RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-banality-of-impeachment-11573689793

House Democrats went public Wednesday with what the media are calling “historic” impeachment hearings, but what strikes us is the pre-cooked nature of the exercise. This isn’t a search for truth. It’s a set-piece production to promote a foregone conclusion. Democrats are turning impeachment into another partisan banality, and the country won’t be better for it.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff plans only five days of public hearings, and he has already heard the witnesses in secret. Mr. Schiff won’t allow most witnesses requested by Republicans, notably the whistleblower who started it all and Hunter Biden. Perhaps Democrats have some new bombshell they’ve uncovered, but that has not been the pattern. What they learn, they quickly leak to the impeachment press.

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The impeachment case—after the failure of non-collusion with Russia and the non-obstruction of Robert Mueller —now boils down to President Trump’s dealings over a few weeks this summer with new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Readers who want to save time should read Mr. Schiff’s opening statement Wednesday because it offers the most damning interpretation of events.

Mr. Schiff’s claim is that Mr. Trump sought to “condition, coerce, extort or bribe an ally into conducting investigations to aid his re-election campaign.” He did this by having his Administration threaten to withhold U.S. military aid and deny an Oval Office meeting until Mr. Zelensky publicly announced a corruption probe. That sums up the case.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/11/ukrainian-officials-release-records-of-46-payments-to-hunter-biden-from-burisma-holdings-38-payments-were-for-83333-totaling-over-3-1-million/

New memos released last week reveal Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian natural gas company, pressured the Obama State Department to help end the corruption investigation during the 2016 election cycle just one month before then-Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor probing his son Hunter.

Joe Biden bragged about getting Viktor Shokin fired during a 2018 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The media immediately covered for Biden and said his targeting of Mr. Shokin was totally unrelated to the prosecutor’s corruption investigation into Hunter and Burisma Holdings.

New memos released because of a FOIA lawsuit filed by award-winning investigative reporter John Solomon show Burisma Holdings contacted the Obama State Department several times during the 2016 election to discuss ending the probe.

In fact, Burisma Holdings actually name-dropped Hunter Biden when requesting help from the State Department.

According to CD Media last week former Ukrainian official Oleksandr Onyshchenko said Hunter Biden was receiving “off the books” payments from Burisma in the millions.

On Tuesday CD Media posted leaked records of payments to Hunter Biden from Burisma Holdings totaling millions.

The documents show 46 payments to Hunter Biden’s company from Novembe 2014 to November 2015.

There were 38 payments for $83,333 totaling more than $3.1 million.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/13/adam-schiffs-star-witness-just-admitted-burisma-should-be-investigated-for-corruption/

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent made the case for launching an investigation into the Bidens and their involvement in Ukraine related to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Kent, the State Department’s top official on Ukraine, said during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in the Democrats’ partisan impeachment proceedings Wednesday he was concerned about a, “perception of a conflict of interest,” related to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, serving on the board of the energy company while his father oversaw the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine.

Hunter Biden served on the board of the company for $50,000 a month despite having no prior experience in the energy industry while his father served as vice president deeply involved U.S.-Ukrainian policy.

Kent also testified in a private deposition that he voiced his discomfort over the situation to the White House in 2015 where administration officials brushed off Kent’s concerns.

“I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” Kent told lawmakers behind closed doors in October. “The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth the deal with family related issues at that time… That was the end of that conversation.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/amb-taylors-awkward-silence-in-response-to-a-question-about-hunter-biden-was-very-telling/

During Wednesday’s impeachment hearings, Steve Castor, House Intelligence Committee counsel for the minority, asked Ambassador Taylor a rather simple question about Hunter Biden and his position at Burisma, that he couldn’t (or perhaps refused) to answer, resulting in perhaps the most awkward silence I’ve ever seen in such a hearing.

CASTOR: Ambassador Taylor, do you know whether Hunter Biden offers anything other than the fact that his dad’s the former vice president

AMB. TAYLOR: I don’t—

CASTOR: Or at the time was the vice president.

AMB. TAYLOR: I have no knowledge of Hunter Biden—

CASTOR: But you agree it raises questions?

AMB. TAYLOR: (five seconds of silence)

Here’s video of the exchange.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/mandatory-shortages/

Governments create problems. Then they complain about them.

“A public health crisis exists,” says Kentucky’s government, citing a report that found “a shortage of ambulance providers.”

Local TV stations report on “people waiting hours for medical transportation.”

