“…Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, criticized the impeachment proceedings as a “show trial” in his closing statement at the end of Thursday’s hearing. Nunes spoke following testimony from Fiona Hill, the White House’s former Russia adviser, and David Holmes, a top staffer at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine in a public hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The impeachment inquiry has focused on a July 25 phone call in which Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate the former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Nunes listed the events of the past three years as an orchestrated “coup” against President Trump.

“What you’ve seen in this room over the past two weeks is a show trial,” Nunes said. “Like any good show trial, the verdict was decided before the trial ever began.”…”

I&I Editorial:

“…Despite the establishment media’s declarations that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland provided the smoking gun proving that President Donald Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on its government investigating the energy company Burisma and the 2016 election, Sondland soon told us this was merely his “presumption.”

We already knew from the transcript of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that aid being conditional on investigating the Bidens was a stretch, certainly nothing near the evidence that would be needed in any respectable court.

Witnesses and Democrats on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee made much of unofficial channels being used to conduct foreign policy, such as the efforts of Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani – hardly a surprise since these witnesses are all part of the official foreign policy bureaucracy that includes more than 77,000 employees of the State Department alone, each of whom is all too happy to justify their collective existence.

As Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper said in her private deposition earlier in the month, and reiterated on Wednesday, “my sense is that all of the senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified … in their view that this assistance was essential.” Cooper added that “they were trying to find ways to engage the president on this.”

The president ultimately agreed it was essential. But why would they be trying to engage the president? Because they wanted to convince the only “official” in the executive branch who really matters, the one who – unlike them – is bestowed by the Constitution with massive power in executing the foreign policy of the United States. The one for whom they work – as advisers whose advice the president is entitled to heed or ignore, or anything in between, at will.

Those who think such near-total control is irresponsible might want to consider the observations of Edward Samuel Corwin, a famed president of the American Political Science Association brought into the Princeton University faculty in 1905 by Woodrow Wilson, and author in 1940 of “The President, Office and Powers.”

As Corwin opined: “A solitary genius who valued the opportunity for reflection above that for counsel, Lincoln came to regard Congress as a more or less necessary nuisance and the Cabinet as a usually unnecessary one.” That’s Honest Abe, not Tweeting Don…”

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Forget the Impeachment Drama, Trump Has Flipped Another Circuit Court of Appeals

Baltimore Wants To Sue Gun Makers Over Gang Violence

Related:

Former Baltimore Mayor Finally Indicted On Fraud Charges

More Than 100 Dead in Iran Protests Due to Sniper Fire

No words to describe the criminal barbarity of this government

https://youtu.be/DIoxH6CQFz4

The media in this country is an agenda-driven, biased disgrace with few exceptions.

TYLER O’NEIL:

“…As Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the E.U., testified before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, news outlets twisted his words against President Donald Trump, in service of the Democrats’ impeachment narrative.

First, the Associated Press (AP) tweeted that Trump contradicted Sondland’s testimony. “Contradicting the testimony of his own ambassador, President Trump says he wanted ‘nothing’ from Ukraine and says the [Impeachment hearings] should be brought to an end,” the tweet read. In fact, Trump was quoting Sondland’s testimony in his remarks.

AP deleted the tweet. “An earlier tweet that didn’t make clear that President Trump was quoting from Gordon Sondland’s testimony in which he was quoting Trump has been deleted,” the news outlet admitted…

…During his testimony, Sondland told Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee, “I finally called the president… I believe I just asked him an open-ended question. ‘What do you want from Ukraine? I keep hearing all these different ideas and theories and this and that. What do you want?'”

“It was a very short abrupt conversation, he was not in a good mood, and he just said, ‘I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing,’ something to that effect,” the ambassador said.

Yet this did not stop other liberal-leaning media outlets from twisting Sondland’s testimony in similar ways. During the testimony, a CNN chyron blasted the words, “SONDLAND: I PRESSURED UKRAINE AT ‘EXPRESS DIRECTION’ OF TRUMP.”

As Trump campaign Communications Director Tim Murtagh tweeted, the chyron was “factually wrong.”…

…Sondland did testify using the words “express direction,” but not in regards to allegedly pressuring Ukraine. “First, Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the President of the United States,” he said.

Yet The New York Times also twisted Sondland’s words in a similar manner. An online headline claimed, “‘We Followed the President’s Orders’ on Ukraine Pressure Campaign, Sondland Says.”…

…When the ambassador spoke about having “followed the president’s orders,” he was referring to the decision to work with Giuliani. The context for this quote is the same as the context for the quote CNN twisted.

“Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the President of the United States,” Sondland testified. “We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt. We all understood that if we refused to work with Mr. Giuliani, we would lose an important opportunity to cement relations between the United States and Ukraine. So we followed the president’s orders.”

