RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/president-trump-delivers-hard-truths-un-general-joseph-klein/

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ speech to the 74th annual High-Level General Assembly meeting on September 24th was full of generalities about world problems the UN is purporting to deal with, in contrast to President Trump’s honest discussion of hard truths.

“We are here to advance the common good while upholding our shared humanity and values,” the secretary general said. “That vision united the founders of our Organization.” However, Secretary General Guterres’ concept of the UN “vision” today is of a globalist institution, which was not the founders’ original vision at all. The founders’ vision for a new United Nations was much closer to the one that President Trump has articulated. The United Nations was founded to bring sovereign nations together for the purpose of cooperating in the solution of common problems and taking collective action where warranted against aggressors’ threats to international peace and security. The United Nations Charter specifically recognizes the sovereign status of the member states. It stipulates that the United Nations does not have the authority “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

President Trump sought to remind the world leaders he addressed in his own General Assembly speech of the UN founders’ original understanding of the relationship between the world organization and its sovereign member states.

“The future does not belong to globalists,” the president said. “The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations, who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-impeachment-congress-11569367442

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday endorsed an official inquiry to impeach President Trump, and there is joy across Resistance America—at least for now. The decision guarantees that this will go down as the Impeachment Congress, with little to show beyond investigations into the Trump campaign and now the Trump Presidency.

In one sense this moment was probably inevitable. Most Democrats and most of the media have never accepted Mr. Trump as a legitimate President. They can’t believe 63 million Americans voted for him over their nominee, Hillary Clinton, so they have looked every day since Election Night in 2016 for some reason to expel him from office.

They spent two years spinning a tale of Russian collusion that proved to be false. Then they hyped obstruction of justice because Mr. Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, but the public wasn’t persuaded. The payment to Stormy Daniels made a cameo, but that was too close to Democrats’ defense of Bill Clinton for “lying about sex” to fly.

Mrs. Pelosi has now found a rationale in a whistleblower’s accusation about Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s President. Mr. Trump admits that he warned Volodymyr Zelensky about corruption, including Joe Biden ’s interventions in Ukraine against a prosecutor who was investigating a company with ties to Mr. Biden ’s son, Hunter. Mr. Trump also admits that he delayed U.S. aid to Ukraine in early July prior to the phone call out of concern for corruption and allied burden sharing.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/190923

Not long ago, I received a lengthy e-mail – “Why We Must Renew Our Commitment to the Civil Rights Movement” – from a woman named Melanie Roth Gorelick, who identified herself as Senior Vice President of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA).

Honestly, I thought it was one of the preposterous spoofs of that satirical publication, The Onion.

But no… it was the real thing.

In short, Ms. Gorelick recommended that Jews concentrate their attention not on the pandemic of anti-Semitism and violent acts against Jews throughout the world and in the United States of America, but instead on those poor oppressed blacks who have never had it better in the good ole U.S.A., thanks to President Trump!

While Ms. Gorelick briefly mentioned that there is an “increase in anti-Semitism and hate crimes” in America, her entire discourse was devoted to a plea for the Jewish community (2.8 percent of the U.S. population) to turn their impassioned efforts and energies to supporting the cause of blacks in the U.S. (14 percent of the U.S. population), who she claimed still experience grave discrimination.

This in spite of the fact that since President Trump was elected, blacks have never experienced a higher degree of employment, independence, wealth, home ownership, and freedom from discrimination in the history of our country!

https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-crime

Democratic accusations that America is endemically racist are becoming ever more frequent and strident. At the last presidential debate, Pete Buttigieg announced that “systemic racism” will “be with us” regardless of who wins the presidency; Beto O’Rourke claimed that racism in America is “foundational” and that people of color were under “mortal threat” from the “white supremacist in the White House”; Julián Castro denounced the growing threat of “white supremacy”; and Cory Booker called for “attacking systemic racism,” especially in the “racially biased” criminal-justice system.

