RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosi-has-second-thoughts-11576802073?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The House impeachment of President Trump is only a day old and it has already moved from folly to farce. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now threatening to withhold the articles of impeachment that Democrats just passed until the Senate sets trial terms that she and her left-wing faction deem adequate.

“We cannot name managers until we see what the process is on the Senate side,” Mrs. Pelosi said Wednesday night after the impeachment vote, referring to the House Members who would present the case for removal to the Senate. “So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us.”

The Constitution gives the House “the sole power of impeachment.” It also gives the Senate “the sole power to try all impeachments.” Mrs. Pelosi nonetheless wants to use the articles the House has passed as leverage to force the Senate to do what she wants. The idea was floated this week by Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe and has been picked up on the left, apparently as a way to discomfit Senate Republicans.

This further trivializes the impeachment power that the Pelosi Democrats have already done so much to diminish. The House raced to an impeachment vote to please swing-district Members who wanted it over before Christmas. Democrats barred GOP witnesses and truncated questioning. Rep. Adam Schiff even said speed was essential and the House couldn’t wait for court rulings on witnesses, lest Mr. Trump steal the 2020 election.

But now Mrs. Pelosi says speed isn’t essential because Senate Republicans might not hold the kind of trial she wants. She is running interference for Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, who is demanding that the Senate call witnesses the House refused to call. The goal seems to be to turn the Senate trial into a second impeachment investigation ad infinitum. Keep the machinery running, and who knows what else might turn up that pressures Republicans to convict.

https://spectator.us/nancy-pelosi-dull-impeachment-spectacle/

I am so glad that Nancy Pelosi has finally come to her senses and declared — on the floor of the House no less — that impeachment is ‘a hatchet job on the presidency’. Yes, that’s right. The House, said Pelosi, is ‘not judging the president with fairness, but impeaching him with a vengeance’. Nicely phrased! The whole circus, she said, violates ‘fundamental principles that Americans hold dear: privacy, fairness, checks and balances’. Go, Nancy! Not only that, the impeachment process is taking place only because one party is ‘paralyzed with hatred’ of the president, and until they ‘free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer’. I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, Pelosi was right again that the spectacle of impeachment is ‘about punishment searching for a crime that doesn’t exist’.

SCREECH!! The needle goes scudding across the vinyl disk: wrong impeachment!

That was Nancy Pelosi in 1998 when a Democrat was being impeached, not Pelosi in 2019 when a Republican is in the dock. As recently as last March, Pelosi insisted that impeachment had to be reserved for the most serious sorts of crimes and required bipartisan support, as was the case in history’s two previous impeachments, that of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and that of Bill Clinton in 1998.

But that was before the impeachment express really got chugging. Now there is no talk of ‘fairness’, ‘checks and balances’, ‘hatred’, or what this nakedly partisan effort to weaponize the instrument of impeachment is all about. Hint: it has nothing to do with exposing any ‘high crimes’ or ‘misdemeanors’. On the contrary, it is merely the action of a bludgeon wielded to destroy a political opponent — it is, as President Trump himself wrote in an historic letter to Pelosi, ‘an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat lawmakers’.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-Impeaching-the-electorate-61148

The US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday evening to impeach President Donald Trump for “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress.”

This didn’t come as a surprise to anyone, least of all Republicans. The outcome, like the whole undue process itself, was predetermined. Most Democrats were unable to accept Trump’s election in the first place, going so far as to say that he hadn’t really won, because he garnered a majority of Electoral College votes, rather than popular ones.That the Electoral College determines presidential victories was of no interest to those who wished to argue otherwise. This is why they admitted openly from the get-go – as soon as Trump was sworn in and entered the White House in January 2017 – that the effort to remove him from office was underway. Since then, they have been engaged in that pursuit with a vengeance.

Their delight at taking back the House following the 2018 midterm Congressional elections not only knew no bounds; it also gave them the false sense that ousting their nemesis, even well before the end of his first four-year term, would be an easy task.

