RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/04/retired-army-officer-remembers-lt-col-vindman-as-partisan-democrat-who-ridiculed-america/

A retired Army officer who worked with Democrat “star witness” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman in Grafenwoher, Germany, claims Vindman “really talked up” President Barack Obama and ridiculed America and Americans in front of Russian military officers.

In an eye-opening thread on Twitter last week, retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Jim Hickman said that he “verbally reprimanded” Vindman after he heard some of his derisive remarks for himself. “Do not let the uniform fool you,” Hickman wrote. “He is a political activist in uniform.”

Hickman’s former boss at the Joint Multinational Simulation Center in Grafenwoehr has since gone on the record to corroborate his story.

Hickman, 52, says he’s a disabled wounded warrior who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and who received numerous medals, including the Purple Heart.

The retired officer said that Vindman, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Ukraine, made fun of the United States to the point that it made other soldiers “uncomfortable.” For example, Hickman told American Greatness that he heard Vindman call Americans “rednecks”—a word that needed to be translated for the Russians. He said they all had a big laugh at America’s expense.

Vindman, who serves on the National Security Council (NSC), appeared last week before the House Intelligence Committee and testified that he’d had “concerns” about the July phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Vindman’s testimony rested on his negative opinions of the call, rather than any new facts about the call.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/so_vindman_was_ridiculing_rednecks_and_sneering_about_american_exceptionalism_to_russian_officers.html

Alexander Vindman, the vaunted National Security Council aide who recently gave Congress his haughty opinion about President Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine, wasn’t the simon-pure official just concerned about national security that he portrayed himself as earlier.

Turns out he’s quite a partisan piece of work.

Over at American Greatness, Debra Heine found the tweets of one of Vindman’s military superiors, a retired lieutenant colonel who had no choice but to verbally reprimand him.

A retired Army officer who worked with Democrat “star witness” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman in Grafenwoher, Germany, claims Vindman “really talked up” President Barack Obama and ridiculed America and Americans in front of Russian military officers.

In an eye-opening thread on Twitter last week, retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Jim Hickman said that he “verbally reprimanded” Vindman after he heard some of his derisive remarks for himself. “Do not let the uniform fool you,” Hickman wrote. “He is a political activist in uniform.”

His series of tweets, soon after Vindman offered his anti-Trump impeachment testimony to Rep. Adam Schiff’s panel, were confirmed and corroborated.  The story Heine put together from the tweets ran like this:

He was apologetic of American culture, laughed about Americans not being educated or worldly, & really talked up Obama & globalism to the point of (sic) uncomfortable.

He would speak w/the Russian Soldiers & laugh as if at the expense of the US personnel. It was so uncomfortable & unprofessional, one of the GS [civil service]employees came & told me everything above. I walked over & sat w/in earshot of Vindman, & sure enough, all was confirmed.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/05/real-talk-impeachment-is-going-poorly-for-democrats-and-the-media/

Inside of newsrooms, broadcast studios, and Twitter, impeachment is going according to plan. Outside of those bubbles, it’s not.

Impeachment is going so poorly for the media and other Democrats that “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd was forced to broadcast false information to support it.

A graphic was posted on Sunday’s show that purported to identify how many people in the president’s party voted in support of an impeachment inquiry in the cases of Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. It accurately noted that 31 Democrats voted in favor of impeachment proceedings for Clinton. But it inaccurately claimed that a single Republican had voted in favor of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment rules last week.

There are multiple problems with this graphic. For one thing, zero Republicans voted with House Democrats last week. Zero point zero. Zilch. Nada. None. For another, Todd’s team is hiding the bipartisan nature of the opposition to the vote last week. Not only did not a single Republican vote with Democrats, two Democrats voted with Republicans in opposition.

Todd knows that no Republicans voted for impeachment, despite the graphic he put up on national television. In fact, he said during the show, “I have one with an asterisk here. I don’t know what you do with Justin Amash. It’s not a zero. At the same time, he’s not a Republican anymore.”

