RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.

The complaint alleges that President Donald Trump broke the law during a phone call with the Ukrainian president. In his complaint, which was dated August 12, 2019, the complainant acknowledged he was “not a direct witness” to the wrongdoing he claims Trump committed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/how-about-a-bipartisan-treaty-against-the

Setting aside Hunter Biden, there was no impropriety in President Trump’s asking Zelensky to assist the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.

Back home in the Bronx is where I first heard the old saw about the Irishman who, coming upon a donnybrook at the local pub, asks a bystander: “Is this a private fight or can anybody join?”

I was a much younger fellow then. The prospect becomes less alluring with age, so I have some trepidation stepping in between two old friends, Andrew Napolitano and Joe DiGenova. Through intermediary hosts, the pair — Napolitano a former New Jersey Superior Court jurist and law professor, DiGenova a former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and prominent defense lawyer — brawled this week on Fox News (where I, like they, contribute regularly).

I’m going to steer clear of the pugnacious to-ing and fro-ing. Let’s consider the intriguing legal issue that ignited it.

Judge Napolitano argues that the July 25 conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky contains the makings of a campaign-finance crime. He highlights Trump’s request for Ukraine’s help in investigating then–vice president Joe Biden. In 2016, Biden pressured Kyiv to drop a corruption investigation of Burisma, a natural gas company that paid Biden’s son, Hunter, big bucks to sit on its board.

Biden, of course, is one of the favorites for the Democratic presidential nomination. Napolitano reasons that the information Trump sought from Ukraine would be a form of “opposition research” that could be seen as an in-kind donation to Trump’s reelection campaign, which should be deemed illegal because the law prohibits foreign contributions and attempts to acquire them. (Napolitano also raised the “arguable” possibility of a bribery offense, on the theory that Trump was withholding defense aid as a corrupt quid pro quo to get the Biden information. But he emphasized the foreign contribution issue. That is his stronger argument, and I am focusing on it, given that the Trump-Zelensky transcript does not support a quid pro quo demand; plus bribery, in any event, raises the same “thing of value” proof problems addressed below.)

https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias

The House Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session, a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after trial.

Minutes before the hearing was scheduled to begin, Al Sharpton escorted Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, to the witness table, surrounded by a mob of photographers. Garner had tragically died of a heart attack after New York Police Department officers tried to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes in July 2014; Garner resisted arrest, and one of the officers used a chokehold to take him down. Garner’s repeated last words—“I can’t breathe”—became an international rallying cry against police brutality. Carr gave impassioned testimony denouncing the lack of consequences for the police “murder” of her son: after five years of federal and local investigation, the officer who used the fatal chokehold was fired, but no prosecutions or other actions in the case have taken place. Carr left the witness table after her remarks to sit in the spectator section, but she remained a frequent reference point for the Democratic argument that the police devalue minority lives.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/27/the-ukraine-whistleblower-isnt-a-whistleblower/

Nobody is above the law, not even the former vice president. Not even a deep state leaker who is using his access to confidential diplomatic information to sway the 2020 election.

Yet this is not the position of the recent leak disguised as a “whistleblower’s disclosure” addressed to Representative Adam (still waiting for “direct” collusion evidence) Schiff (D-Calif.) and Senator Richard Burr (R.-N.C.). The complaint is a tantrum by a self-appointed guardian of elite privilege whose nonsensical monograph seeks to criminalize the president’s inquiry into the 2016 collusion hoax and the apparent leveraging of U.S. aid by Joe Biden to protect his son and his son’s company from criminal prosecution.

I say it is nonsensical because this Ukraine “scandal” is a perfect shoe-on-the-other foot demonstration of the elite’s sacred belief that their hatred of Trump immunizes them from the effects of laws they seek to use as weapons against the president. To paraphrase the famous exchange between Richard Nixon and David Frost:

Question: “Would you say that there are certain situations . . . where a deep-state Resistance bureaucrat can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?”

The Left: “Well, when somebody on our team does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

That’s the only way to make sense of how the self-sainted bureaucrat and the press can call what he did “whistleblowing.”

The term “whistleblower” has a legal definition and, for the author of the August 12 letter, it means an employee “who reasonably believes there has been a violation of law, rule, or regulation; gross mismanagement; waste of resources; abuse of authority; or a substantial danger to public health and safety.”

By contrast, a person who leaks “a difference of opinion over policy, strategy, analysis, or priorities for intelligence funding or collection,” is not a whistleblower.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/dems_impeachment_frenzy_is_the_prelude_to_the_coming_time_bombs_about_to_explode_in_their_faces.html

Lost in all the frenzy over impeachment — sparked by the Deep State leaker posing as a “whistleblower” (passing along hearsay does not qualify for protection under whistleblower statutes) — is the trio of ticking time bombs that Democrats know are about to detonate in their faces.

The three time bombs have names: Horowitz, Huber, and Durham.  When the Department of Justice inspector general issues his report, then John Huber and John Durham, the U.S. attorneys tasked with investigating crimes suspected in the Clinton Foundation; Uranium One; and the FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency will be free to start seeking indictments, or to unseal indictments that may have already been issued by their grand juries.  The reports and the unleashing of the two U.S. attorneys are coming soon, as those mentioned in the I.G. report are currently submitting their responses for inclusion in the final report.

One poker tell of the Dems’ panic is the demand that Attorney General Barr recuse himself, or even be impeached.  Having left his lucrative law practice and returned to the attorney generalship out of a sense of duty to correct the corruption that has spread through the Justice Department and its subsidiary, the FBI, William Barr will not flinch in going after miscreants once they are indicted.  That’s why they desperately want him out of the game.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/463307-solomon-these-once-secret-memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.

He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.

There’s just one problem.

Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.

And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Trump years have been rough on Democrats’ sensibilities, and their thinking has become increasingly addled as a result. The party has worked tirelessly to create an issue worthy of impeaching the president—Russia collusion, obstruction of justice, Stormy Daniels, tax returns. This week Democrats jettisoned all that in favor of the only issue that implicates their own front-runner for the nomination. Genius.

The one person who has been as much in the news this week as Donald Trump is former Vice President Joe Biden. It’s a dubious accomplishment. The only way to discuss Mr. Trump’s nonsmoking-gun phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is to acknowledge the subject of the ruckus: Mr. Biden’s glaring conflicts of interest during his vice presidency vis-à-vis his son Hunter’s business interests. Since Democrats insist on making this all about Ukraine, get ready for daily new revelations about the young Mr. Biden’s questionable activities and “Quid Pro Joe’s” involvement.

This is why the former vice president’s promises that this scandal will fade are nonsense. True, the media is doing double-duty on his behalf. Its general line is that Mr. Biden’s conflicts are fine; asking about them is corrupt. We are seeing a lot of stories about how Democrats are determined not to let Republicans “Hillary” Mr. Biden—a historical rewrite that places the blame for Mrs. Clinton’s notorious ethical travails on her rivals. The “fact checkers” are out in force with soothing assurances that there’s no evidence any Biden broke the law.