RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-first-glimpse-into-horowitzs-fisa-abuse-report/

CNN reports that an FBI attorney tampered with documents related to the Carter Page application. How much does it matter?

I s this the tip of a scandalous iceberg? Or is it a signal that Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s much anticipated report on investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia probe will be much ado about nothing much?

A low-ranking FBI lawyer altered a document that was somehow related to the Obama Justice Department’s application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for a national-security surveillance warrant. The application, approved by the FISC in October 2016, targeted former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page — an American citizen, former naval intelligence officer, and apparent FBI cooperating witness — as a clandestine agent of Russia. Apparently, the document tampering made at least one of the application’s factual assertions seem more damning than it actually was.

The FBI attorney, who has not been identified, is also said to have falsified an email in an effort to provide back-up support for the fabricated claim. The lawyer, who was reportedly pushed out of the Bureau when the tampering incident came to light, was interviewed in Horowitz’s inquiry and is said to be a subject of the related criminal investigation being conducted by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham.

The news was broken on Thursday night by CNN. That in itself is noteworthy. The FBI’s former deputy director Andrew McCabe is a CNN contributor, and the Bureau’s former general counsel James Baker is a frequent CNN guest. The IG’s probe has scrutinized the conduct of both. CNN commentators also include other former federal law-enforcement officials, who have ties to the Bureau and to some of the former officials under scrutiny. CNN’s news story about the evidence tampering is sourced to “several people briefed on the matter,” who were not identified. The IG report is scheduled to be released on December 9, and witnesses have recently been permitted to review a draft of it under tight restrictions.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/23/impeachment_3_crucial_qu

Question 1: What did the president want from Ukraine?
 
The Democrats presented testimony that Trump cared much more about getting Ukraine to investigate the Biden family than he did about advancing American national security. That’s the most likely explanation for the five-week hold on aid to Ukraine. But the Republicans have offered a plausible alternative, though not an entirely convincing one. Given Ukraine’s dismal record on corruption, they say, wasn’t it prudent to wait briefly and see whether country’s new president lived up to his big promises?
 
Question 2: Can the Democrats prove their case?
 
Can they show conclusively that the president wanted something illicit and was using official resources to get it?
 
Democrats need firsthand proof of Trump’s motives to demolish the Republican case. That means they need documents or testimony from people who dealt directly with the president. Democrats have subpoenaed some of Trump’s close aides; the president ordered them not to testify. Nancy Pelosi has decided to skip over them rather than wait for the Federal Courts to adjudicate the conflict between the two branches.
 
The result, so far, is what Scottish courts call “unproven.” Crimes that carry draconian punishment rightly require conclusive evidence to match. The Democrats simply cannot produce it without firsthand accounts.
 
Question 3: What’s the rush?

The Democrats argue — and have presented testimony — that Trump cared a lot more about getting Ukraine to investigate the Biden family than he did about advancing American national security. If Trump’s real goal was bringing down the Bidens, and if he tried to get Kyiv to do that by leveraging U.S. foreign aid and the prospect of a White House meeting, then he would be wrongly seeking personal, political benefits from a foreign government against a likely 2020 competitor.

Those are reasonable arguments. Indeed, they are the most likely explanations for the 55-day hold on aid to Ukraine, which Congress had authorized. Still, other explanations are possible, and the White House and its Republican allies have offered them. They say Trump had perfectly legitimate national-security concerns about U.S. policy in Ukraine, that he had often mentioned them to advisers, and that he paused the aid as he evaluated them.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/22/the-curtain-closes-on-the-schiff-show/

Every theater rat knows that closing night is even tougher than the debut.

After all the auditions, the practices, the blocking, the tech rehearsals, the dress rehearsals, the opener, and the full run, the final performance usually comes quicker than expected.

Exhausted and emotional, nerves are as raw as they were during callbacks. The leading man glances around at his castmates one last time, realizing he’ll never have the same experience again. A bow to the orchestra pit, a gesture to the lighting crew, roses for the director, and a prolonged, bittersweet wave to the crowd—then the heavy red curtain slowly closes the stage off from the cheering audience.

The show, the ensemble must accept, is over.

In what presumably was his final encore Thursday afternoon, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) bid an emotional farewell to his long run as the lead role in his impeachment inquiry, a.k.a. “The Schiff Show.” As the lights dimmed and folks headed for an early exit, Schiff choked up during his closing monologue.

“In my view, there is nothing more dangerous than an unethical president who believes they are above the law,” Schiff emoted, voice trembling, tears welling. “And I would just say to people watching here at home and around the world [dramatic pause] . . . we are better than that!” Voice breaking, Schiff then gaveled his theater to a close.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/winning-was-trumps-high-crime-and-misdemeanor-11574466051

When I don’t get the feeling Adam Schiff is secretly working for the Russians, I get the feeling he’s secretly working for Donald Trump. The latter feeling predominated during two weeks of impeachment hearings. The case, which doesn’t strike me as strong, should be that Mr. Trump withheld, or threatened to withhold, congressionally mandated military aid for Ukraine for an illegal purpose. But the witnesses who were supposed to be harmful to Mr. Trump weren’t. They failed to establish, or even argue, that Mr. Trump’s concern with the Biden role in Ukraine, or Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election, was illegitimate.

State Department witness George Kent testified that he himself upbraided Ukrainian officials for ending an investigation of Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, which U.S. taxpayer dollars had helped support. He called for—guess what?—an investigation: “I would love to see [Ukraine’s government] find out who the corrupt prosecutor was, and who took the bribe, and how much he was paid.”

William Taylor, another presumably hostile State Department witness, was sufficiently open to the agenda of his outsider president to propose that an official other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky make the wished-for announcement, “in coordination with Attorney General Barr’s probe into the investigation of interference in the 2016 elections.”

Like a dinner-theater detective, Mr. Schiff shouts “Aha!” at every confirmation of what has been obvious since the White House released its own transcript of the Trump call with Mr. Zelensky. The Trump administration was keen on arming Ukraine and supporting its new government to exact a cost from Vladimir Putin. That is, everybody in the Trump administration except the president himself, who was cool or indifferent to this agenda but intruded only occasionally to push the Biden talking point.

His staff, apparently appreciating who actually received votes from the electorate, busied itself at times trying to reconcile Mr. Trump’s agenda with their own. And yet, in the manner of factotums everywhere, the agenda they ended up delivering was their own—Ukraine got its arms and presidential meeting—while Mr. Trump’s fell through the cracks.

Mr. Trump is chaotic, unschooled and politically motivated, but only the first two qualities differentiate him from other presidents. He cares only about “the big things,” Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified. Isn’t that the job description? If President Obama’s staff had been as successful as Mr. Trump’s, U.S. troops would never have left Iraq. Yet Mr. Obama was entitled to make the trade-off he did, unfortunate as it was. Securing re-election is the first thing any president owes his supporters. It’s what makes our system go ’round.

Unfortunately, the media, in the grip of narrative-itis and its own partisan myopia, leaves no fact or logical premise unmolested. Numerous outlets peddle the fallacy that election meddling is what economists call a rivalrous good: If Russia engaged in it, Ukraine couldn’t have. An NBC reporter, lacking any bombshells, proclaims that a “bombshell” is the word “more” in an official’s recollected impression that Mr. Trump “cared more” about investigations than he did about Ukraine.

The national media is an idiot at this point to keep the name of the whisteblower, which they’ve known for weeks, from the public. His identity and motives are unquestionably newsworthy. The media exists to report newsworthy information. All the press does is sow distrust about what other news it’s hiding. CONTINUE AT SITE