RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-if-impeachment-articles-are-not-delivered-did-impeachment-happen/

It’s hard to believe the Speaker’s latest stunt will go on for very long.

I’ll confess: Last night, when I was first told that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was toying with the idea of not delivering the two articles of impeachment voted by the House against President Trump, I assumed it was a joke.

For these last weeks, the Democrat-dominated chamber has been in a mad rush to impeach the president. Democrats even tacked on article two — “obstruction of Congress” — because, they told us, time could not be wasted engaging in the usual negotiation and litigation over legislative demands for executive branch information. Trump is a clear and present threat to “continue” undermining our elections, we were admonished. That’s why he needs to be impeached right now. That’s why the political class cannot responsibly leave his fate up to the sovereign, the People, who will vote in November.

But now that the deed is done, it’s . . . hey, not so fast.

Pelosi and Democratic leadership have convinced themselves there may be advantage in delaying the formal, ministerial delivery of the impeachment articles — as if Mitch McConnell were in as much a hurry to receive them as Democrats were to conjure them up. The thought is that this latest strategic petulance might pressure Senator McConnell into promising a full-blown trial, including summoning as witnesses top aides of the president whom the House didn’t bother to summon because tangling over privilege issues would have slowed up the works.

So it’s not a joke, but I still have to laugh. When I was a prosecutor negotiating plea deals, I always found the most pathetic defense lawyers were the ones who acted like they were playing with the House money when, in stark reality, it was they who needed something from me. Now here’s Pelosi trying to play hard to get with McConnell who, I imagine, couldn’t care less how long Democrats want to dither.

https://spectator.us/pelosi-impeachment-delay-unforced-error/

One of our perennial school pranks was to place a whoopee cushion secretly on the chair of an unsuspecting teacher. When she sat, she would launch the resounding clap of flatulence. That, metaphorically, is what just happened to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Unfortunately, she placed it on her own chair. The embarrassing noise sounded when she announced she would delay sending the House’s Articles of Impeachment to the Senate.

This delay was a nakedly partisan ploy — and a major error of political judgment. Every day it continues will cost Democrats in the general election.

Why?

First, the Democrats should be emphasizing only the constitutional necessity of impeachment. That’s why Speaker Pelosi wore funereal black for the House vote, why she tried in vain to stop jubilant Democrats from taking selfies after the vote. (She seemingly couldn’t control Washington Post reporters, who did the same thing. Democracy dies in derangement.) The delay highlights the Democrats’ raw political calculations. Of course, those calculations are always the drivers for both parties in Washington. What Pelosi’s stunt does, though, is put them front and center.

The real motives are painfully obvious. Democrats want Trump out not for some specific reasons (the articles of impeachment are virtually inkblots) but because they truly, deeply hate him. Republicans want to keep him, most because they like him, some because they think the party will implode if they remove him now. Both parties are united. Impeachment only solidified their stances.