The veteran Dems who had been around the block – and on the Hill – for a lot longer than the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan – were a little more cautious in their assessment. They understood, though didn’t say so aloud, that the sitting president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/barr-simply-not-true-comey-was-hands-off-during-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/

William Barr pushed back Wednesday on James Comey’s assertion that he had no knowledge of the “particulars” of the FBI’s infamous Crossfire Hurricane probe, in which the bureau was found to have made 17 “significant errors” in pursuing FISA warrants to surveil members of the 2016 Trump campaign.

During an interview Sunday with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Comey attributed the FBI’s errors in the FISA process detailed by DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz’s report to “sloppiness,” and said that he “didn’t know the particulars of the investigation” as director.

“As a director sitting on top of an organization with 38,000 people, you can’t run an investigation that’s seven layers below you,” he said. “You have to leave it to the career professionals to do . . . If a director tries to run an investigation, it can get mucked up in other kinds of ways given his or her responsibilities and the impossibility of reaching the work being done at the lower levels.”

But speaking Wednesday with Fox News’ Martha McCallum, Barr disagreed with Comey’s characterizations, especially the former FBI director’s claim that he was “seven layers” above the investigation.

“One of the problems with what happened was precisely that they pulled the investigation up to the executive floors, and it was run and birddogged by a very small group of very high-level officials,” Barr said. “The idea that this was seven layers below him is simply not true.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-if-impeachment-articles-are-not-delivered-did-impeachment-happen/

It’s hard to believe the Speaker’s latest stunt will go on for very long.

I’ll confess: Last night, when I was first told that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was toying with the idea of not delivering the two articles of impeachment voted by the House against President Trump, I assumed it was a joke.

For these last weeks, the Democrat-dominated chamber has been in a mad rush to impeach the president. Democrats even tacked on article two — “obstruction of Congress” — because, they told us, time could not be wasted engaging in the usual negotiation and litigation over legislative demands for executive branch information. Trump is a clear and present threat to “continue” undermining our elections, we were admonished. That’s why he needs to be impeached right now. That’s why the political class cannot responsibly leave his fate up to the sovereign, the People, who will vote in November.

But now that the deed is done, it’s . . . hey, not so fast.

Pelosi and Democratic leadership have convinced themselves there may be advantage in delaying the formal, ministerial delivery of the impeachment articles — as if Mitch McConnell were in as much a hurry to receive them as Democrats were to conjure them up. The thought is that this latest strategic petulance might pressure Senator McConnell into promising a full-blown trial, including summoning as witnesses top aides of the president whom the House didn’t bother to summon because tangling over privilege issues would have slowed up the works.

So it’s not a joke, but I still have to laugh. When I was a prosecutor negotiating plea deals, I always found the most pathetic defense lawyers were the ones who acted like they were playing with the House money when, in stark reality, it was they who needed something from me. Now here’s Pelosi trying to play hard to get with McConnell who, I imagine, couldn’t care less how long Democrats want to dither.

https://spectator.us/pelosi-impeachment-delay-unforced-error/

One of our perennial school pranks was to place a whoopee cushion secretly on the chair of an unsuspecting teacher. When she sat, she would launch the resounding clap of flatulence. That, metaphorically, is what just happened to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Unfortunately, she placed it on her own chair. The embarrassing noise sounded when she announced she would delay sending the House’s Articles of Impeachment to the Senate.

This delay was a nakedly partisan ploy — and a major error of political judgment. Every day it continues will cost Democrats in the general election.

Why?

First, the Democrats should be emphasizing only the constitutional necessity of impeachment. That’s why Speaker Pelosi wore funereal black for the House vote, why she tried in vain to stop jubilant Democrats from taking selfies after the vote. (She seemingly couldn’t control Washington Post reporters, who did the same thing. Democracy dies in derangement.) The delay highlights the Democrats’ raw political calculations. Of course, those calculations are always the drivers for both parties in Washington. What Pelosi’s stunt does, though, is put them front and center.

