RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2019/11/21/fiona-hill-and-dems-ignore-the-serious-evidence-of-ukrainian-2016-meddling/

In her testimony before the House impeachment inquiry, Fiona Hill, formerly of the National Security Council, took great pride in telling lawmakers she was a nonpartisan intelligence professional. She then labored mightily in service of a Democratic political narrative.

Specifically, Hill conflated two separate theories of Ukrainian collusion in the 2016 election. One of these is discredited, the other is quite viable. Hill helped the Democrats suggest that they have both been debunked.

Hill is too smart not to have grasped the effect of her testimony. This is exactly the kind of cynicism that fuels concerns about the unaccountable “deep state.”

To be sure, President Trump is largely to blame for propagating the discredited Ukraine theory. It holds that, somehow, it was Ukraine, rather than Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election by cyber-espionage against Democratic email accounts.

This is such a loopy theory, it defies clear explanation. Suffice it to say that it involves suspicions that a hacked DNC server is hidden in Ukraine. Perhaps, the speculation runs, it was Ukrainian operatives, not Russian ones, who were the culprits.

It is a fringe theory. No one who has closely followed the collusion caper puts any stock in it. Regrettably, the president is a hospitable audience for frivolous theories that cast doubt on Russia’s culpability, which he wrongly fears casts doubt on his legitimacy.

In his July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump appears to have pressed this theory about the server. He wanted Kiev to look into it, even though it is the consensus of American intelligence agencies that Moscow was behind the cyber hijinks.

In her testimony, Hill observed that Russia, which she rightly regards as our strategic rival, is delighted by the promotion of this debunked server theory. Anything that could undermine ties between Washington and Kiev promotes Moscow’s interest — putting in doubt our support for a former Soviet captive state that revanchist Russia has under siege.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/21/politics/fbi-fisa-russia-investigation/index.html?ofs=

Washington (CNN)A former FBI lawyer is under criminal investigation after allegedly altering a document related to 2016 surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser, several people briefed on the matter told CNN.

The possibility of a substantive change to an investigative document is likely to fuel accusations from President Donald Trump and his allies that the FBI committed wrongdoing in its investigation of connections between Russian election meddling and the Trump campaign.
The finding is expected to be part of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s review of the FBI’s effort to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide. Horowitz will release the report next month.
Horowitz turned over evidence on the allegedly altered document to John Durham, the federal prosecutor appointed early this year by Attorney General William Barr to conduct a broad investigation of intelligence gathered for the Russia probe by the CIA and other agencies, including the FBI. The altered document is also at least one focus of Durham’s criminal probe.

It’s unknown how significant a role the altered document played in the FBI’s investigation of Page and whether the FISA warrant would have been approved without the document. The alterations were significant enough to have shifted the document’s meaning and came up during a part of Horowitz’s FISA review where details were classified, according to the sources.

DOJ watchdog finds security risks in FBI handling of confidential sources

Some witnesses who have been interviewed in Horowitz’s investigation have said they expect the inspector general to find mistakes in the FBI’s handling of the FISA process, but that those mistakes do not undermine the premise for the FBI’s investigation.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/22/sondlands-presumptions-and-all-the-presidents-powers/

Despite the establishment media’s declarations that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland provided the smoking gun proving that President Donald Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on its government investigating the energy company Burisma and the 2016 election, Sondland soon told us this was merely his “presumption.”

We already knew from the transcript of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that aid being conditional on investigating the Bidens was a stretch, certainly nothing near the evidence that would be needed in any respectable court.

Witnesses and Democrats on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee made much of unofficial channels being used to conduct foreign policy, such as the efforts of Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani – hardly a surprise since these witnesses are all part of the official foreign policy bureaucracy that includes more than 77,000 employees of the State Department alone, each of whom is all too happy to justify their collective existence.

As Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper said in her private deposition earlier in the month, and reiterated on Wednesday, “my sense is that all of the senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified … in their view that this assistance was essential.” Cooper added that “they were trying to find ways to engage the president on this.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/bribery-and-impeachment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

Even assuming Trump’s intent was corrupt, this is not the bribery the Framers had in mind in the impeachment clause.

The Constitution makes bribery a predicate for impeaching and removing a president. Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff is pushing the theory that President Trump has committed impeachable bribery because, as Schiff sees it, the president’s conduct violates a subsection of the federal bribery statute.

As in most criminal statutes, Congress includes several crimes in the bribery law. The offenses have gradations of seriousness, ranging from directly paying a public official a lavish bribe, to a public official’s indirectly agreeing to receive (but not ultimately receiving) some “thing of value” to be influenced in some official act. Like some of the lesser bribery offenses, the one Schiff is homing in on does not require an actual bribery (in the sense of an actual payoff).

Specifically, he is accusing the president of making a “corrupt demand.”