I know what you do with that, Chuck. You don’t lie and call him a Republican. Todd himself gave Amash national media attention for leaving the Republican Party in dramatic fashion, interviewing him two weeks prior. In the first six seconds of the interview, he noted twice that Amash was not a Republican.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-envoy-trump-ukraine-transcripts

Former U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, according to transcripts released Tuesday, pushed back on the claim that President Trump sought to withhold a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky until Kiev committed to investigate allegations concerning the 2016 election — while also denying that Trump was seeking “dirt” on former Vice President Joe Biden.

The deposition transcripts, though, also reflect officials’ concerns about the involvement of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in seeking politically related investigations out of Ukraine. Further, they offer varying accounts of whether a quid pro quo of some kind — involving either a meeting or the release of U.S. military aid — may have been presented.

One of the most significant revelations from Tuesday’s release is that E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland revised his prior testimony to say that he told a top Ukrainian official that U.S. aid would likely not resume until the country issues a corruption statement — a revelation that was quickly hailed by Democrats of proof of the quid pro quo they have been alleging took place.

Other sections presented a muddier picture. In the transcript of his closed-door deposition last month with lawmakers conducting the impeachment probe, Volker was asked if Trump withheld or delayed a meeting with Zelensky absent a pledge to probe concerns Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/05/the_democrats_high-risk_g

The Democrats’ activist base considers Donald Trump fundamentally unfit to hold office. Their impeachment drive is really about this damning judgment, not about any specific act such as withholding Ukrainian aid or wanting to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. They say Trump is erratic, narcissistic, self-serving, and unforgivably gauche. He cozies up to dictators and would like to become one himself. Every day, he tramples the presidency’s historic norms. Surely the voters who put him there made a catastrophic error, or, rather, the antiquated Electoral College did. In short, Trump is not just a bad president — the worst in modern history — he is an illegitimate and dangerous one, at home and abroad.

Their harsh view is no masquerade. It is sincere, deeply held, and shared by most elected Democrats. Many, perhaps most, career civil servants agree and consider the president only nominally their boss. That’s why they consider it their constitutional duty to hold him in check. That’s why former heads of the CIA openly praised the “Deep State,” why former FBI Director James Comey wanted his agents to monitor the president in the White House itself. If that means targeting Trump and his key aides for disguised FBI interviews or leaking classified phone calls, so be it. The fight over the Deep State is partly about this profound distrust of Trump (and his distrust of them) and partly about the president’s rising opposition to a century of progressive legislation, executive orders, and court decisions, which grant extensive power to government bureaucrats.

This revulsion is the backdrop to the Democrats’ impeachment effort and the earlier appointment of a special counsel. The crucial point is this: Democrats see the actions they have investigated for three years less as specific crimes and more as steadily accumulating evidence of Trump’s unfitness for office and his repeated violation of his oath, as they understand it. “Democrats of all stripes look at Donald Trump’s business and personal history and see a man who serially does not follow laws and therefore should not be president,” said one well-informed Democrat. For his party, “Ukraine is a big deal because it confirms this view.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/04/looking-for-fame-and-fortune-become-a-coup-plotter/

As the coup-plotters sell books, give high-priced speeches, and toil as political pundits, their victims struggle to regain their lost finances, reputations, and careers.

During the screening of a new film about the 2016 presidential election, one celebrity earned a standing ovation from the Hollywood crowd: Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and top Trump antagonist now tasked with impeaching the president.

In a side-splitting puff piece published in the New York Times over the weekend, Schiff is portrayed as the latest “it-boy” in Tinseltown thanks to his role playing the hero in the Beltway reality show based on crushing the villain in the White House. Legendary producer Norman Lear called Schiff an “American hero.” Fans grasped for his hand. Actress Patricia Arquette swooned at the sight of the would-be Trump-slayer.

