Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred thirty-ninth day.
On this day in 1944, Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division troops defending Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge, refuses a German surrender demand.
Recommended for reading in full —
R. Jeffrey Smith reports Trump Administration Officials Worried Ukraine Aid Halt Violated Spending Law:
When President Donald Trump ordered a halt to aid to Ukraine last summer, defense officials and diplomats worried first that it would undermine U.S. national security. Ukraine is, as some of them later testified before Congress, on the front lines of Russian aggression, and only robust American support would fend off aggressive Moscow meddling in the West. This worry eventually helped galvanize congressional support for one of the two impeachment articles approved by the House of Representatives on Dec. 18.
But there was also a separate, less-noticed facet of the internal administration uproar set off by Trump’s July 12 order stopping the flow of $391 million in weapons and security assistance to Ukraine. Some senior administration officials worried that by defying a law ordering that the funds be spent within a defined period, Trump was asking the officials involved to take an action that was not merely unwise but flatly illegal.
The administration so far has declined to release copies of its internal communications about this vital issue – the legality of what Trump had ordered. On Friday, in 146 pages of new documents provided to the Center for Public Integrity under a court order, the Justice Department blacked out – for the second time – many of the substantive passages reflecting what key officials at the Pentagon and the Office of Management and Budget said to one another.
But considerable evidence is still available that those at key institutions responsible for distributing the Ukraine aid worried the halt potentially violated a 45-year-old law written to keep presidents from ignoring the will of Congress, according to public statements and congressional testimony
That law, known as the Impoundment Control Act, says that once Congress appropriates funds – like the Ukraine assistance – and the president signs the relevant spending bill, the executive branch must spend those funds. A president cannot simply ignore Congress’s direction, no matter how inconvenient or unappealing that instruction might be. If funds are withheld or shifted elsewhere, this cannot be done in secret, and Congress must approve.
(Emphasis added.)
[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/CPI-v-DoD-Dec-20-2019-Release.pdf” width=”80%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]See also updates to the Center for Public Integrity’s reporting at the DIGGING INTO THE #UKRAINEDOCS live blog.
Dan Friedman reports Trump Touts Support from Putin Over Impeachment (‘Trump’s tweet follows a report that Putin planted the idea of Ukrainian inference with Trump’):
You can’t make it up. President Donald Trump on Friday night touted a statement from Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizing Trump’s impeachment. Trump did this amid continuing revelations that Putin helped sell him on the discredited theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
