RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/469880-adam-schiffs-ham-sandwich-not-an

The most familiar metaphor about criminal investigations is, of course, that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Like all good metaphors, there’s enough exaggeration in it to make a strong impression. It resonates, though, because it conveys the entirely accurate sense that a grand jury is a one-sided affair. We’re wired to believe there are two sides — at least — to every story. That’s why the grand jury rubs us the wrong way.

And that’s why the impeachment show — not inquiry show — that Democrats are running should really rub us the wrong way. 

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and his House Intelligence Committee are taking the show public this week. The inquiry he’s been running is, he claims, analogous to a grand jury investigation: It’s a preliminary investigative stage before the inquiry’s transfer to the Judiciary Committee for the formal consideration of articles of impeachment. 

Grand juries, however, never go public. And that is precisely because they are intentionally one-sided. They are kept secret by law to avoid prejudicing the suspect.

Prejudice is exactly what Schiff is aiming for, however. The point is not impeachment; it is to wound President Trump politically.

To be clear, Schiff’s grand jury analogy is bogus. Congress is not a grand jury. Grand juries are designed to be at least somewhat objective — a body of impartial citizens who, by constitutional mandate, must be satisfied there is probable cause that a crime has been committed before the state is permitted to indict and try a citizen presumed to be innocent. In theory, the grand jury is there to protect the suspect from an overbearing prosecutor. Here, House Democrats are the overbearing prosecutor, not the protective grand jurors.

What is happening in the House is a political exercise. Schiff is a hyper-partisan. With the anti-Trump media leaving his absurd grand jury analogy unchallenged, he exploits it when it is useful, namely, when telling Republicans they will not be permitted to call their witnesses, and he puts the analogy aside when it is not useful, namely, in convening one-sided public hearings.

As a matter of due process, Schiff’s made-for-TV spectacle is a bad joke. That was underscored this past weekend when (a) Democrats gave Republicans a ridiculously short deadline to propose their own witnesses, whom Chairman Schiff reserved the right to veto; (b) Republicans duly proposed witnesses on the issues of Democrats’ collusion with Ukraine in the 2016 election campaign and in possible corruption; and (c) Schiff, as predictably as sunrise, ruled the GOP’s witnesses irrelevant.

In point of fact, the witnesses that Republicans seek to call are entirely relevant to what would be at issue in an impeachment trial, to wit: Is any misconduct by the president alleged in an article of impeachment sufficiently egregious that he should be removed from power?

But, see, a grand jury is not a trial. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/private-speech-bolton-suggests-some-trump-s-foreign-policy-decisions-n1080651

The former national security director was especially critical of the president’s handling of Turkey, according to multiple sources present for his remarks.

Former national security adviser John Bolton derided President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law during a private speech last week and suggested his former boss’ approach to U.S. policy on Turkey is motivated by personal or financial interests, several people who were present for the remarks told NBC News.

According to six people who were there, Bolton also questioned the merits of Trump applying his business acumen to foreign policy, saying such issues can’t be approached like the win-or-lose edict that drives real estate deals: When one deal doesn’t work, you move on to the next.

The description was part of a broader portrait Bolton outlined of a president who lacks an understanding of the interconnected nature of relationships in foreign policy and the need for consistency, these people said.

Bolton has kept a low public profile since he left the administration on Sept. 10, and efforts by Democrats to have him testify in the House impeachment inquiry into the president have stalled. But his pointed comments, at a private gathering last Wednesday at Morgan Stanley’s global investment event in Miami, painted a dark image of a president and his family whose potential personal gain is at the heart of decision-making, according to people who were present for his remarks.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/11/son-of-convicted-weather-underground-cop-killers-raised-by-ayers-and-dohrn-elected-da-in-san-francisco/

The son of Weather Underground domestic terrorists convicted of felony murder for their role in the Brinks armored car robbery in 1981, has won a tightly contested race for district attorney in San Francisco.

Chesa Boudin won after campaigning to reform the the criminal justice system in a city already known for having a very liberal criminal justice system.

In October of 1981, Boudin’s parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, joined other members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brink’s armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York.

While in the process of stealing $1.6 million from the armored car, the self-professed revolutionaries killed Sgt. Edward Grady, Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown, and Brinks guard Peter Paige, as well as wounded Paige’s partner Joseph Trombino.

