RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/donald-trump-impeach

“President Trump heads to Mar-a-Lago impeached but defiant, with a new NAFTA and a “Phase One” China deal, Space Force, 185 federal judges, the lowest unemployment in half a century, a stock market that has increased by 50 percent since Election Day 2016, a unified party, and an opposition barreling toward a confusing and bruising primary. Trump won 2019, but this is the preseason. The real game begins in 2020.”

President Trump ends 2019 in a better position than when he started. The year began with the swearing in of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. The Mueller probe dragged on. The legislative agenda of Trump’s first two years in office had petered out. The Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden, was beating him by double digits in the polls. A little more than halfway through the year, bond prices signaled recession.

Look where things stand now. Pelosi’s decision to impeach Trump already has cost her a seat and stands zero chance of resulting in a Senate conviction. Not only has Mueller shuffled off the stage, but Michael Horowitz’s report on FBI malfeasance also raises serious doubts about the credibility of the government and media elites who spent years arguing that Trump and his associates were Russian agents. Mitch McConnell blocks liberal bills from the House while confirming additional conservative judges. Biden is damaged, and the problems of his candidacy manifest as he sleepwalks toward his party’s nomination. The economy is gangbusters.

Nothing the Democratic majority has done has hurt Trump’s approval rating. At this time last year, he stood at 42 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. As I write, the RCP average of Trump’s approval rating is 45 percent and disapproval is 52 percent. Trump’s numbers are remarkably stable and closely track President Obama’s at this point in his presidency. Biden began the year with big leads over Trump. Since then his margin has dwindled to 4 percent. And that’s before Trump drops $1 billion in negative social media on him (or whoever the nominee is) next year.

https://townhall.com/columnists/stevesheldon/2019/12/18/the-democrats-just-impeached-themselves-the-giant-has-awoken-n2558223?

Mark this day on your calendar. It is the day that the Democratic Party sealed its fate for a generation becoming a minority party for years to come. After dancing in the dark near a cliff, they finally took one tantrum-two-step too far. It’s going to be a hard landing.

In 2016, a sleeping giant awoke but instead of respecting the giant, they’ve been chasing after the giant’s liberator. Now it is fully awake and starting to stand. You might just say it’s woke and it’s angry…very angry. This giant, the American people, have had enough. For some time now, they’ve been rubbing their eyes, slowly coming out of a deep slumber but now, they’re starting to see very clearly the menace that is before them. This menace has kept them tied down for too long now. It has been harassing the giant for years, but the giant was asleep and unaware of the noise that was around him. Now he realizes that the lullabies he thought he was hearing are the very thing that has been giving him nightmares and keeping him restrained.

The voices have kept the giant lulled to sleep for some time now, singing soft lullabies and soothing music. The giant keepers forgot one thing though. Giants are not peaceful creatures prone to slumber. Giants do what giants do. They are big things and they do big things. More importantly, the vehemently dislike being tied down and controlled.

In 2016 one brave soul started untying the giant, carefully, quietly, one rope at a time. At first, he whispered in the giant’s ear, “Wake up, they are keeping you tied down.” The giant grumbled. The giant rescuer kept untying ropes and repeating the message until the giant keepers recognized his efforts. They chased him and harassed him, but he was agile and clever eluding their capture. He avoided their attempts to silence him long enough to wake the giant enough that it became aware that it was tied down. They made every effort to subdue the giant’s rescuer but to no avail. He persisted. He became louder and louder encouraging the giant to recognize his captors for what they were.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/20/a-contemptible-tissue-of-lies-surrounds-impeachment/

Impeachment is just an effort to strengthen the Democrats as they make the uphill battle to persuade the voters to evict President Trump next year for confected moral turpitude, since he can’t be challenged on his accomplishments in office.

Even as the House Democrats voted to impeach the president this week, there was universal recognition that the effort to remove him was a dead pigeon on arrival at the Senate (assuming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summons the courage to apprise the Senate officially of the results of the House vote).

The battle, for some time already, has been at the public relations level, and there the president is winning. USA Today, an anti-Trump newspaper with regular anti-Trump polling results, reported a five point decline in the numbers of people who approved impeaching the president, and other polls indicate that this is a clear trend; he is now ahead of where President Obama was in the polls eight years ago. These polls also probably reflect the gathering disquietude of the country about revelations of unprecedented political skulduggery by the FBI in the Horowitz report.

In her public order Tuesday, Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court didn’t mention Robert Mueller. But her stinging rebuke of the FBI for abusing the FISA process to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page invites the question: How could the special counsel have ignored the Steele dossier?
Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirms the FBI sought to verify the claims former British spy Christopher Steele made in his dossier. Yet during an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, when Mr. Comey was asked directly if the bureau was investigating them, Mr. Comey answered: “I’m not gonna comment on that.

He had good reason to dodge. By that time, the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew that most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable. Yet rather than take a hard look at it, Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it. In his opening statement to Congress when he testified this July, Mr. Mueller declared he would not address “matters related to the so-called Steele dossier,” which he said were out of his purview.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/delay-senate-impeachment-trial-joseph-klein/

After her Democrat-controlled House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she might just wait awhile before sending the articles over to the Senate for trial. “We will make our decision as to when we are going to send it when we see what they are doing on the Senate side,” Speaker Pelosi said. “So far, we have not seen anything that looks fair to us.” The House Democrats want the Senate to call the witnesses who House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler failed to call during their sham hearings. In their rush to impeach, they were too impatient to wait for a court decision compelling the witnesses to testify.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded Thursday morning to the House’s impeachment process and the latest delay tactics.  He said that “House Democrats may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate.” In a further dig, the Senate Majority Leader added, “Looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet.” He noted that the same Democrats who stressed the urgency of impeaching President Trump immediately now seem “content to sit on their hands.”

Senator McConnell excoriated “Speaker Pelosi’s House” for conducting “the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history.” He charged the Democrats with exhibiting “partisan rage at this particular President,” creating “a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future.”

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.”