Under the law, if a public official, with corrupt intent, demands that someone provide him a bribe (a “thing of value”) as a condition for performing an “official act,” that is enough to prove guilt, even if the official drops the demand before something of value is exchanged. The Democrats’ theory is that Trump, intending nothing other the advancement of his own political interests (i.e., improving his 2020 reelection chances), corruptly demanded that Ukraine conduct investigations of his political rivals in exchange for two official acts — viz., granting a White House visit for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and transferring $400 million in military aid authorized by Congress to help Ukraine defend against Russian aggression.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sheep-during-reset-lions-now/

I have written frequently about the dangers Vladimir Putin poses to U.S. interests. Yet when we prune all the rhetoric away, we are still left with two antithetical Obama–Trump administration policies.

The Obama reset, in reaction to the Bush pushback against Putin’s aggression in South Ossetia, inaugurated a bewildering policy of appeasement — summed up in a 2012 debate by Obama’s weird attack on Mitt Romney who warned of Russian threats (“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years”).

The list of Obama’s Russian appeasement is long: watering down sanctions, not arming the Ukrainians, inviting Putin into the Middle East after a near 40-year hiatus, defense cuts, dismantling plans to cooperate with Eastern Europeans to install missile defense, the Obama/Medvedev hot mic incident, whose terms (reelection “space” for Obama in a exchange for “flexibility” on Eastern European missile defense) were carried out, high-level U.S. intelligence and FBI operatives trafficking in a “dossier” drawing on purchased Russian disinformation sources, anemic responses to the Russian absorption of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and wet-noodle reactions to Russian cyber interference in the U.S. (“cut it out”, Vladimir?).

All of this naivete was based on the mythical assumptions that Russia was in transition to a civil society and should no longer be alienated as it had been in the last years of the derided Bush administration, and that Putin would interpret such restraint as magnanimity to be reciprocated rather than as timidity to be exploited.

Trump’s rhetoric was certainly not as eloquent on questions of Russian human-rights abuses as we heard in the twilight of the Obama administration in 2016, when the reset was in ruins.

But Trump’s 2017–19 record stands in stark contrast to all of the above: Pulling out of an asymmetrical anti-missile deal, arming the Ukrainians with lethal aid, defeating and killing Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefing up U.S. defense, jawboning NATO to rearm, opposing energy deals between Germany and Russia, and pushing for more U.S. gas and oil production and exports that stabilized or lowered global export prices. Are these witnesses going to criticize Trump’s “unfair” dismantling of Obama’s Russian reset on grounds that he knew Putin had tried to sabotage his campaign via having Russian operatives seeding Christopher Steele’s phony dossier?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/what-if-the-democrats-hadnt

Sondland’s testimony provided their daily ‘this changes everything’ fix.

The excitable team of Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy is especially excitable in Stelter’s a.m. newsletter today. Darcy, filling in today for Stelter, thinks everything has changed. “Historic day” is the headline of his newsletter. Isn’t every day? Approvingly, he quotes CNN colleague Jeffrey Toobin: “I think you can divide the Trump presidency into two periods, before November 20th, 2019, and after, because now we know. I mean, now we know that every fantasy about how corrupt this administration was is actually true. That this was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.”

I won’t bore you by listing all the other times Team Excitable has solemnly declared that Suddenly Everything Has Changed, the Other Shoe Finally Dropped, and it’s The Beginning of the End. Just to give a quick recap, Trump was going to be dragged out of the Oval Office  because he colluded with the Russians during his campaign; because he fired James Comey, which was obstruction of justice; because he paid off Stormy Daniels; because he interfered with the Mueller investigation, which was obstruction of justice; and because he violated the Emoluments Clause by continuing to be a hotelier. This last was deemed the “number one” reason to impeach Trump by the Democratic party’s shaman-healer-id, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as recently as April.

Toobin’s statement is self-contradicting; Gordon Sondland’s testimony didn’t demonstrate that this administration “was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.” That Toobinism is the Democrats’ problem; the fact that they’ve been calling this administration a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning negates the idea that Sondland’s Testimony has Changed Everything. Darcy enthusiastically quotes pundits who called yesterday a “John Dean moment.” I think not. People who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s were about four standard deviations less cynical about politics than everyone is today.

Brian Stelter’s newsletter would have us believe that yesterday was like the moment when Krusty the Clown’s switch was flipped from Good to Evil. He and Darcy never expressed the slightest objection to anything in TrumpWorld until now, when it becomes their reluctant duty to call foul. That Darcy would suggest this simply indicates that his memory works about as well as that of the unfortunate hero of Memento. A more useful metaphor is that the Trump administration is like a tub of clear water into which beef-bouillon cubes of accusation have been thrown since before he even took office. The water turned dark brown a long time ago. Sondland’s testimony merely made the leather-colored water a bit more leathery-looking.