Paige and Trombino were shot during the first shootout at the mall. When the police caught up to the U-Haul truck with David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin in the front seats, they weren’t sure they had the right vehicle because the suspects had been described as black, while the occupants of this truck were white. This was a deliberate part of the plan, designed to fool the police.

When officers approached the truck with their guns drawn, Boudin feigned innocence and pleaded with them to put their guns down. Once they dropped their guard and lowered their guns, “six men armed with automatic weapons and wearing body armor emerged from the back of the truck and began firing upon the four police officers.”

Officer Brown was hit repeatedly by rifle rounds and collapsed on the ground. One robber then walked up to his prone body and fired several more shots into him with a 9mm handgun, ensuring his death. Keenan was shot in the leg, but managed to duck behind a tree and return fire.

https://spectator.org/the-radicalizing-of-eric-ciaramella/

While the lawyers representing Eric Ciaramella, the alleged “whistleblower” in the Trump impeachment fiasco, describe him as having spent his entire career in “apolitical civil servant positions,” the truth is that Eric Ciaramella has been involved in radical political behavior throughout his life — including his years at Yale.

In fact, long before he was digging up dirt with the DNC’s Alexandra Chalupa about President Trump’s mythical collusion with Russia, Ciaramella was involved in leading a protest over what he believed was the poor treatment of Bassam Frangieh, a radical professor of Arabic studies at Yale. On April 15, 2005, then first-year Yale student Ciaramella dressed in all white to lead a contingent of 10 similarly dressed first-year Yale Arabic students to the offices of the provost and the president of the university to demand that the university provide an incentive to encourage Frangieh to stay at Yale. The students were unhappy because Frangieh had decided earlier in the school year to accept a tenure-track position at the University of Delaware.

Ciaramella helped to organize a campus-wide letter-writing campaign on behalf of Frangieh, which “identified flaws in the administration’s policies regarding language instructors at Yale.” According to the Yale Daily News, Bassam Frangieh was looking for an opportunity to teach more of the classes that he would like to teach. One of the protesters said, “His specialty is Arabic language and literature, and he wanted to teach some classes on style and poetry.” A week after the protest, Yale’s administration announced that they had “upped the ante with an offer competitive enough to keep one of its star language instructors from leaving” Yale.

It is likely that Bassam Frangieh wanted to use literature to be able to shape Yale’s undergraduates’ views on what he called the “heroic Arabic poet-martyrs” battling against the unjust occupation in Palestine. In 2000, Frangieh published a chapter romanticizing terrorism in a book entitled Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature. Ciaramella’s favorite Yale Arabic professor praised the heroism of Abd al Rahim Mahmud, the “first Arab poet-martyr.” Mahmud, who is often used to inspire terrorism and suicide bombings among Arab youth, was described by Frangieh as “carrying his soul in the palm of his hand” as he “threw himself into the cavern of death.” Romanticizing his terrorism, Frangieh recalls Mahmud’s “premature death at age 35, fighting a battle in an attempt to keep Palestine free from foreign occupation, [which] brought dignity to the hearts of his people. Through his death he eliminated the gap between words and action … he shall remain a symbol of heroism and pride for his people.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/schiff-denies-republican-requests-testimony-key-joseph-klein/

Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 65, dealing with impeachments in the House of Representatives and trials in the Senate, that during the impeachment phase there may often be “animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He hoped the Senate would be able to determine guilt or innocence and serve impartially “between an INDIVIDUAL accused, and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, pressing hard for the House to formally become President Trump’s “accusers” and hand over articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial, is displaying the worst traits that Alexander Hamilton described.

The latest example is Schiff’s refusal to let the American people hear from the whistleblower, whose complaint containing a secondhand account of President Trump’s July 25, 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave rise to the impeachment inquiry against President Trump in the first place. The whistleblower’s testimony is “redundant and unnecessary,” Schiff said in a letter to Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes rejecting House Republicans’ request for the whistleblower to testify during the public phase of the impeachment inquiry hearings. Schiff claimed that the impeachment inquiry already “has gathered an ever-growing body of evidence — from witnesses and documents, including the president’s own words in his July 25 call record — that not only confirms but far exceeds the initial information in the whistleblower’s complaint.”

