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Tyler O’Neil:
“…On Friday morning, President Donald Trump told Fox & Friends that spygate — the Obama administration’s surveillance on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election based on the false pretense of Trump being in league with Russia — will be “perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of our country.” He said Attorney General Bill Barr’s investigation of FISA abuses and U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal investigation will prove “historic,” and he predicted that the investigations will implicate former President Barack Obama himself.
“Now, what you’re going to see, I predict, will be perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of our country, political scandal,” Trump said. “You have a FISA report coming out which the word is, it’s historic, that is what the word is. That’s what I hear. And if it’s historic, you will see something. And then perhaps even more importantly you have Durham coming out shortly thereafter. He is the U.S. Attorney and he is already announced it’s criminal.”
“You know, a lot of people say deep state. I don’t like to use the word ‘deep state.’ I just say they’re really bad and sick people,” the president added.
Peter Doocy noted that Trump had previously suggested “that this might go much higher than the Department of Justice or the FBI during the Obama Administration.” He asked the president if spygate “could actually go up into the West Wing of the Obama administration.”
Trump said it traces back to “the highest levels of government. They were spying on my campaign. That is my opinion.”
“How high did it go, Mr. President? How high did it go?” Doocy pressed.
“I think personally, I think it goes all the way,” Trump responded.
“I hate to say it. I think it’s a disgrace. They thought I was going to win and they said, ‘How can we stop him?’ They wrote up the phony, fake dossier, the disgusting fake dossier, and they tried to have it put out prior to the election just to show you how incompetent they were,” he said. “They spent millions and millions of dollars, Hillary Clinton paid for it, and the Democrats.”…”
SCOTT JOHNSON:
“…The GOP members of the House Intelligence Committee performed like all-stars in the Schiff impeachment theater, the stalwart Ranking Member Devin Nunes foremost among them. We have previously recognized Rep. Elise Stefanik for her work during the Schiff show. The rest of the GOP members also excelled. I would like to recognize them by name: Mike Conaway (Texas), Mike Turner (Ohio), Brad Wenstrup (Ohio), Chris Stewart (Utah), Will Hurd (Texas), John Ratcliffe (Texas), and Jim Jordan (Ohio). Thanks to one and all for a job well done…”
JOHN HINDERAKER:
“…The indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was announced today did not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Israeli politics have become less workable and less democratic over time. What we are seeing here is an attempted coup by the Israeli version of the Deep State…”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
“…For most of the last three years, Donald Trump’s critics have scoffed at supposed “conspiracy theories” that claimed a “deep state” of bureaucrats were aborting the Trump presidency. We have been told the word “coup” is hyperbole that reveals the paranoid minds of Trump supporters.
Yet oddly, many people brag that they are proud members of a deep state and occasionally boast about the idea of a coup.
Recently, former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin proclaimed in a public forum, “Thank God for the deep state.” Former CIA director John Brennan agreed and praised the “deep state people” for their opposition to Trump.
Far from denying the danger of an unelected careerist bureaucracy that seeks to overturn presidential policies, New York Times columnists have praised its efforts to nullify the Trump agenda.
On the first day of the impeachment inquiry, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff called his initial two witnesses, career State Department diplomats William Taylor Jr. and George Kent. Far from providing damning evidence of criminal presidential behavior, Taylor and Kent mostly confined themselves to three topics: their own sterling résumés, their lack of any firsthand knowledge of incriminating Trump action, and their poorly hidden disgust with the manner and substance of Trump’s foreign policy…
…Trump’s opponents often have praised the deep state precisely because unelected career officials are seen as the most effective way to sabotage and stymie his agenda.
A “coup” is no longer proof of right-wing paranoia, but increasingly a part of the general progressive discourse of resistance to Trump.
In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election…”
“…A new Emerson poll finds President Trump’s approval has increased in the last month with 48% approval and 47% disapproval, a bounce from 43% approval in the last Emerson National poll in October. Support for impeachment has flipped since October from 48% support with 44% opposing to now 45% opposed and 43% in support. The biggest swing is among Independents, who oppose impeachment now 49% to 34%, which is a reversal from October where they supported impeachment 48% to 39%.
The impeachment hearings are being watched or followed by 69% of voters. A plurality (26%) is getting their information from Fox News, 24% are getting their information from 1 of the 3 network stations (ABC, NBC, CBS), 16% are watching CNN, 15% MSNBC and 19% are going somewhere else for their information…”
“…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…”
No words to describe the criminal barbarity of this government
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.”…”
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.”…”
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…”
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…”
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