Sondland admitted that Trump “never told me directly that the aid was conditioned on the meetings.” He described the Democrats’ assumed quid pro quo as “my own personal guess.”…”

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MIRANDA DEVINE:

“…It was ironic that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland used the word “humble” to describe himself in his opening statement on the fourth day of public impeachment hearings.

This was a virtue he said his parents took care to instill in him, and kudos to him for recognizing its importance at least enough to mention it.

But humility is the one quality missing from this impeachment process and the one quality most essential to a functioning society.

Only a profound absence of humility on the part of the Democrats would have allowed them to follow up their three-year Russia-collusion failure with another shameless attempt to overturn the 2016 election for no reason other than that they are deranged with Trump hatred…

…Over and over Sondland, disappointed, “I never heard from President Trump that aid was conditioned on an announcement of an investigation.”…”

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Victor Davis Hanson:

“…After three days of Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry, we are left with only the monotony. We know in advance all the questions, the subjective mood answers and bureaucratic mindset of the witnesses, the ensuing spin, and the congressional posturing.

In lieu of a Jaworski or Starr special prosecutor’s damning report, a White House tape, or even a blue dress, there is only “I assumed,” “I gathered,” “I presumed,” and “my personal belief is that” — without direct knowledge of impeachable wrongdoing or some smoking-gun email or document.

The next “star” witness, Ambassador Sondland, played perfectly the Janus consummate businessman — nodding first to Democrats, only then turning to grin at Republicans.

Sondland seemed at last to offer Schiff the chance to run out to announce to the captive press a proverbial MSNBC/CNN “bombshell.” But it was mostly a dud, with Sondland referencing a hoped-for Ukraine meeting in the White House (that never happened) for Ukrainian statements on corruption (that never happened), rather than a cutoff of U.S. military aid to Ukraine — at least according to Sondland’s “own presumption.” He even mentioned a “quid pro quo,” but that was focus grouped out to “bribery” days ago. (Sondland, like most major ambassadors, should be an expert in quid pro quos, given that it is a hallowed and bipartisan American tradition to sell off the most prestigious European ambassadorial slots to the most generous campaign donors.)

But then the cagey Sondland tacked back by reciting his phonecall question to the president, in which he asked the existential question of what Trump wanted from Ukraine — with Trump answering “Nothing!” Checkmate?

All day long, the grinning Sondland played Roadrunner to Adam Schiff’s Wiley E. Coyote, as he slowed and pulled up to offer up Trump — only to scoot away in a puff of dust as soon as Schiff tried to wrap his hands around him.

What we are left with so far are two inconvenient truths that won’t go away.

One, Trump sent lethal military aid to Ukraine and never fired any prosecutor; the Obama administration, led by Joe Biden, got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired and forbade sending lethal aid to the Ukrainians. Those facts eroded any argument that Trump endangered the Ukrainians in a way Obama had not…”

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Conrad Black:

“…We know he wasn’t a whistleblower, just a former Biden political helper misrepresenting what he had been told of a conversation the president had with the president of Ukraine. First, he said, President Trump had threatened to withhold aid Congress had approved if the authorities in that country did not investigate the activities of Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. In fact, the money was not withheld, the request and the aid were not related, the Bidens haven’t been investigated, the Ukrainian president has denied there was any pressure, the Democrats will not allow the so-called whistleblower to testify and be questioned, Trump did not direct findings on the Bidens—he just wanted to know what happened, and the president has a perfect right to conduct foreign policy as he wishes.

At first, we were told Trump was using government money to extort a smear of Biden, but there was no connection and he wanted the facts, not a smear and didn’t even get that. Again, warped by the observation that sophisticated societies will respond rationally to emergent facts on matters of public interest, I awaited the evaporation of this latest farrago of desperate partisan nonsense. But the Democratic National Committee made no secret of the fact that it consulted a public relations firm and went through focus groups and the like to find that the most damning charge against the president was “bribery,” the crime used along with “treason” in the Constitution to justify recourse to impeachment. Treason hadn’t worked and back they all came, like synchronized Radio City choristers, with incantations of “bribery” directed at the president.

Now they say he bribed the Ukrainian president with aid in exchange for the presumed campaign advantage of learning why the young Biden was getting the unheard-of fee of $87,000 a month from a notoriously corrupt energy company, an industry in which Hunter Biden had no experience. This, they said, was the bribe, even though Congress voted the aid, and President Trump never got the information he was seeking—the facts not a smear, a question all politically interested Americans would also like to have answered; and there is no persuasive evidence of any connection between the aid and the request for the facts anyway: not a bribe, not a crime, nothing wrong.

The polls don’t move, the airwaves are empurpled with gasps of horror at these unnewsworthy banalities. The most inveterate liar in the history of American politics, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who makes Joseph R. McCarthy seem like a soothsayer, continues as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to deny Republicans the right to cross-examine or call their witnesses. Meanwhile, the media just romp along like a pantomime horse nodding at this relentless avalanche of imbecilities and outrages.