“Six-year-old Kyler Truesdell fell off his motorcycle,” reported Channel 12 news. “The local hospital told (his mother) he should be transported to Cincinnati Children’s to check for internal injuries.” But there was no ambulance available. Kyler had to wait two hours.

Yet Kyler’s cousin, Hannah Howe, runs an ambulance service in Ohio, just a few minutes away. “We would’ve (taken him) for free,” she says in my new video. “But it would’ve been illegal.”

It would be illegal because of something called certificate of need (CON) laws.

Kentucky and three other states require businesses to get a CON certificate before they are allowed to run an ambulance service. Certificates go only to businesses that bureaucrats deem “necessary.”

CON laws are supposed to prevent “oversupply” of essential services like, well, ambulances. If there are “too many” ambulance companies, some might cut corners or go out of business. Then patients would suffer, say the bureaucrats.

Of course, Kentucky patients already suffer, waiting.

It raises the question: If there’s demand, then who are politicians to say that a business is unnecessary?

Phillip Truesdell, Hannah’s father, often takes patients to hospitals in Kentucky, “I drop them off (but) I can’t go back and get them!” he told me. “Who gives the big man the right to say, ‘You can’t work here’?!”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15158/alan-dershowitz-steve-cohen

For [Congressman Steve] Cohen [D-TN], the issues surrounding impeachment are one-sidedly simple, and there is no reason for anyone to express or listen to opposing points of view. Therein lies the true road to tyranny: when government officials like Cohen berate people for expressing contrary points of view, free speech and dissent are chilled.

Congressmen Steve Cohen, who has a long history of one-sided condemnation of Israel, recently called me a Nazi collaborator on MSNBC as the show’s host Alex Witt sat silently by. Here is the context: several days earlier, I had been on a Fox News show discussing impeachment when the host and another panelist began attacking Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, who was preparing to testify the next day regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of the Ukraine. When the attack on Vindman occurred, I had never heard of him and had no idea why he was being vilified. Since I had no knowledge to offer, I remained silent about Vindman and continued to discuss the subject at hand, namely impeachment.

As soon as I learned who Vindman was, I did three things: I tweeted a strong statement criticizing the accusation against Vindman and describing him as a patriot who served his country; I went on TV and publicly apologized for my silence, explaining that I knew nothing about the issue at the time; I then wrote an op-ed declaring Vindman to be a patriot and calling on Republicans to “stop their smears.”

It was several days after I offered these explanations and apologies that Cohen described the attack on Vindman and said that “Dershowitz sat there listening like a quisling.” He said nothing about my subsequent statements.

For those too young to remember who Vidkun Quisling was, let me remind you. Quisling was a Nazi collaborator and strong supporter of Hitler. The name quisling has become a descriptive noun meaning traitor, collaborator and Nazi. I assume that congressman Cohen knew all this when he threw that despicable term at me.

The crowning irony is that Cohen was criticizing me for remaining silent while someone else wrongfully called Lt. Col. Vindman a traitor. Yet, Cohen himself was prepared to call me — a patriotic American and a liberal Democrat — a quisling. The further irony is that Cohen went on to bemoan how divided we have become as a nation: “we are separated tremendously.” Of course, we are separated, and Congressman Cohen is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-vs-the-policy-community/

We resolve policy disputes by elections, not impeachments.

When it comes to Russia, I am with what Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman calls the American “policy community.”

Vindman, of course, is one of the House Democrats’ star impeachment witnesses. His haughtiness in proclaiming the policy community and his membership in it grates, throughout his 340-page House deposition transcript. I couldn’t agree more, though, with our experts’ apparent consensus that Moscow is bad, should be challenged on various fronts, and would best be seen as the incorrigible rival it is, not the potential strategic partner some wish it to be — the “some” here known to include the president. Ukraine, for all its deep flaws, is valuable to us as a check on Russia’s aggression, another conclusion about which the president is skeptical.

That is, on the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions.

But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.

And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/469880-adam-schiffs-ham-sandwich-not-an

The most familiar metaphor about criminal investigations is, of course, that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Like all good metaphors, there’s enough exaggeration in it to make a strong impression. It resonates, though, because it conveys the entirely accurate sense that a grand jury is a one-sided affair. We’re wired to believe there are two sides — at least — to every story. That’s why the grand jury rubs us the wrong way.

And that’s why the impeachment show — not inquiry show — that Democrats are running should really rub us the wrong way. 

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and his House Intelligence Committee are taking the show public this week. The inquiry he’s been running is, he claims, analogous to a grand jury investigation: It’s a preliminary investigative stage before the inquiry’s transfer to the Judiciary Committee for the formal consideration of articles of impeachment. 

