RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-poised-to-mark-its-first-record-in-about-four-months-mcdonalds-shares-set-to-fall-2019-11-04?mod=home-page

The Dow Jones Industrial Average joined other major indexes in record territory Monday, with stocks propelled higher as optimism about a near-term U.S.-China trade resolution and a third-quarter earnings season that has been better than feared buoyed sentiment on Wall Street.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/john-durham-last-trusted-prosecutor-in-washington/

John Durham is the legendary lawman digging into how the intelligence probe of Donald Trump started.

John Durham may be the most consequential and least known figure in Washington right now.

In May, U.S. attorney general William Barr selected Durham, a longtime prosecutor with a résumé so sterling it nearly glows, to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether it was properly predicated. Some Trump fans believe there was a vast effort by a “deep state” of high-ranking intelligence and law-enforcement officials to smear Trump or hinder his campaign by creating a perception of corrupt ties to Russia. In late October, the New York Times quoted unnamed sources who said that Durham’s probe had officially become a criminal investigation, meaning he now has the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury, and to file criminal charges.

Since he is an attorney general appointed by President Trump, almost every decision from William Barr is criticized by Democrats as a partisan abuse of law-enforcement powers. But the appointment of Durham received no backlash, and in fact received praise far and wide.

Who is Durham, this rare-as-a-unicorn figure who can reassure lawmakers, talking heads, and court-watchers on both sides of the aisle, in an era when everything seems destined to turn into a loud partisan food fight?

To say Durham is tight-lipped is an understatement; he lets his courtroom arguments speak for him and rarely talks to reporters at all. Those who have covered him for years — or, more accurately, tried to cover him — say that when he does run into reporters, he is cordial but uninformative, and almost never on the record. In Durham’s questionnaire for the Senate while awaiting confirmation to be a U.S. Attorney, he was asked to list his written work. He answered that he had never written or published any books, articles, reports, or letters to the editor. (The Senate confirmed him unanimously, with home-state senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) calling him “a fierce, fair prosecutor” who “dedicated his life to public service and the pursuit of justice.”) Durham is nicknamed, inevitably, “the Bull,” and his reputation makes clear he doesn’t take any of it from anyone.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-tax-returns-second-circuit-rules-against-president/

No Surprise: The Second Circuit in NYC clears the way for the president’s accountants to turn over records relating to his dealings more than a decade ago.

Today’s Trump v. Vance decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, holding that President Trump’s tax-return information must be turned over to state prosecutors, is no surprise.

As the court relates, a New York State grand jury is investigating the circumstances surrounding the “‘hush money’ payments made to two women” — a reference, no doubt, to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stefanie Clifford (a.k.a. “Stormy Daniels”), who claim to have had flings with Donald Trump a decade before he was elected president. In the course of the investigation, a subpoena was issued to the Trump organization for related “documents and communications.” Prosecutors interpreted this subpoena to cover the president’s personal tax returns from the relevant period (June 2015 through mid-September 2018). The president’s private counsel objected, and the Trump organization (which is wholly owned by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, of which the president is grantor and beneficiary) has not produced any such tax documents.

Meanwhile, prosecutors served another subpoena, this time on Mazars USA LLP. That is the accounting firm that possesses financial records pertaining to the president’s personal and business dealings. The Mazars subpoena covers a period stretching back to 2011. It explicitly demands production of any “tax returns and related schedules, in draft, as-filed, and amended form.”

The president discouraged Mazars from complying. He claimed sweeping immunity from state criminal process while he is in office, and thus sought a declaratory judgment that the subpoena was invalid, along with an injunction barring the district attorney from taking any action to enforce the subpoena.

That was the claim rejected today by the unanimous three-judge panel.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/03/the-military-intelligence-complex/

Many retired high-ranking military officers have gone beyond legitimately articulating why President Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to smear him personally or speak openly of removing their commander-in-chief from office. And the media and the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment are with them every step of the way.

Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the melodramatic sense of current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.

We know from a variety of disinterested watchdog institutions and foundations that the media has offered 90 percent negative coverage of the Trump Administration. CNN in its anti-Trump zeal has ruined its brand by serial fabrications and firings of its marquee biased reporters. 