As usual, Schiff is lying to rationalize the extreme one-sided way he is conducting his sham hearings. Originally, Schiff himself had said the whistleblower would appear before Congress “very soon,” but changed his mind after reports surfaced of the whistleblower’s contacts with members of Schiff’s staff before filing the complaint. The whistleblower’s testimony as to the identity of his or her sources is highly relevant to ensuring a fair proceeding and making a complete record for the Senate to consider as the trier of fact. So are the whistleblower’s biases and motives for coming forward and filing a complaint after having first contacted members of Schiff’s staff. Who did the whistleblower talk to, what did they say to the whistleblower that became the basis for the whistleblower’s complaint, and where did the whistleblower’s sources tell the whistleblower they got their information about the July 25th call?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/will-health-care-federalism-ever-have-a-chance/

A Democrat proposes a mirror image of conservative health-care thinking.

R epresentative Ro Khanna (D-CALIFORNIA DISTRICT 17) just introduced a bill whose premise conveys a sense of déjà vu. It would allow states to take the health-care money they already receive from numerous federal programs and use it to provide health care in the way they think best, rather than the way Washington prescribes.

It’s funny, because Khanna is a Democrat who openly admits he has no chance of passing his bill under a Republican president, and the last time we encountered this notion, it was in a Republican bill with zero Democratic support. Both sides want to give freedom to the states, but they can’t seem to agree on how.

Khanna’s bill is a pretty clean illustration of “federalism for me, but not for thee.” The bill offers states access to an amazing amount of federal funding, including the money that currently flows into their borders via Obamacare, Medicaid, and even Medicare. The government would waive a lot of regulations for these states, too.

But in order to get that leeway, states would have to pursue a very specific, very lefty goal: a single-payer program that provides comprehensive coverage to 95 percent of the population within five years and the rest of the population soon after that. The bill’s drafters seem blissfully unaware that red states might want more freedom to experiment, too — and that there might be Republican votes to be had granting them some.

For all their many flaws, Republicans weren’t so selfish when they floated their own most recent attempt at federalism, the Graham-Cassidy proposal that went down in flames about two years ago. A major feature of this plan was that it replaced Obamacare’s funding with block grants to states that they could use to meet their own health-care needs — even if that meant single-payer.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/impeachment-question-trump-andrew-mccarthy

Is it an impeachable offense?

That is the question of the hour. On “Fox News Sunday,” Chris Wallace pressed it on Republican Congressman Will Hurd of Texas. It is a question every Republican supporter of President Trump should be prepared to answer. Democrats, by contrast, determined that the president was impeachable before he ever darkened the Oval Office door; it’s not worth asking them since their answer preexisted any real or imagined occasion for posing the question.

It is, of course, the question that must be asked. That does not make it a fair question. It is unfair because it assumes a fact that is not in evidence, namely: that we have a working definition of an impeachable offense on which there is agreement – or at least something close to consensus. We don’t.

In fact, even that explanation of the problem is misleading. To have a “working definition” in this context implies that we are dealing with a legal reality – as if the question were, Is it a contract?  Or, Is it a homicide? A contract or a homicide is a legal designation with a settled definition applicable in all circumstances.

President Donald Trump kicked off New York City’s Veterans Day Tribute on Monday by saying the nation’s veterans “risked everything for us. Now it is our duty to serve and protect them every single day of our lives.”

Trump spoke at the opening of the 100th annual parade organized by the United War Veterans Council in Madison Square Park. He is the first sitting president to accept the group’s invitation to speak at the event.

As Trump spoke, more than 100 protesters gathered and could be heard with whistles and booing. Some chanted “lock him up” and “shame, shame, shame.”

Trump told the crowd that the nation’s veterans often came face to face with evil and did not back down.

“You returned from war and you never forgot your friends who didn’t return,” Trump said. “But your greatest tribute of all is the way you lived your lives in the years since.”

Trump also used the event to tout the strength of the U.S. military and the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, saying “al-Baghdadi is dead. His second in charge is dead. We have our eyes on number 3.”

Trump has been a longtime supporter of the parade. The New York Times reported that during the 1990s he pledged $200,000 and offered to raise money from friends in exchange for being named the parade’s grand marshal.

Trump is a lifelong New Yorker but recently changed his official residence to Florida , complaining about his treatment by the heavily Democratic city’s elected officials.