy “make up
dirt” on Biden.
Trump has taken this
inaccurate account by Schiff and
run hard with it. (Never mind
the fact that Trump routinely
embellishes his “facts.”) He has
even declared that Schiff was
guilty of a “crime” and should be
tried for “treason” or even
“impeached,” even though
members of Congress cannot be
impeached.
“He gave the most horrible
rendition, adding his own
words.... He took my really —
believe it or not — congenial
and gentle words, and he made
me sound like a tyrant,” Trump
said Oct. 5.
Apparently, even this spin
was not good enough for the
president. In recent days, he has
added a new wrinkle: that Schiff
gave his description of the call
before Trump released the
transcript, thereby providing a
gotcha moment for his fans.
l “He made a conversation
that didn’t exist. He never
thought in a million years that Icontent of Trump’s July 25 call,
occasionally with dramatic
effect (or what Schiff later called
a parody), that he opined was “a
classic organized crime
shakedown.”
There is no exact transcript of
the conversation — in which
Trump urged an investigation of
former vice president Joe Biden,
a potential 2020 election rival —
as the summary was cobbled
together from notes by White
House officials. So Schiff told
the audience that “this is the
essence of what the president
communicates” and that he
would describe “in sum and
character, what the president
was trying to communicate.”
That was a signal to listeners
that he was not quoting
verbatim from the rough
transcription. Nevertheless,
Schiff included some eyebrow-
raising embellishments.
In particular, Schiff suggested
that Trump, after asking for “a
favor,” s aid something along the
lines of: “I’m going to say this
only seven times, so you better
listen good. I want you to make
up dirt on my political
opponent.”
This is where Schiff gave
Trump an opening for attack.
Biden’s name came up twice in
the call, not seven times. The
president also urged a probe
into the discredited conspiracy
theory that a private company
had a role in starting the
“Russian hoax” becauseRep. Adam B.
Schiff (DCalif.)
“made up a
conversation. He
made a
conversation that
didn’t exist. He
never thought in
a million years
that I was going
to release the real
conversation.
And when it did, the
whistleblower turned out to be
totally inaccurate.”
— President Trump,
interview with Jeanine Pirro
on Fox News, Oct. 12
“Nancy Pelosi hates the
United States of America
because she wouldn’t be doing
this. And I’m telling you, foreign
nations, foreign people looking
at us, they honestly think we’re
nuts. And then you have
presidents and saying nothing
was wrong.... But Nancy Pelosi
said, ‘Well, that’s what he said.
Isn’t it?’ But she was angry as
hell when she got to read the
transcript. Because she said,
‘Wait a minute, that’s not what I
was told.’ But she was stuck, she
was stuck.”
— Trump, campaign rally in
Lake Charles, La., Oct. 11
In our database of President
Trump’s false or misleading
claims — at 13,435 as of Oct. 9 —
we’ve documented how he
twists things out of proportion
or simply invents stories out of
whole cloth. Sometimes, he even
goes through a time warp. All of
these elements are present in
this pair of statements, which
are similar or identical to other
statements he made over the
weekend at various events or
media availabilities.
Central to the president’s
message is a Four-Pinocchio
claim: that the whistleblower
complaint inaccurately
portrayed his July 25 phone call
with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky and the
events surrounding it. But we’ve
documented that most of the
whistleblower’s factual
allegations have turned out to
be on target.
But the president wants his
supporters to believe that the
complaint falsely portrayed the
phone call so he can explain
why, in his words, the man
leading the impeachment
investigation “made up” a
conversation and the House
speaker supposedly was upset
when she saw the actual
transcript. In an added twist,
Trump sometimes tries to adjust
the time frame to make his
point appear even more
dramatic.
The Schiff description
In a bit of a self-inflicted wound,
Schiff at a congressional hearing
on Sept. 26 summarized the
Tr ump inverts time and invents conversations in effort to thwart impeachment
The Fact
Checker
GLENN
KESSLER
JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump addresses the media on the South Lawn of the White House before heading to a rally Oct. 11 in Lake Charles, La., where
he attacked Democratic rivals Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.).As year’s end nears, impeachment isn’t the only big political showdown ahead
@PKCapitol
PAUL KANE
MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Federal employees and family members wait for free meals in Washington during the government
shutdown in January. Without action on spending bills, a far more sweeping one could lie ahead.