At the same time, the allowable explanations for racial disparities have shrunk to one: that self-same racism. During this month’s debate, Joe Biden tried to suggest that some poor parents could benefit from instruction regarding optimal child-rearing practices: “We [should] bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do,” he said. Biden was invoking one of the Obama administration’s key anti-poverty initiatives. Home-visiting programs pair nurses and other social service workers with pregnant women and new mothers to teach them parenting skills. Progressive activists have demanded and won hundreds of millions of federal dollars for such programs, yet pundits have denounced Biden’s “horrifyingly racist answer,” in the words of The Intercept, and called for him to pull out of the presidential primary because of it. Buttigieg sniffed that Biden’s statement was “well-intentioned” but “bad,” since it ignored the fact that “racial inequity” in this country was “put into place on purpose.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/24/newly-released-mccabe-memo-describes-rosensteins-offer-to-wear-wire-to-spy-on-trump/

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein proposed wearing a wire into the Oval Office to record conversations with President Trump in the days after the president fired FBI Director James Comey, an explosive two-page memo written by then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe claims.

According to McCabe’s notes, Rosenstein said he thought he could get away with wearing a wire because “he was not searched when he entered the White House.”

Justice Department officials have insisted for months that Rosenstein was only joking when he talked about wearing a wire. The DOJ has also pushed back on McCabe’s claim that Rosenstein discussed with Justice Department officials a plan to recruit members of Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.

“The Deputy Attorney General again rejects Mr. McCabe’s recitation of events as inaccurate and factually incorrect,” the DOJ said in a statement back in February.

The fired G-Man’s memo—dated May 16, 2017— was obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch last Friday following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. It is redacted in a few key sections, and “purports to serve as a contemporaneous recollection” of McCabe’s meeting with Rosenstein, Deputy Assistant AG for Intelligence Tashina Gauhar and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Jim Crowell in Rosenstein’s Justice Department office on 5/16/2017.

McCabe claims that he began the meeting by telling Rosenstein that he “approved the opening of an investigation of President Donald Trump … to investigate allegations of possible collusion between the president and the Russian Government, possible obstruction of justice related to the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and possible conspiracy to obstruct justice.”

In his memo, McCabe cites the memos Comey wrote detailing his meetings with President Trump, as well as the president’s interview with NBC’s Lester Holt to justify the investigation.  In the May 11, 2017 interview, Trump told Holt that he was preparing to fire Comey regardless of recommendations from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then DAG Rosenstein.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/23/like-russian-collusion-ukraine-hysteria-is-pure-projection-by-media-and-democrats/

The only 2016 campaign that colluded with Russia was Hillary Clinton’s, and the only 2020 candidate who bragged about threatening Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating corruption is Joe Biden.

If the latest media-manufactured hysteria over President Donald Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian government looks familiar, it’s because it is. The same tired playbook is being run by the same discredited people with the same goal: get rid of Trump, by any means necessary.

Just as the Clinton campaign, Obama administration holdovers, and complicit media allies peddled lies about Russian collusion while engaging in literal Russian collusion during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, so too did Joseph Biden literally threaten to withhold money from Ukraine if it failed to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company.

To hear the media tell it, Trump committed treason. The walls are closing in. The end is nigh. Why? Well, the details there are a little fuzzy, as they always seem to be. Somebody heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another that Trump had threatened Ukraine that it must investigate Hunter Biden, the troubled son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden…or else.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/no-trump-is-not-facing-the-death-penalty-over-ukraine/

Bill Weld beclowns himself in trying to spread this misinformation.

Bill Weld used to be a serious guy. A scholar graduated from Harvard and Oxford, a man with gravitas in the legal community. Before he began seeking elective office in the late 1980s, Weld was a high-ranking and extremely knowledgeable federal prosecutor. For a time, he was the chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division under President Reagan. I have not been a fan of his post-DOJ political career, but I’ve never thought of him as a clown.

Now, he has beclowned himself.

It was a “Hold my beer” moment of one-upmanship on Morning Joe Monday, MSNBC, where the Trump-deranged legions make their 24/7 calls for Trump’s impeachment, is one of few venues where Weld can find an audience for his forlorn GOP-nomination challenge to the president.

Weld was talking about the president’s conversations with his Ukrainian counterpart. Trump has admitted that he urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden for corruption. Former vice president Biden, of course, is a favorite to emerge as the Democrats’ 2020 nominee opposing Trump.

