RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-whistleblower-executive-11570056633

The impeachment process is barely underway and already some constitutional norms are being trampled without a note of media notice or political concern. To wit, can a whistleblower inside the intelligence bureaucracy override a President’s right to executive privilege merely with an accusation?

That seems to be the default view among Democrats and the press as they luxuriate in news about Donald Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders. First it was the call with Ukraine’s President. Then on Monday the leak was what Mr. Trump told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Now Democrats want to see the transcripts of other phone calls with other leaders.

“This is a coverup,” declared Nancy Pelosi last week, but if that’s true it is the most incompetent coverup in presidential history. Mr. Trump can’t seem to have any conversation that doesn’t leak, in part or whole, or that can’t be demanded by Congress as if everyone in the executive branch works for the House Speaker. Mr. Trump has released the Ukraine transcript and the whistleblower complaint, and he’s still accused of a coverup.

Last week’s inquisition of acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff captures the prevailing disdain for the separation of powers when Mr. Trump is the political target. Mr. Maguire, who has an impeccable reputation, had received the whistleblower complaint as part of his duties. He then acted responsibly by seeking legal advice about whether the document was subject to executive privilege.

Mr. Schiff berated him for even waiting to turn the document over to Congress: “At any time over the last month that you held this complaint, did the White House assert executive privilege?”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/02/five_observations_on_the_politics_of_impeachment.html

As the House initiates an official impeachment inquiry and moves toward a likely vote to impeach, here are five observations on the politics of the moment:

Our previous impeachments shed little light on this one. It’s generally unwise to make confident predictions without a relatively large data set to draw upon. Here, we have only had four examples of serious impeachment proceedings.

The first two – John Tyler and Andrew Johnson – do not help us understand our present politics. Both involved presidents who had weak relationships with their respective parties and who had succeeded to the office after presidents of the opposing party had died while serving. Perhaps more importantly, both took place in the mid-1800s, long before the arrival of reliable public opinion polling.

The other two examples are more relevant, but in both cases it is nearly impossible to isolate the specifics of impeachment from the broader political context. Richard Nixon’s case would seem to offer a good example for Democrats, as his job approval suffered an astonishing decline from 67% at his second inauguration to a mere 24% as he left office after being told by GOP leaders that he would not survive a Senate trial. Republicans were crushed in the ensuing midterm elections, and Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, lost to an inexperienced Southern Democrat named Jimmy Carter two years later.

It is not, however, clear how much of this is attributable to impeachment itself. Nixon had the advantage of running for reelection amid 5% economic growth, which doubtless juiced his job approval numbers. But the economy began turning against Nixon at the beginning of his second term. The easy money policies pursued by the Federal Reserve began to catch up with the country, as the monthly inflation rate brushed up against 1% in March 1973 and almost hit 2% in August. Overall inflation for the year was almost 9%, and the federal funds rate hit 11%. In 1974, inflation surged to over 12%.

At the same time, in October of 1973, OPEC instituted an embargo of oil to the United States, causing widespread gas shortages. The country entered a serious recession, which lasted until 1975 – the longest recession the country had experienced since the Great Depression.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/schiffs-heads-up/

The New York Times reports what many on the right suspected — Schiff got a heads-up about the whistleblower complaint, indeed knew about it before it was filed. This affected how he handled the matter, which got the ball rolling on what ultimately became the impeachment inquiry:

By the time the whistle-blower filed his complaint, Mr. Schiff and his staff knew at least vaguely what it contained.Mr. Schiff released a letter seeking the complaint and suggested it could involve Mr. Trump or others in his administration. Mr. Schiff followed up by subpoenaing Mr. Maguire to testify before the intelligence committee.

Mr. Schiff’s intense push took Mr. Maguire and his aides by surprise, current and former intelligence officials said. In other cases of lawmakers seeking classified material that the intelligence agencies were reluctant to share, including whistle-blower complaints, both sides usually tried to resolve the matter by holding quiet discussions.

