RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/linking-incompatibles-is-the-lefts-stock-in-trade/

Any clear-sighted observer can see that America is now undergoing its most severe crisis of legitimacy since the Civil War of 1861-1865. The Democrat Party has gone hard left, the education system is indoctrinating the young with a socialist syllabus as extensive and invariant as the Nazi curriculum of the 1930s, the media are irremediably corrupt, the pervasive ideology of “social justice” ensures multiple miscarriages of basic justice, an activist judiciary defies constitutional legality, and violence both rhetorical and actual has become the standard operating procedure of the New Totalitarians. The nation’s public institutions and government agencies are in full sedition mode, and the lawful tenure and authority of the President is under sustained attack. As David Goldman writes, correctly, President Trump is “fighting a mutiny by the U.S. intelligence community. If the mutineers succeed, it will be the end of the republic.”

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, much lament and detailed analysis among conservative thinkers and writers over the current state of affairs. The problem is that pragmatic and meaningful proposals to rectify a deteriorating social, cultural and political situation are hard to come by.

Normality tends to flinch in the face of reality. It is, after all, a natural inclination to dismiss or underestimate the premonition of catastrophe until, one day, it actually happens. Volcanoes do erupt. Occasionally an asteroid will plow into the earth. A revolution will destroy a nation from one year to the next. Foresight and preparation can avoid or at least mitigate disaster. Better to bite the bullet before the bullet strikes, and to act with courage and determination to avert a looming catastrophe.

Any effort at pushback is regularly met by the tactic of the false analogy, in this case by comparing justified anti-Marxist resistance with fascist bigotry, government oppression, or anti-liberal intimidation. The tactic is highly effective since decent people—and most conservatives I know are decent people—tend to recoil from being associated with repressive regimes, ideologies of hatred, and anti-democratic attitudes. The taint of the disreputable, no matter how apocryphal, is an extremely powerful deterrent. Clarity and fortitude must prevail against the miasma of spurious imputation deployed by the left.

Of course, the left will use the false analogy not only to denigrate its opponents but to justify its chosen paladins. The monstrous fanatic and genocidal terrorist Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS and torturer and killer of thousands, becomes for The Washington Post an “austere religious scholar.” Similarly, Antifa, a violent ideologically-driven fascist cult and the most recent incarnation of Hitler’s Brownshirts, Germany’s Baader Meinhoff, and Italy’s Red Brigades, can pass itself off as anti-fascist.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/468483-a-partisan-impeachment-vote-is-exactly-what-the-framers-feared

The House vote to establish procedures for a possible impeachment of President Trump, along party lines with two Democrats opposing and no Republicans favoring, was exactly was Alexander Hamilton feared in discussing the impeachment provisions laid out in the Constitution.

Hamilton warned of the “greatest danger” that the decision to move forward with impeachment will “be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He worried that the tools of impeachment would be wielded by the “most cunning or most numerous factions” and lack the “requisite neutrality toward those whose conduct would be the subject of scrutiny.”

It is almost as if this founding father were looking down at the House vote from heaven and describing what transpired this week. Impeachment is an extraordinary tool to be used only when the constitutional criteria are met. These criteria are limited and include only “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Hamilton described these as being “of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

His use of the term “political” has been widely misunderstood in history. It does not mean that the process of impeachment and removal should be political in the partisan sense. Hamilton distinctly distinguished between the nature of the constitutional crimes, denoting them as political, while insisting that the process for impeachment and removal must remain scrupulously neutral and nonpartisan among members of Congress.

Thus, no impeachment should ever move forward without bipartisan support. That is a tall order in our age of hyperpartisan politics in which party loyalty leaves little room for neutrality. Proponents of the House vote argue it is only about procedures and not about innocence or guilt, and that further investigation may well persuade some Republicans to place principle over party and to vote for impeachment, or some Democrats to vote against impeachment. While that is entirely possible, the House vote would seem to make such nonpartisan neutrality extremely unlikely.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/latest-impeachment-witness-contradicts-vindmans-claim-that-key-details-were-left-out-of-ukraine-call-transcript/

A senior White House official who listened to President Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky testified Thursday in a closed-door impeachment hearing that the White House did not omit any key details of the conversation from the publicly-released transcript.

The official, Tim Morrison, also told House lawmakers he did not think Trump discussed anything illegal on the call.

“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” Morrison said in remarks to Congress.

Morrison’s testimony contradicts that of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, who testified on Tuesday that he believes the White House omitted from the transcript Trump’s claim that recordings of vice president Joe Biden existed that implicated him in corrupt dealings.

During a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump asked the Ukrainian president to help the U.S. investigate allegations that Biden used his position as vice president to help Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings avoid a corruption probe soon after his son, Hunter Biden, was appointed to its board of directors. That phone conversation has become the crux of House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry against Trump.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-impeachment-vote-11572561408

The nation focused on the House this week, where Democrats voted Thursday to formalize an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Less noticed, but equally important, was the prebuttal on the Senate floor.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered Wednesday a speech devoted to the glaring deficiencies in the House impeachment proceedings. The Kentuckian excoriated it for its lack of fairness and transparency, and listed the affronts to due process: secret hearings, the refusal to let Republicans call witnesses or obtain answers, the exclusion of Mr. Trump’s legal counsel from the proceedings. And he noted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s resolution would include no guarantee of a remedy. The Democratic approach, Mr. McConnell said, amounts to: “No due process now, maybe some later, but only if we feel like it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

After preparing a failed bill of particulars against the president—Russian election collusion, porn star payoffs, income tax evasion, obstruction of justice, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the Charlottesville rally, the two Michaels (Avenatti and Cohen), Deutsche Bank, Alfa-Bank, and Orange Man Bad—Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) finally has Trump dead-to-rights: A quid pro quo without the quid, the pro, or the quo.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday largely along party lines, with only two Democratic defectors, to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, will manage the initial stage of the sham inquiry; hearings are expected to begin in a few weeks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), departing from tradition, handed off the impeachment grunt work to her most dependable grunt rather than to the House Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi pleaded the Democrats’ case on the morning of Hallowe’en, titillating her caucus of ghouls, witches, tramps, and thieves with tales about the scary monster in the White House.