“At home in his district, which stretches from West Hollywood to Pasadena and north to the San Gabriel Mountains, Mr. Schiff is well acquainted with the celebrity lifestyle,” reporters Sheryl Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos cooed.

Schiff, the ballyhoo goes, is quite comfortable as Hollywood’s hottest ticket because he has cool friends in high places and once toyed with being a screenwriter.

“In some ways, he’s become the chief storyteller of this drama-filled political moment,” Washington Post reporter Ben Terris wrote in yet another lengthy Schiff profile on November 1. “Can he give the Trump presidency a Hollywood ending?”

Chris Farrell is a former counterintelligence case officer. For the past 20 years, he has served as the Director of Investigations & Research for Judicial Watch. The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15127/corrupt-impeachment-resolution

We are not witnessing a legitimate impeachment process, and certainly not any form of justice recognizable in America since the Massachusetts Spring of 1693.

Will United States Attorney John Durham empanel a grand jury and indict anyone? What of the “journalists” in the overtly partisan American press corps? Will a brave US Senator dare to ask: “What did President Obama know, and when did he know it?”

While the House Intelligence Committee negligently fixates on carrying out their coup against the President, what are they missing from the real threats arrayed against our country?

November, the month signaling the approach of winter, brings the American public the promise of a bitter, dishonest, political spectacle — casting a poisonous gloom over the traditional winter holidays celebrating faith and family. Worse — the long-term consequences may irreparably damage our constitutional republic.

House Resolution 660 is a false and maliciously dishonest legislative maneuver by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, intended retroactively to inoculate Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), et al. from their earlier “inquiry” abuses, and possible criminality. Criminality? Yes — abuse of power on a grand scale, as well as the violation of individual rights and constitutional due process guarantees can be criminal. Speaker Pelosi’s unilateral declaration on September 24, 2019, of an “official inquiry,” now bears the phony, partisan imprimatur of the House of Representatives, by a slim margin of 232-196.

We are not witnessing a legitimate impeachment process, and certainly not any form of justice recognizable in America since the Massachusetts Spring of 1693. Let’s examine the particular dishonest elements of Pelosi’s “Open and transparent investigative proceedings by the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence” — that’s Section 2 of her Resolution.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/04/bureaucrats-hurt-feelings-on-foreign-policy-dont-justify-impeachment/

Privileged bureaucrats are so high on their self-righteousness that they actually think they’re protecting the Constitution by obstructing the foreign policy of the elected president.

In recent testimony during his confirmation hearing, the nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Russia said, “Soliciting investigations into a domestic political opponent — I don’t think that would be in accord with our values.”

Never? Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Remember when Donald Trump said he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and still maintain his support? Suppose a candidate for office did shoot somebody and the only witness was a Russian national who then hopped a plane back to Moscow.

Now suppose that the only way to prosecute this candidate would be for his political rival (the incumbent president) to request cooperation from Russia to extradite this material witness back to the United States to participate in a trial. Should he do it?

Partisanship Is the Deciding Factor

Obviously, in today’s climate, the answer depends on one critical fact: Whose side is the candidate on? If the candidate aligns with the left, then investigating a political opponent would be totally beyond the norms established by our cherished traditions. But if the candidate opposes the left, then the deep state will step in “to protect the country from that menace.”

You see, it’s perfectly fine for Hillary Clinton to use her campaign funds to hire foreign national Christopher Steele to investigate Trump using (probably made-up) Russian sources. And there’s nothing wrong with the FBI using those partisan Steele smears to investigate the Obama administration’s political opponent.

Crossfire Hurricane, the official operational title for the investigation, employed assistance from the British government and an Australian diplomat. So the left believes there’s nothing wrong with asking a foreign government for help to investigate a domestic political opponent — so long as that opponent is Trump. After all, “Nobody is above the law, not even Donald Trump.” But if the shoe ends up on the other foot and Trump is the one investigating, it’s a constitutional crisis!