Officials in Mr. Maguire’s office, who did not know the details of the complaint, were puzzled why Mr. Schiff went public right away, eschewing the usual closed-door negotiations.

“Top Dem Maxine Waters: impeach Trump, he belongs in solitary confinement”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/trump-calls-illicit-impeachment-inquiry-coup-matthew-vadum/

President Donald Trump justifiably lashed out at the congressional Democrats trying to impeach him, accurately describing the Left’s unseemly effort to overturn the 2016 election as a “coup.”

“As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” Trump tweeted Oct. 1 at 4:41 p.m.

Trump was echoing the words of trade adviser Peter Navarro who earlier in the day told Fox Business Network he believed the president was the victim “of an attempted coup d’etat.”

Since even before Donald Trump was elected president the Left has been trying to make the normal presidential job-related things he has been doing look abnormal. The impeachment circus is filled with examples. There were anti-Trump protesters outside the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital in the dark wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016, not long after the media called the race for Trump. The manufactured, media-driven mass hysteria directed against Trump only grew over time.

Even as he was being inaugurated, the Left was howling for Trump’s impeachment, removal from office by the Senate or by military coup, and even assassination, as they came to grips with the fact that the new Chief Executive was deadly serious about protecting America and rolling back President Barack Hussein Obama’s poisonous legacy. No claim or statement has been too crazy, lawless, undemocratic, or barbaric for the Left as it has desperately tried to keep the borders open to Muslim terrorists as well as illegal aliens they view as future Democrat voters, Americans groaning under the chains of Obamacare, businesses buried under mountains of red tape, and the welfare state ballooning.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/democrats-impeachment-inquiry-will-make-everything-worse/

For Democrats, Ukraine is the release valve for nearly three years of fear and loathing.

Impeachment is about to make everything worse.

If our politics seems overheated, our institutions beleaguered, and our public debate degraded, just wait until we are in the midst of the impeachment debate.

Democrats have had an impeachment itch that they’ve been desperate to scratch ever since Donald Trump took office. For them, Ukraine is equal parts a genuine outrage and an excuse, the release valve for nearly three years of fear and loathing.

Rather than conducting himself as if he were aware that a hysterical opposition is eager to impeach him just as soon as it finds a reason, Trump has embraced constant provocation. He has shown little interest in distinguishing between himself and the high office that he holds. Although we need to learn more, there’s clearly an impropriety in his handling of Ukraine.

If he’d only urged Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to cooperate with Attorney General Bill Barr on the probe related to the beginnings of the 2016 Russian investigation, it would have been completely appropriate (the president reportedly pushed other countries to cooperate as well). Or if the story only involved Rudy Giuliani poking around in Ukraine under his own power to find damaging information on the Bidens, it’d be standard hardball politics. It’s the intersection of the latter with Trump’s official capacity as president that’s inappropriate.

ttps://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-influence-and-double-standards-11569971481

We hope the prosecutors won’t be deterred. When Washington is in impeachment heat, it pays to be skeptical and look for the other half of the story.

Washington is in an impeachment frenzy, which is a dangerous moment for facts and context. A classic example is the political and media overreaction to Monday’s stories concerning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr and impeachment.

Mr. Pompeo’s alleged misdeed is that he was among those listening to Mr. Trump’s July 25 telephone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. But why shouldn’t a Secretary of State be on a call to the new President of an important country? U.S. foreign policy is the secretary’s job. As far as we know, Mr. Pompeo isn’t responsible for Mr. Trump’s decision to mention Joe Biden in that conversation. This is not impeachable behavior, or even impeachment news.

As for Mr. Barr, he is supposedly implicated because he asked Mr. Trump to ask Prime Minister Scott Morrison for Australia’s cooperation with the Justice Department probe of illegal foreign influence in the 2016 election. Mr. Barr and prosecutors have also sought the cooperation of other foreign governments.