The real motives are painfully obvious. Democrats want Trump out not for some specific reasons (the articles of impeachment are virtually inkblots) but because they truly, deeply hate him. Republicans want to keep him, most because they like him, some because they think the party will implode if they remove him now. Both parties are united. Impeachment only solidified their stances. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/pelosi-threatens-call-impeachment-unless-senate-daniel-greenfield/

Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to commit Wednesday to delivering articles of impeachment to the Senate, citing concerns about an unfair trial on removing President Donald Trump from office.

Senior Democratic aides said the House was “very unlikely” to take the steps necessary to send the articles to the Senate until at least early January, a delay of at least two weeks and perhaps longer.

“So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us,” Pelosi told reporters at a news conference just moments after the House charged Trump with abuse of power and obstructing congressional investigations. “That would’ve been our intention, but we’ll see what happens over there.”

Pelosi’s comments, which echo suggestions raised by other Democrats throughout the day, inject new uncertainty into the impeachment timetable and send the House and Senate lurching toward a potential institutional crisis.

Though the House adopted two articles of impeachment charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of congressional investigations, it must pass a second resolution formally naming impeachment managers to present the case in the Senate. That second vehicle triggers the official transmission of articles to the Senate.

By delaying passage of that resolution, Pelosi and top Democrats retain control of the articles and hope to put pressure on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to adopt trial procedures they consider bipartisan.

What leverage does Speaker Pelosi think she has here?

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/12/19/the-dems-real-impeachment-goal-sabotage-trumps-2nd-term/

Why would House Democrats put forward articles of impeachment that are laughably weak and have no chance of removing President Donald Trump from office? Most of the speculation has been that the impeachment will nevertheless hurt Trump’s reelection chances.

There’s another possibility that’s even more insidious.

Democratic Party leaders can’t possibly be unaware of the fact that their impeachment case has no merit. Despite the endless talk of bribery, extortion, campaign finance violations and other supposed crimes Trump has committed, not one of the articles of impeachment accuses Trump of breaking any of those laws, or any federal law for that matter.

Instead, they accuse Trump of an “abuse of power” and of “obstruction of Congress.” As Sen. Ted Cruz explained this week at a Heritage Foundation event, as weak as the first article is, “the second article is orders of magnitude weaker.”

“They’ve simply said that the mere fact that you assert a privilege is itself impeachable, without their bothering to issue a subpoena or litigating anything.

“If that is impeachable conduct,” Cruz went on, “all 45 presidents we have had in the United States have committed impeachable offenses.”

Mind you, this is in sharp contrast to the articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, which charged him with committing two felonies – perjury before a federal grand jury and obstruction of justice.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/18/for-whom-the-new-rules/

So egregious have been the ruling class’s attacks on Donald Trump, so shameless has been the sanctimony with which men such as William Webster have defended their biased governing rules, that the rest of us are well nigh compelled to give it a double dose of its own medicine.

When Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 9 report did not challenge the claim by the FBI (and the CIA) that its surveillance and investigation of all things Trump were properly “premised”; when it failed to address the illegality of officials’ trafficking to the media information from said surveillance; when it downgraded the FBI’s misdeeds to “performance failures,” that report offered the deep state the opportunity to claim that its interference in American politics is a good thing.

William Webster, the only person ever to have headed both FBI and CIA, seized that opportunity with an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he claims both agencies acted to protect “the rule of law,” and that they should continue to do so. That claim abstracts from the undeniable—and undenied—clash between the FBI and CIA’s anti-Trump campaign and current law.

Nevertheless, given the power of precedent, as well as the unpunished permanence of the officials who established the precedent, yes: America’s national security apparatchiks  effectively have changed the meaning of current law. They have established the propriety—maybe even the necessity—of adulterating or manufacturing allegations as premises for investigations the purpose of which is to hurt candidates or officials of whom they disapprove.