Donald Trump Slams Democrats And Brags On Economy During Conference Call With GOP Leadership
As the controversy surrounding President Donald Trump’s Ukraine phone call continues to explode, the president on Friday held a conference call with top House Republican leadership and discussed the Democrats’ push for impeachment and touted the latest on the U.S. economy.
According to The Hill, several ranking Republican House members joined the call, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, and House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney. White House spokesman Judd Deere said the president discussed with the members the “Democrats’ refusal to focus on solutions that would help the American people as they attempt to overturn the result of the 2016 election.”
Deere also revealed that during the phone conference, the president and the ranking members “emphasized that Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and Chairman [Adam] Schiff are deliberately misleading the American people about the truth, and are trampling over procedure and precedent to advance their political goals.”
Trump also talked about the latest economic numbers that came out this week, which included the addition of 136,000 jobs in September and the fact that the unemployment rate dropped to a staggering 50-year low.
The call came at about the same time a number of House committees held closed-door meetings with Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, in which they reportedly discussed the whistleblower who shed light on the president’s alleged wrongdoing during his July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenksy.
Democrats claim the president pressured the foreign leader into gathering political ammunition he can use against former Vice President Joe Biden, who is likely to be his primary political challenger in the 2020 presidential race.
House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff, who has been at the forefront of the Ukraine whistleblower issue, explained why they met with and interviewed Atkinson on Friday.
“While we cannot get into the substance, we explored with the IG through documents and testimony the reasons why he found the whistleblower complaint to be both urgent and credible,” Schiff said.
“Now that we have all seen the call record, we can see that the IG’s determination was correct in both respects,” he added.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Schiff and a number of ranking House Democrats sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence on Friday asking for documents related to the Ukraine phone call. The members asked the vice president for documents relating to any involvement he had in the Ukraine phone call.
While Pence typically stays out of Trump-related controversies, it appears as if he might have significant involvement in the scandal, as he flew to Ukraine to meet with the president after Trump canceled his trip there because of an incoming hurricane.
Some have reportedly speculated that part of Pence’s trip to Ukraine involved ratcheting the pressure on Zelensky to meet Trump’s demand for information on Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