“Sadly, this is not any cause for any glee or comfort,” Pelosi assured her gleeful Democratic colleagues. “This is something very solemn, something prayerful.”

But ringing in the ears of every Democrat and NeverTrumper across the land were the iconic words of #TheResistance hero Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Mich.): “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!” You will recall that the freshman Democratic congresswoman from Michigan didn’t waste any time before uttering that profundity. She shouted it on January 4, 2019, just hours after she was sworn in.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/whistleblower_eric_ciaramella_is_this_the_best_theyve_got.html

Well, Happy Halloween.

The whistleblower is now pretty well outed by investigative journalist Paul Sperry, and it’s underwhelming.  He’s been identified as one Eric Ciaramella, 33, prep school grad, Yalie, Obama backwash, political operative, and fanatic Trump-hater.  Hardly the Mister Probity concerned about national security that’s been painted.

Sperry did the digging but pointed out that that the man’s identity had been an open secret in the Beltway, with mainstream media doing their darnedest to keep his name from being attached to his rather spectacular charges.

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Ciaramella’s name should be out there because it’s relevant whether all the hearsay in his legally couched charge was actually made in good faith or was just another leftist smear job under cover of government mechanisms, same as the Steele dossier.

Based on Sperry’s digging, it certainly looks like the latter. 

From Sperry’s reporting, we learn that this creep wasn’t trying to make anything better within government, which is what whistleblower protections are for.  He was just another leftist trying to overturn the 2016 election, and it dated from way back, starting with his propensity to leak.

In May 2017, Ciaramella went “outside his chain of command,” according to a former NSC co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had phoned the president a week earlier.

Contents of the email appear to have ended up in the media, which reported Trump boasted to the Russian officials about firing Comey, whom he allegedly called “crazy, a real nut job.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/31/the-rules-of-the-democrat-backed-impeachment-inquiry-are-stacked-against-trump/

House Democrats rubber-stamped an ad hoc anti-Trump investigation Thursday aimed at overturning the results of the 2016 election after the spectacular failure of the grand Russian collusion hoax collapsing earlier this year.

The text of the resolution lays the framework for the official impeachment proceedings going forward led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has been operating an illegitimate process since Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced the beginning an investigation in September.

Despite Democrat claims that the resolution would mean an open and transparent process, House members are still holding hearings in secret even after its passage.

The Democrat passed rules for impeachment also bar Republican lawmakers from calling witnesses or subpoenaing evidence without prior approval from Democrats. Members of the minority party were granted these rights in both the Nixon and the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Schiff, whose credibility was shattered by his peddling of the Russian conspiracy theory for the last three years, has run an unfair process from the start. Behind closed doors, Schiff interviewed witnesses and selectively leaked parts of their testimonies to frame the president while Trump’s legal counsel has been barred from participating, denying the president rights to due process.

On Wednesday, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., exposed Schiff for directing witnesses testifying not to answer questions asked be Republican members.

“He’s directing witnesses not to answer questions that he doesn’t want the witness to answer if they’re asked by Republicans,” Scalise told reporters on Capitol Hill. “He’s not cut off one Democrat. He’s not interrupted one Democrat and told a witness not to answer Democrat members’ questions but today he started telling witnesses not to answer questions by certain Republicans.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/house-impeachment-inquiry-resolution-observations/

Some observations

On Tuesday, House Democrats published the resolution that, once passed, will approve and govern the impeachment inquiry on the question whether President Trump should be impeached. The vote is likely to take place on Thursday.

Some observations about the eight-page resolution.

1) The resolution is flawed, for reasons we’ll get to (the flaws could be major or minor, depending on how the resolution is implemented). By any measure, though, it is a significant improvement over the status quo ante. Once it’s passed, the House as an institution will have endorsed the impeachment inquiry. As we have pointed out, the Constitution commits the impeachment power to the House, not to the Speaker or the majority party in the House. The House acts as institution only by voting. It will finally have done so once this resolution is approved. The president and Republicans will no longer have a valid argument that the inquiry is constitutionally infirm. That has been the White House’s main justification for refusing to cooperate. (This refusal is overstated since a number of executive officials have submitted to closed-door interviews and otherwise participated. This has largely been done, though, despite the discouragement of the White House, which has otherwise declined to cooperate.)

2) Not surprisingly, Democrats are posturing that the passage of the resolution means the president must produce any information directed by the House. This is an overstatement. What the resolution means is that the White House’s position of blanket, indiscriminate non-cooperation will no longer be justifiable. Nevertheless, the president maintains all the legal privileges he enjoyed — including executive privilege and attorney-client privilege — regardless of whether there was a resolution.

3) It is not clear how extensive executive privilege is. In United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court recognized that the president’s communications with key advisers in carrying out his official duties were presumptively privileged; but it further held that the privilege was not absolute and would have to give way to the needs of a criminal investigation — particularly if the evidence at issue was critical and there was no alternative source for obtaining it. A House impeachment inquiry is not a criminal investigation. It is, however, a core constitutional function, and I believe the courts would find that its needs for information are at least as compelling as those of a criminal investigation.