RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/double-standards-on-ukraine/

Democrats in Congress and the media pretend to swoon over conduct they accepted when Obama did it.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s opening statement at today’s hearing, a grilling of National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire, was remarkable. To begin with, he recited a parody of the conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that was so absurd, it would not have made it into a Grade-C mob movie. A telling decision by Schiff, a capable former prosecutor: If you have an extortionate conversation, you quote it. If you need to imagine it into something it isn’t, that means it is not an extortionate conversation.

Also telling: Chairman Schiff came flying out of the starting block describing how overwhelmingly dependent Ukraine is on the United States and its president. Of course, this fact must be forced to the fore because it is not obvious from the Trump–Zelensky conversation — again, Schiff does not have evidence that Trump extorted Zelensky for the purpose of aiding Trump’s 2020 campaign.

But more to the point, the relationship of dependency intensified in 2015 due to the flight to Moscow of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych. At that point, a new Ukrainian government more to the Obama administration’s liking, under President Petro Poroshenko, came to power. It was desperate for American help, financially and security-wise, which is why Vice President Biden was in a position to pressure it into firing the prosecutor who was conducting a corruption investigation of Burisma, the energy company that had appointed Hunter Biden to its board and was lavishly compensating him.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/25/the-transcript-is-damning-to-biden-not-trump/
Picture the 2020 presidential debate between Donald Trump and the Democratic nominee. The challenger turns to the president and charges: “You asked the Ukrainian president to investigate your opponent’s son’s shady business dealings.”

He adds, “you released the transcript of your phone call last year with him in which you said, ‘there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.’

“And then you said, and I quote, ‘Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution. So if you can look into it, it sounds horrible to me.’”

Finally, arriving at his rhetorical crescendo, the nominee declares victoriously, “Horrible? What’s horrible wasn’t me as vice president using the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees that Ukraine needed to stay solvent to get the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating my son’s client fired. No, what’s horrible is a president of the United States using the power of his office to dig up foreign dirt on a political opponent.”

It doesn’t quite work, does it? In fact, it would, if you will, trump Joe Biden’s long history of verbal blunders as the gaffe of all gaffes of the entirety of his four-and-a-half decades in Washington.

Democrats — from high-ranking party operatives to rank-and-file primary voters — know this, which is why the transcript released by the Trump White House on Wednesday dooms Biden’s 2020 chances, not Trump’s.