Trump attacks whistleblower and Schiff, tweets impeachment would cause ‘Civil War-like fracture’ – NBC News

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President Donald Trump on Monday attacked the whistleblower at the center of the growing Ukraine scandal and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, after promoting comments from a supportive pastor who told Fox News that impeaching the president would lead to a “Civil War-like fracture in this nation.”

Trump’s comments on Twitter came as he faces an impeachment inquiry in the House over a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which he asked Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s family. The Trump administration, around the same time as that July conversation, placed a hold on hundreds of millions of dollars in Ukrainian military aid, only to release it earlier this month.

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Trump on Monday called the whistleblower complaint at the center of the scandal “fake” and said it was “not holding up,” even though it lined up with a record of the July 25 call between the two presidents that the White House released, was deemed credible by a Trump-appointed intelligence community inspector general, and was authored by a whistleblower who the Trump-appointed acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire told Congress last week had acted in “good faith.”

Then Trump went after Schiff, who he said “illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people.”

“It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call,” Trump added. “Arrest for Treason?”

Though the remarks Trump was referring to, which Schiff made during the hearing with Maguire last week, did not line up verbatim with the detailed summary of the call released by the White House, they did mirror its description. Schiff himself made clear during the hearing that his remarks were “the essence” of what Trump said during the call.

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-attacks-whistleblower-schiff-tweets-impeachment-would-cause-civil-war-n1060191

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