For most of us, the potential removal of a president of the United States over misconduct allegations may seem extraordinarily grave, having never happened and rarely been tried lo these 230 years of constitutional governance. For former Governor Weld, though, grounds for Trump’s impeachment are so matter-of-factly to be assumed that he’s moved beyond them. Way beyond them.

Trump, he asserts (and I’m not kidding, though I wish I were), may need to be put to death.

The details of the Trump–Zelensky communications are still emerging. Yet Weld decided he knows enough to pronounce that Trump’s purported “pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election” is not a matter of merely “undermining democratic institutions.” No, no, “It’s treason pure and simple.” Not content with ludicrous overstatement, Weld took pains to add: “And the penalty for treason under the U.S. Code is death. That’s the only penalty.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gregg-jarrett-trump-whistleblower

The latest media mass hysteria over a whistleblower’s complaint that, according to FoxNews.com “reportedly involved allegations President Trump made a troubling and unspecified ‘promise’ to a foreign leader,” is based on precious little information.  That has not stopped journalists from convicting Trump in the court of public opinion and predicting his imminent demise.

Who exactly is this unidentified “whistleblower”? What is the specific nature of his or her “urgent concern” complaint against the president?  Does this complaint really qualify under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA)?  These are just a few of the most fundamental questions that remain largely unknown.

Despite the paucity of facts, some reasonable observations and conclusions can be drawn.

It appears that an American spy in one of our intelligence agencies may have been spying on our own president.  The complaint suggests that this intel agent was listening in on Trump’s conversation with a foreign leader.  Was this person officially asked to listen to the conversation or was he or she secretly listening in? We don’t know.
This agent, who is an unelected and inferior federal employee in the government hierarchy, apparently believes that it is his/her job to second-guess the motivation behind the words of the elected president, who is the most superior officer in the U.S. government. 
Article II of the Constitution gives the president sweeping power to conduct foreign affairs, negotiate with leaders of other nations, make demands or offer promises.  The Constitution does not grant the power of review, approval or disapproval to spies or other unelected officials in the executive branch. 
The ICWPA law defines the parameters of an “urgent concern” complaint as an abuse or violation of law “relating to the funding, administration, or operations of an intelligence activity involving classified information, but does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters.”  The president’s conversation with a foreign leader does not seem to fall under this whistleblower definition. 
It appears the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) agrees with this assessment. His agency’s general counsel wrote a letter stating the complaint did not meet the ICWPA definition because it involved conduct “from someone outside the intel community and did not relate to intelligence activity,” according to a report by Fox News. This is why the DNI refused to forward the complaint to congress. 

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-biden-pass-andrew-mccarthy

It was in the national interest of the United States that Ukraine, under siege by our Russian nemesis, be given the full quantum of military aid extended by Congress. It was in the political interest of President Trump that Ukraine aggressively investigate credible allegations of corruption and conflict-of-interest against former Vice President Joe Biden, a favorite among the Democratic candidates seeking to run against Trump in 2020.

The national interests of the United States and the political interests of the president are not the same thing. If President Trump conflated them in his discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that was a failure of judgment.

But have we lost our capacity to say conduct is censurable without turning it into something it is not – such as effective immunity for Biden and grounds for Trump’s impeachment?

Don’t get me wrong. It is not my purpose to minimize the politicization of American foreign relations. To the contrary, I just wrote a book, “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.” In many ways, it is a “cri de coeur” for a restoration of a vital American norm. Incumbent administrations must not wield the awesome powers of the presidency, especially the powers to conduct foreign affairs and gather foreign intelligence, out of sheer partisanship.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, it is proven that Trump used his enormous influence over Kiev, or worse, his control over the release of defense aid Ukraine needs, strictly to better his electoral chances against Biden. That would be an abuse of power.

It would also make the 45th president, well, the 45th president in American history to exercise his powers under the influence of his political standing. That is particularly true of presidents seeking reelection, even if we suspect that most exploitations of foreign relations power for electoral advantage have been less crude than Trump’s alleged squeezing of Ukraine.