Fox News host Chris Wallace solemnly stated that Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, was a “powerful witness.” A “powerful witness” to what? She had no evidence of any illegality committed by the president, and this is an inquiry into whether the president committed “high crimes.” Schiff started to read to her a tweet the president had just sent out saying that everywhere this ambassador had gone had turned out badly and that she was a partisan opponent of his and was disliked by the government to which she had been accredited. Schiff called it “witness intimidation.” She responded that she did not know the president’s motives but that she felt “very intimidated.”

Again, I thought my ears were deceiving me; Ukraine is a wild and woolly place and if she was intimidated by that, Trump didn’t get her out of there fast enough. Let’s have more robust ambassadors!

It might have been understandable if Yovanovitch had said she found it intimidating to be a featured witness where she didn’t have any relevant evidence for this spurious kangaroo court and publicity-fest. Schiff and the rest of the lynch mob not only want to defame and impeach with no evidence, but they also want to turn the White House into a judgment-free zone where the chief resident can’t express an opinion, like in a kindergarten for challenged children.

Reports that the Republican Senate leaders will prolong the trial to inconvenience the six Democratic senators running for their party’s nomination are nonsense. The country would resent it, the Trump campaign has no fear of any of them, and only Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders still have their heads above water anyway.

If the Democrats actually vote this out for an impeachment trial in the Senate, they will pay for it at the polls. But if they do, it is so feeble and ludicrous, I suspect the Republican majority will refuse to hear it, or will send it to the Supreme Court for referral, contending it does not reach the constitutional threshold of possible conviction to bring the country’s business to a stop for six weeks, especially in a year where the people themselves will decide whom they wish to be president.

Americans should pause to remember how far this has sunk: the idea is that the president’s request to know the facts about the Bidens’ financial involvement in Ukraine, after congressionally voted aid funds to Ukraine had been resumed, with no demonstrated connection between them, as the Ukrainian president affirms the absence of pressure, is held to be offering a bribe to elicit information American voters would wish to have but which has not been produced, within the president’s authority over the conduct of foreign policy, and that this should be judged by two-thirds of U.S. senators to be a “high crime” on the scale of bribery or treason, and President Trump should be removed from office because of it.

Any American adult who believes any substantial part of that should seek psychiatric help at once…”

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DUKE NUKEM DROPS BIOLOGICAL BOMB! Eric Swalwell appears to fart on live television while pushing for Trump impeachment.

The Babylon Bee is savage: “Democrat Finally Releases Something Of Substance.” Heh, indeed.

Hat tip to Ed Driscoll for stringing this together

In Genius Move, Trump Supports Impeachment, Forcing Democrats To Oppose

Satire?

The ACLU Gives Christine Blasey Ford An Award For Lying

California customers billed for power during shutoff

Bloomberg Renounces His Record as a Crime-Fighter in NY

President Trump reversed the last minute policy declaration by the Obama Administration and, in my opinion, is fixing years of confused and contradictory policy on Israel. Israel is an important ally and friend to the U.S.

Caroline B. Glick:

“…Monday will long be remembered as a turning point in Middle East history. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement Monday that Israeli settlements are not illegal per se is the most significant shift in US Middle East policy in the past generation. Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital has been a matter of US law since 1996.

There was little interest in Washington in recent years in pressuring Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights. But the issue of the legality of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), has been the defining issue of much of the international discourse on Israel for a generation.

In the vast majority of cases, the discourse has revolved around the widely held allegation – with no basis in actual law – that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal.

This allegation has served as the justification for a continuous barrage of condemnations of Israel in the international arena and for anti-Israel legal verdicts in international courts including the International Court of Justice at the Hague in 2004 and the European Court of Justice last week…”

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Victor Davis Hanson on Max Boot:

“…Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

Most recently Boot declared—and then quickly retracted it only in embarrassment after popular outrage—that chief ISIS mass-murdering psychopathic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not kill himself in cowardly fashion as Trump had described: “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.”

When Baghdadi was cornered by American forces, he chose to murder three innocent children rather than surrender—consistent with his entire venomous career of ordering the beheading, burning, and mutilating of innocent captives from a safe distance. The murder of defenseless children is cowardly.

No one should know better the horrific crimes of a mass-murdering Josef Stalin than the Russian-born Boot. Stalin’s purges, orchestrated famines, gulags, show trials, liquidation of the officer class, and atrocities during World War II perhaps accounted for over 20 million Russian deaths. So how could Boot write, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump”? Twenty million dead souls don’t quite match Boot’s hatred of Trump.

After the former Republican Boot saw Trump elected, by defeating his own particular favored Republican primary candidate, and Hillary Clinton, he seemed a bit embittered: “For the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party.”…”

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