We certainly hope they have. Everyone has known for some time that Justice is investigating what happened in 2016, and Justice made that public last week in a statement when the transcript of Mr. Trump’s Ukraine phone call was released.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/01/intel-community-admission-of-whistleblower-changes-raises-explosive-new-questions/

In a press release issued late Monday, the intelligence community inspector general admitted it changed its policy and its whistleblower form after an anti-Trump complainant alleged that Trump broke the law during a phone call with the Ukrainian president.

On Monday, the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) admitted that it did alter its forms and policies governing whistleblower complaints, and that it did so in response to the anti-Trump complaint filed on Aug. 12, 2019. The Federalist first reported the sudden changes last Friday. While many in the media falsely claimed the ICIG’s stunning admission debunked The Federalist’s report, the admission from the ICIG completely affirmed the reporting on the secretive change to whistleblower rules following the filing of an anti-Trump complaint in August.

The ICIG also disclosed for the first time that the anti-Trump complainant filed his complaint using the previously authorized form, the guidance for which explicitly stated the ICIG’s previous requirement for firsthand evidence for credible complaints. The Federalist reported last week that it was not known which form, if any, the complainant used, as the complaint that was declassified and released to the public last week was written as a letter to the two chairmen of the congressional intelligence committees.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/schiff_aides_trip_to_ukraine_12_days_after_whistleblower_filed_complaint_sponsored_by_burismafunded_ngo.html

The cast of characters involved in the attempt to impeach President Trump over enlisting Ukrainian help in probing Joe Biden certainly have a lot of connections with each other.  A few days ago, I noticed quite a few seeming coincidences around Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden for at least $600,000 a year; Mitt Romney; and the CIA.  Now Aaron Klein of Breitbart has uncovered some more coincidences centering on an organization called The Atlantic Council, a nonprofit organization that receives funding from Burisma, Google Capital, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, and the U.S. State Department (i.e., U.S. taxpayers) among others.  The Atlantic Council reportedly was:

… established in 1961 by former Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter to bolster support for NATO. Atlantic Councils were set up in other member states for the same purpose, and at the present time they now number more than 40 in NATO and Partnership for Peace countries. The name is derivative of North Atlantic Council, the highest governing body of NATO.

Klein’s article is long and complex, and it provides a lot of information that needs to be kept in mind as we trace the genesis of the impeachment drive and ask who may (or may not) have had a hand in shaping the events that led to Nancy Pelosi doing a 180 and supporting impeachment and tasking six committees with investigating it.  Read the whole thing.  Some excerpts:

A staffer for Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took a trip to Ukraine last month sponsored and organized by the Atlantic Council think tank. (snip)

The Schiff staffer, Thomas Eager, is also currently one of 19 fellows at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Congressional Fellowship, a bipartisan program that says it “educates congressional staff on current events in the Eurasia region.”

amgreatness.com/2019/09/30/inspector-generals-ties-suggest-ukraine-scandal-is-just-more-collusion-hoax/

Democrats are poised to begin the impeachment process based on this latest controversy. It’s time for Republicans to uncover as much information as possible, including whether this scandal is an extension of the collusion hoax and whether it involves some of the very same players.

Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general at the center of the so-called “whistleblower” report, is earning Robert Mueller-level adoration by the press.

Atkinson, we are told, is a truth-seeker with no partisan agenda or political grudge. “The intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, is known to his peers and colleagues as a highly cautious ‘straight shooter’ who tends to keep his head down,” cooed Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand on September 23.

The former prosecutor’s resume is touted as proof that the long-time public servant only is acting in the best interest of the country; his motives are not to be questioned, we are chastised. (This description follows a pattern similar to the way the media portrayed dossier author Christopher Steele and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.)

Atkinson is “a no-nonsense, serious and nonpartisan career prosecutor who showed a strong commitment to the law throughout his nearly two-decade career at the Department of Justice,” insisted a puff piece in The Hill on September 26.