An entire array of CNN journalists and analysts either has resigned, been fired, retired, forced to offer retractions, or been disgraced either for peddling ad hominem crude attacks on Trump, displaying unprofessional behavior, concocting or repeating false stories, engaging in obscene commentary, or being refuted, including but not limited at times to Reza Aslan, Carl Bernstein, Donna Brazile, James Clapper, Marshall Cohen, Candy Crowley, Kathy Griffin, Julie Joffe, Michael Hayden, Suzanne Malveaux, Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Julian Zelizer, and teams such as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, and Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.

About every month or so, a Hollywood or entertainment personage offers a new assassination scenario of shooting, torching, stabbing, beating, blowing up, caging, or lynching the elected president. 

Likewise, the country witnesses about every six weeks a new “turning point,” “bombshell,” “walls are closing in” effort to subvert the Trump presidency.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/04/trumps_true_crime_he_made_people_laugh_at_congress_141643.html

“Let’s hope some Democrats and Republicans will earn their way into a sequel to “Profiles in Courage” by standing against the naked power grab of Democrats who wanted to overturn an election and eliminate an “Unacceptable President.”

Since impeachment is a political rarity, it is not unexpected that analysts would seek out the few parallels from U.S. history to put in context the assault being waged against President Trump by the Democrats. It has been argued that Trump is not being afforded the same rights by the opposition party in Congress  that were extended to his impeachment predecessors Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But, while significant, those are not the most relevant precedents.

To draw a more apt comparison to the political persecution of Trump, we need to go back to the first actual impeachment of a president, which happened in 1868, when Andrew Johnson was harassed by his Republican opponents in Congress, in part because he did not agree with their policies on Reconstruction of the South following the Civil War.

The meat of the impeachment hinged on Johnson’s rejection of the Tenure of Office Act, which added to the Senate’s constitutional power to confirm presidential appointments by also denying the president the right to fire Cabinet members once they had been confirmed. To modern sensibilities, this seems absurd and unworkable, and so too did it seem to Johnson. He fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had been appointed by Lincoln, and promptly found himself facing  charges of committing an impeachable offense.

Johnson was a Tennessee Democrat who had been selected by Lincoln — the first Republican president — as his second-term running mate to symbolize the coming together of the nation as the Civil War approached its end. Most of the Republicans in Congress – they proudly called themselves “Radical” Republicans –  did not share Lincoln’s confidence in Johnson, who was an unpolished populist in the same vein as Donald Trump. Moreover, they thought Johnson should never have become president in the first place, much like Democrats’ attitude toward Trump today. Lincoln wasn’t supposed to die. By removing Johnson from office, the Republicans were just restoring the natural order and disposing of someone they considered an accidental president.

Whether they had used the Tenure of Office Act specifically to entrap Johnson or not, it had that effect. Johnson believed that the new law was an unconstitutional abridgment of his authority, and so he ignored the law in order to challenge it. He knew that Congress was trying to neutralize him because he opposed the Republican plan for Reconstruction.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15120/weaponizing-impeachment

To be impeached, a president must commit a crime (misdemeanor is a species of crime) and the commission of that crime must also constitute an abuse of office. An abuse of office without an underlying crime is a political sin, but not an impeachable offense.

This very issue was debated at the Constitutional Convention, where one delegate proposed “maladministration” as the criteria for impeachment and removal of a president. James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, strongly objected on the ground that so vague and open-ended a criterion would have the president serve at the will of Congress and turn us from a Republic with a strong president into a parliamentary democracy in which the chief executive can be removed by a simple vote of no confidence. Instead, the Convention adopted strict prerequisites for impeachment: treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Congress is not above the law. It is bound by what the Framers accepted and cannot now apply the criterion the framers explicitly rejected.

Most important, misusing the impeachment power in a partisan manner would pose, in the words of Hamilton, “the greatest danger” to our Constitution.

The constitutional power to impeach a duly elected president was intended by the Framers of the Constitution as a neutral, non-partisan tool of last resort to be used against only criminal incumbents in extreme cases. It is now being deployed as a partisan weapon that can be used routinely against presidents of a different party from those who control the House of Representatives.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wrong-impeachers-11572649090

Donald Trump keeps it simple, and likely too simple given Ukraine’s opaque and corrupt politics, when he says Joe Biden arranged the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into a company that employed his son.

