RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cover-up-of-all-time/

Pelosi, not the president, is ‘obstructing’ an impeachment inquiry in the literal sense of not letting one go forward.

President Donald Trump may be guilty of many things, but a cover-up in the Mueller probe isn’t one of them.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attempting to appease forces in the Democratic party eager for impeachment, is accusing him of one, with all the familiar Watergate connotations.

The charge is strange, not to say incomprehensible, in light of the fact that Congress is in possession of a 448-page report produced by the Trump Department of Justice cataloguing the alleged obstruction that Congress now wants to investigate. The report is so exhaustive that many members of Congress haven’t had the time to read it.

If this is a White House cover-up, it’s too late. It’s a cover-up of an alleged crime that has already been extensively exposed, not by whistleblowers, not by Jerry Nadler, not by hostile journalists, but by a DOJ prosecutor who worked under the supervision of Trump’s handpicked deputy attorney general.

Pelosi has rehearsed the cliche, “As they say, the cover-up is frequently worse than the crime.” Or in this case, a substitute for the crime.

Mueller found no Russia collusion or coordination and didn’t even accuse the president of obstruction, instead bizarrely pronouncing him “not exonerated.”

Pelosi hasn’t deemed the alleged obstruction detailed in the Mueller report worthy of impeachment but now insists that Trump’s resistance to congressional probes is itself obstruction and “could be impeachable.”

This is an alleged process crime on top of an alleged process crime, all stemming from an investigation that Trump had the power to stop but never did (even as he openly hated it and came up with various schemes, never effected, to crimp it).

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/24/damned-if

Nancy Pelosi is between impeach and a hard place.

“You want to believe that there’s all this unease in our caucus,” an irritated House Speaker told the press on Thursday, a day when the barbs were flying between herself and President Trump, and when many House Democrats expressed impatience or even dissatisfaction with her leadership to her face.

“That simply isn’t the truth … and I say to the caucus, ‘our diversity is our strength. Our unity is our power,’” she said, adding an assurance that House Democrats were “not on a path to impeachment.”

The claimed co-existence of unity and diversity is a tad removed from Ben Franklin’s call to all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. At any rate, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) wasn’t buying it. “She’s either delusional or misrepresenting where her caucus really is,” he told reporters. “Speaker Pelosi is trying to hide what I think is obvious: that the Democratic Party is hellbent on impeaching President Trump no matter what the evidence is and no matter what he does.”

This week opened a new chapter in relations between the White House and Pelosi and the Democrats’ Senate leader Chuck Schumer — with the eyes of all three on November 2020 before the arrival of even Memorial Day 2019.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/445402-senate-dems-to-house-tamp-down-the-impeachment-talk

Senate Democrats want the House to cool it on impeachment. 

They see an impeachment drive as hurting more than helping their efforts to win back the Senate majority and generally back Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) efforts to keep a lid on the issue.

Even Senate Democrats running for president who back impeachment aren’t pressing Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) to take a more aggressive approach to the issue.

Democratic senators say the subject of impeachment rarely even comes up in caucus-wide meetings and that it distracts from issues like health care they see as more important to voters.

“I don’t think we should go there now,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I was here for the Clinton impeachment, and after it was over I wished it never had happened. I think we ought to be very, very cautious with that kind of thing.”

“Everybody does what they do based on their own desires, but I don’t find it helpful,” she said of fellow Democrats who are pushing for the beginning of an impeachment inquiry.

Schumer, who is not shy about criticizing Trump, has stuck with Pelosi’s line that more investigation needs to be done.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mark-penn-dem-calls-to-impeach-trump-echo-partisan-impeachment-of-president-andrew-johnson-in-1868

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mark-penn-dem-calls-to-impeach-trump-echo-partisan-impeachment-of-president-andrew-johnson-in-1868

Impeach him! He has disobeyed Congress!

Those words rang out both this week and in 1868. While the themes then and now are the same, hopefully the outcome will be different.

The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson is widely recognized as one of the most embarrassing moments in American history, in which unrestrained partisanship almost won the day. But it was also a day in which one senator, as recounted by President John F. Kennedy in his book “Profiles in Courage,” stopped us from becoming just another banana republic.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., missed her “Profiles in Courage” moment Thursday, adding “villainous” to her laundry list of accusations against President Trump. Rather than stand firm against her caucus and move the country forward, she caved and started to call the assertion of executive privilege a “cover-up.”

Pelosi might oppose it and might fight it in the courts, but it’s no cover-up. It’s a clear and legally appropriate message that enough is enough.

Remember that there were already multiple all-out congressional investigations over the last two years in addition to Special Counsel Robert Mueller issuing 2,800 subpoenas, interviewing 500 witnesses and ordering 280 interceptions of communications while employing 40 FBI agents and 19 lawyers.