House Democrats have already introduced articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, because they believe they have the evidence they need. But without taking additional steps, they risk diminishing the House's oversight power in the long term.
Throughout the impeachment inquiry, Republicans have objected to this rushed process. The GOP witness during the House Judiciary Committee's hearing last week on impeachment, law professor Jonathan Turley, argued that the House is moving too fast and should make a more significant attempt to obtain further evidence.
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There is no shortage of questions about impeachment and confusion about the process seems to have also enveloped Congress itself. But there’s an abundance of experts and historians on hand to help, including a few here at POGO. We’re using this FAQ to capture the many questions around impeachment, and provide the best answers we can find.
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A giant private prison company’s spending at President Donald Trump’s hotel in D.C. raises “serious concerns about possible corruption, or the appearance of corruption,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) wrote in a letter sent this week.
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Corruption is often viewed as a byproduct of unrest and ineffective government. POGO board member and former adviser to the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Sarah Chayes, in her book Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, makes the case that corruption is the single largest source of unrest in the world.
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Attorneys Mike Stern, who served as senior counsel to the House from 1996 to 2004, and Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law expert and professor at the University of Texas, discuss a dozen recent and ongoing cases, where they stand, and what they could mean for Congressional oversight.
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On December 5, POGO lost a close member of our family: Jack Mitchell, 69, died after a long battle with cancer. Jack Mitchell was a life-long investigator who had a rare trait for a Washington person—he never sold out.
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ICYMI: New Newsletters
Need more POGO in your inbox? We have two new email newsletters that we curate and deliver fresh to your inbox regularly.
Indispensable is our new pop-up newsletter answering your questions about impeachment processes, the pressures on the figures involved, the facts uncovered, and their consequences. It's been recognized by The New York Times! Check out a recent edition and sign up!
Sidebar is our quick takes on today’s most pressing constitutional issues, valuable and informative resources, and thought-provoking trivia and facts you can share. It's brief, interesting, and occasionally amusing. Check out a recent edition and sign up! |
POGO in the News
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Danielle Brian argues that Congress should hold Trump’s aides in contempt while they still can.
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Politico's Morning Defense Newsletter
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MORE SECRECY: The Project on Government Oversight has released a report showing the Pentagon’s lack of transparency is on the rise.
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Romero returned to the US because of the lack of opportunity and dangerous conditions in his home country, his family said. Romero was arrested by Customs and Border Protection officials on May 9, 2018, and was transferred to ICE’s Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, on May 14.
By the next day, he began feeling sick and was in serious pain, according to a death review conducted by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility and obtained by the Project on Government Oversight.
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Key point: The Ford-class makes a lot of promises but is very expensive and has had several issues.
Pres. Donald Trump used the Navy’s next-generation aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, as a backdrop to unveil his vision for the next defense budget in March 2017.
The moment was meant to symbolize his commitment to rebuilding the military, but it also positioned the president in front of a monument to the Navy’s and defense industry’s ability to justify spending billions in taxypayer dollars on unproven technologies that often deliver worse performance at a higher cost.
The Ford program also provides yet another example of the dangers of the Navy’s and industry’s end-running the rigorous combat testing that is essential to ensuring our fighting men and women go to war with equipment that works.
The Navy had expected to have the ship delivered in 2014 at a cost of $10.5 billion. But the inevitable problems resulting from the concurrency the Navy built into developing Ford’s new and risky technologies, more than a dozen in all, caused the schedule to slip by more than three years and the cost to increase to $12.9 billion—nearly 25 percent over budget.
Keep reading |
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“For the time being, all of our military space interests are tied to supporting the operations of the existing services for communications, navigation, weather observations, surveillance, and missile warning,” Grazier said. “It is a really bad idea to create bureaucratic barriers between the main effort and the support forces as it will actually hinder that relationship rather than enhance it.”
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“Taxpayers would pay a premium to make the military less effective: analyses have found that even the most conservative version of this proposal would increase costs by $3.6 billion through 2024,” Grazier said.
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The Army is using other transaction authority to purchase prototypes of tactical vehicles that would be dropped from helicopters. Soldiers would then climb aboard and head to battle. That is a repeat of many old mistakes, according to Mark Thompson. The national security analyst for the Project on Government Oversight joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin for more discussion.
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Background Briefing with Ian Masters
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We begin with today’s grilling of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice by the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Senator Lindsey Graham who focused on the phony Republican talking point claiming the Steele Dossier was the predicate for the Mueller Report and the investigation into Russian ties to the Trump campaign. Although the IG’s reports refutes that spin, Senator Graham castigated the Steele Dossier as “The first thing is about the golden shower – about the sexual encounter that President Trump supposedly had at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Russia”, then rising to an emotional climax, “it’s salacious and it’s a bunch of crap.” Jake Laperruque, Senior Counsel at the Constitution Project of the Project on Government Oversight joins us to discuss the partisan focus on criticisms in the IG’s report of mistakes and deficiencies in the FBI’s applications for extensions of the FISA warrants on the Trump campaign’s foreign policy advisor Carter Page who was recruited by Russian intelligence agents who were later expelled from the country. And while the new-found champions of civil liberties, the Republican’s spin had some basis in truth over problems which FBI Director Christopher Wray vowed to fix, the overall hearing today was yet another display of the alternative realities of a fact-based report versus the desperate political fictions the Republicans are barking into the wind.
Listen to the broadcast |
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In an article in the Atlantic magazine from 2016, Danielle Brian, head of the group Project on Government Oversight, said, “No doubt there have been some abuses by some committees, but it’s unfair to paint them with a broad brush.”
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In addition to the House Oversight Committee, two liberal-funded government watchdog groups pounced on Conway‘s comments, filing ethics violation complaints with the Office of Government Ethics. A third group, the Project on Government Oversight, asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to open a Justice Department investigation into possible ethics violations.
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The Center For Defense Information (a group of retired generals and admirals) around that same time said 25% less was where we should be. That said, in 40 years of defense spending of about $12 trillion, we’ve overspent by at least $3 trillion — and that doesn’t include fraud, waste and abuse, inherent in a department with 20 accounting systems that make it unauditable.
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Federation of American Scientists
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“Across the Department of Defense, basic information is becoming harder to find,” wrote Jason Paladino of the Project on Government Oversight in “The Pentagon’s War on Transparency,” December 5, 2019.
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