You can find quotes on both sides from Ukrainians, but all have axes to grind. And why was Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko so resistant to the prosecutor’s firing that Mr. Biden had to threaten to hold back $1 billion in aid? Never explained. Some reports say the prosecutor was actually using the threat of investigating Burisma as a lever to extort something of value from regime colleagues—which makes a certain sense.

Mr. Biden can claim he was uninfluenced by his son’s employment. But his staff knew about the job. The Ukrainians knew. America’s European allies knew. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund knew. All knew that Burisma had to be pussyfooted around to avoid causing a scandal for Mr. Biden that might mess up the Obama administration’s ability to sustain support for the shaky regime.

This is what made Hunter Biden worth the money Burisma paid him to sit on its board between April 2014 and April 2019. And whatever the reason for firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin, it was decidedly not with the goal of making trouble for Burisma.

Until a few weeks ago, the press understood the implicit corruption of U.S. foreign policy involved here. The facts themselves may not be disqualifying for Mr. Biden, but the sight of him endlessly prevaricating could be. And the story is not going away because Democrats have put Ukraine at the center of their impeachment spectacle.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/02/doing-the-impeachment-math/

Welcome to the new and improved Get Trump Daily, special impeachment edition. A couple of days ago, on Halloween, a cute kid of about 7 came to our door dressed up as a dinosaur. It was a pretty nifty costume, green with spindling protuberances, tail with spiky-things, and bits on the head that expanded in a showy way when the budding tyrannosaur pressed a button.

This had two effects: One, you could tell that it was supposed to be scary, so it was a cue to say, “Oooh!” and “Ah! That’s scary!” Two: it made the costume’s occupant feel important, and I think that was probably the major effect.

“Trick or treat.” We gave the kid some candy and he toddled off down the street to impress the neighbors and, even more, himself.

If this were a story by Stephen King, maybe the kid might have been an evil demon and his expanding dinosaur head would have devoured us. But he wasn’t and we weren’t, which, frankly, is what we expected.

Of course, we might have been wrong.

I think that the Halloween impeachment show is a lot like that tyke’s costume. “Impeachment” sounds scary. As Kryptonite is to Superman, so impeachment is to the president. It’s just about the only thing that can bring him down. So I suppose it is not surprising that you can practically smell the self-importance oozing out of Adam Schiff. Like our little dinosaur, he is mighty impressed with himself.

By the Numbers

But “impeachment” means many things. Until 15 minutes ago, I’d wager, many people believed it was a synonym for “remove from office.” But with the House shouting “impeach him, impeach him, impeach him” in tones more or less like those that emanated from that angry mob which sided with Barabbas in front of Pontius Pilate, lo, these many years ago, we have all been reminded that while the House may bring articles of impeachment, it takes two-thirds of the Senate to convict the accused and remove him from office.

Two-thirds. I was told there would be no math, but I am pretty sure that means 67 senators, when 53 of them are now Republicans. According to my abacus, that means that 20 Republican senators would have to jump ship and vote with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to remove the president from office. How likely is that?

Given the popularity of Donald Trump among Republicans, another way of asking that question is: Are there really 20 Republican senators who would commit political suicide in order to please Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Adam Schiff?

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

The so-called “whistleblower” (who dd not follow the protocol necessary to qualify for whistleblower protections) could well be facing serious legal jeopardy.  Sean Davis writes in the Federalist:

Testimony by Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Michael Atkinson revealed that the whistleblower, whom Real Clear Investigations has identified as former National Security Council (NSC) staffer and current Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Eric Ciaramella, concealed his contacts with Schiff from the ICIG in his complaint form. If the anti-Trump complainant did, in fact, refuse to disclose previous disclosures of his allegations to Congress or the news media, he could be subject to felony criminal penalties for making false statements. The final portion of the whistleblower form requires whistleblowers to attest under penalty of perjury that they have neither misstated nor concealed material facts in their complaints.

“I certify that all of the statements made in this complaint (including any continuation pages) are true, complete, and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief,” whistleblowers are required to attest under penalty of perjury. “I understand that, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. 1001, a false statement or concealment of a material fact is a criminal offense punishable by a fine of up to $10,000, imprisonment for up to five years, or both.”

Schiff has refused to detail the breadth of his interactions with the anti-Trump complainant or explain why he lied about his staff’s collusion with the complainant. Ratcliffe told The Federalist that Schiff’s behavior was an “outrageous offense to legal due process.”