RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/there-you-go-again-nevertrumpers-bruce-thornton/

The latest in a series of “scandals” that supposedly will finally banish President Trump from the White House has provoked the latest in a series of outbursts from NeverTrump obsessives. Allegations that the president, during a phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, abused his power, violated campaign finance laws, or sullied an upcoming American election by inviting foreign interference, precipitated the latest dudgeon-fest. No one seemed to care that the release of the conversation’s transcript, and the exculpatory protestations of Ukraine’s president have already deflated the “scandal” like a stomped soufflé.

We still have to hear homilies from the Church of NeverTrump, once again trying to turn the president’s blunt, take-no-prisoners, what-you-see-is-what-you-get style into a Constitutional crisis. In fact, Trump was elected because enough voters rejected the vision of politics as the purview of technocratic elites who define “democratic norms,” “presidential decorum,” and “political normality” in terms that happen to suit their tastes, interests, and prejudices.

For them, Trump’s discussion with Zelensky with its alleged implied quid-pro-quo was outrageously out of bounds and unprecedented. So let’s see, the Constitution gives the president wide authority to conduct foreign policy, including interactions with other heads of state. It does not specify by what rules of manners and diplomacy he do so. His only job is to see to the national interests and security of the United States, using whatever tools––except for undeclared war––he finds will achieve those aims.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/do-they-mean-it-this-time/

The Democrats have been desperately searching for a pretext for impeachment that won’t get them laughed out of Washington. Is the latest scandal it?

I  don’t envy Nancy Pelosi.

The base of her party has been apoplectic for the better part of three years. Not without help — from the moment that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, elected Democrats have carefully built up a sense of panic and scandal around the Trump administration, a sense that, in fairness, has been unwittingly and clumsily abetted by the behavior of the president and his aides. Escalated by the breathless outrage of the media, a shroud of illegitimacy has enveloped the Trump White House from Day 1, and this shroud has, in turn, allowed the base of the Democratic party to avoid facing democracy’s colder realities, such as: Sometimes you lose. And it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault — not Russia, not racism, not rednecks — but your own.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to pretend otherwise.

First came efforts to undo the Trump presidency via the Electoral College by flipping enough electors to reverse the result (watching progressives, I must add, make use of the electoral college’s anti-democratic features was quite a sight to behold). After that failed, a California Democrat launched an “Impeach Trump Leadership” PAC, meant to coopt the impeachment pretexts du jour — emoluments-clause violations, speculative mental ailments, Representative Al Green’s impassioned say-so — and give each of them something like professional sanction. Then, of course, came the Russia probe, with all its unseemly partisan pomp: the trivial “bombshells,” the seething media firestorm, the discursive public hearings, the televised predawn arrest of Roger Stone (helicopters in the air!), and the theatrical build-up and relative inconsequence of the Mueller Report.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/hunter-biden-comprehensive-timeline/

From being appointed senior MBNA vice president (two years out of law school), to a gift of a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese energy tycoon, to Burisma Holdings . . .

Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.

The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:

According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

Both James and Hunter Biden have denied to Politico that James had ever made these comments.

Up until that time, Hunter Biden had been employed as a consultant to the Delaware bank MBNA, with a $100,000-a-year retainer, according to the New York Times. The bank hired him fresh out of law school and in less than two years promoted him to senior vice president. Biden also separately worked as a lobbyist until 2008, founding the firm Oldaker Biden & Belair, where he represented mostly universities and hospitals but also drug companies such as Achaogen Inc. and Pulmatrix Inc., and the music-sharing company Napster and online gambling sites.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-durhams-ukrainian-leads-11569786611

Americans often boast that we are a nation of laws, but for the moment laws appear to play a decidedly secondary role in the drama we are living in and—hopefully—through.

We have some guidance from our foundational law, the Constitution, which tells us how to proceed: the House of Representatives has “the sole power of impeachment,” the Senate has “the sole power to try all impeachments,” and must do so “on oath or affirmation.” The Senate cannot convict “without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present.” And “when the president of the United States is tried, the chief justice shall preside.”

It looks almost like a real trial. Yet despite the legal trappings, the underlying standard, if applied to a criminal statute, would be vulnerable to attack as void for vagueness: “The president . . . shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Treason and bribery have specific and recognized meanings, but what about “other high crimes and misdemeanors”?

In Federalist No. 66, Alexander Hamilton defended the Senate as the tribunal for trying impeachments in part by saying that impeachable offenses come from “the abuse or violation of some public trust” and “are of a nature which may . . . be denominated political.”