Grand juries, however, never go public. And that is precisely because they are intentionally one-sided. They are kept secret by law to avoid prejudicing the suspect.

Prejudice is exactly what Schiff is aiming for, however. The point is not impeachment; it is to wound President Trump politically.

To be clear, Schiff’s grand jury analogy is bogus. Congress is not a grand jury. Grand juries are designed to be at least somewhat objective — a body of impartial citizens who, by constitutional mandate, must be satisfied there is probable cause that a crime has been committed before the state is permitted to indict and try a citizen presumed to be innocent. In theory, the grand jury is there to protect the suspect from an overbearing prosecutor. Here, House Democrats are the overbearing prosecutor, not the protective grand jurors.

What is happening in the House is a political exercise. Schiff is a hyper-partisan. With the anti-Trump media leaving his absurd grand jury analogy unchallenged, he exploits it when it is useful, namely, when telling Republicans they will not be permitted to call their witnesses, and he puts the analogy aside when it is not useful, namely, in convening one-sided public hearings.

As a matter of due process, Schiff’s made-for-TV spectacle is a bad joke. That was underscored this past weekend when (a) Democrats gave Republicans a ridiculously short deadline to propose their own witnesses, whom Chairman Schiff reserved the right to veto; (b) Republicans duly proposed witnesses on the issues of Democrats’ collusion with Ukraine in the 2016 election campaign and in possible corruption; and (c) Schiff, as predictably as sunrise, ruled the GOP’s witnesses irrelevant.

In point of fact, the witnesses that Republicans seek to call are entirely relevant to what would be at issue in an impeachment trial, to wit: Is any misconduct by the president alleged in an article of impeachment sufficiently egregious that he should be removed from power?

But, see, a grand jury is not a trial. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/private-speech-bolton-suggests-some-trump-s-foreign-policy-decisions-n1080651

The former national security director was especially critical of the president’s handling of Turkey, according to multiple sources present for his remarks.

Former national security adviser John Bolton derided President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law during a private speech last week and suggested his former boss’ approach to U.S. policy on Turkey is motivated by personal or financial interests, several people who were present for the remarks told NBC News.

According to six people who were there, Bolton also questioned the merits of Trump applying his business acumen to foreign policy, saying such issues can’t be approached like the win-or-lose edict that drives real estate deals: When one deal doesn’t work, you move on to the next.

The description was part of a broader portrait Bolton outlined of a president who lacks an understanding of the interconnected nature of relationships in foreign policy and the need for consistency, these people said.

Bolton has kept a low public profile since he left the administration on Sept. 10, and efforts by Democrats to have him testify in the House impeachment inquiry into the president have stalled. But his pointed comments, at a private gathering last Wednesday at Morgan Stanley’s global investment event in Miami, painted a dark image of a president and his family whose potential personal gain is at the heart of decision-making, according to people who were present for his remarks.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/11/son-of-convicted-weather-underground-cop-killers-raised-by-ayers-and-dohrn-elected-da-in-san-francisco/

The son of Weather Underground domestic terrorists convicted of felony murder for their role in the Brinks armored car robbery in 1981, has won a tightly contested race for district attorney in San Francisco.

Chesa Boudin won after campaigning to reform the the criminal justice system in a city already known for having a very liberal criminal justice system.

In October of 1981, Boudin’s parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, joined other members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brink’s armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York.

While in the process of stealing $1.6 million from the armored car, the self-professed revolutionaries killed Sgt. Edward Grady, Officer Waverly “Chipper” Brown, and Brinks guard Peter Paige, as well as wounded Paige’s partner Joseph Trombino.

Paige and Trombino were shot during the first shootout at the mall. When the police caught up to the U-Haul truck with David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin in the front seats, they weren’t sure they had the right vehicle because the suspects had been described as black, while the occupants of this truck were white. This was a deliberate part of the plan, designed to fool the police.

When officers approached the truck with their guns drawn, Boudin feigned innocence and pleaded with them to put their guns down. Once they dropped their guard and lowered their guns, “six men armed with automatic weapons and wearing body armor emerged from the back of the truck and began firing upon the four police officers.”

Officer Brown was hit repeatedly by rifle rounds and collapsed on the ground. One robber then walked up to his prone body and fired several more shots into him with a 9mm handgun, ensuring his death. Keenan was shot in the leg, but managed to duck behind a tree and return fire.