RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/latest-impeachment-witness-contradicts-vindmans-claim-that-key-details-were-left-out-of-ukraine-call-transcript/

A senior White House official who listened to President Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky testified Thursday in a closed-door impeachment hearing that the White House did not omit any key details of the conversation from the publicly-released transcript.

The official, Tim Morrison, also told House lawmakers he did not think Trump discussed anything illegal on the call.

“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” Morrison said in remarks to Congress.

Morrison’s testimony contradicts that of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert, who testified on Tuesday that he believes the White House omitted from the transcript Trump’s claim that recordings of vice president Joe Biden existed that implicated him in corrupt dealings.

During a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump asked the Ukrainian president to help the U.S. investigate allegations that Biden used his position as vice president to help Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings avoid a corruption probe soon after his son, Hunter Biden, was appointed to its board of directors. That phone conversation has become the crux of House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry against Trump.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-impeachment-vote-11572561408

The nation focused on the House this week, where Democrats voted Thursday to formalize an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Less noticed, but equally important, was the prebuttal on the Senate floor.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered Wednesday a speech devoted to the glaring deficiencies in the House impeachment proceedings. The Kentuckian excoriated it for its lack of fairness and transparency, and listed the affronts to due process: secret hearings, the refusal to let Republicans call witnesses or obtain answers, the exclusion of Mr. Trump’s legal counsel from the proceedings. And he noted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s resolution would include no guarantee of a remedy. The Democratic approach, Mr. McConnell said, amounts to: “No due process now, maybe some later, but only if we feel like it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

After preparing a failed bill of particulars against the president—Russian election collusion, porn star payoffs, income tax evasion, obstruction of justice, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the Charlottesville rally, the two Michaels (Avenatti and Cohen), Deutsche Bank, Alfa-Bank, and Orange Man Bad—Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) finally has Trump dead-to-rights: A quid pro quo without the quid, the pro, or the quo.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday largely along party lines, with only two Democratic defectors, to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, will manage the initial stage of the sham inquiry; hearings are expected to begin in a few weeks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), departing from tradition, handed off the impeachment grunt work to her most dependable grunt rather than to the House Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi pleaded the Democrats’ case on the morning of Hallowe’en, titillating her caucus of ghouls, witches, tramps, and thieves with tales about the scary monster in the White House.

“Sadly, this is not any cause for any glee or comfort,” Pelosi assured her gleeful Democratic colleagues. “This is something very solemn, something prayerful.”

But ringing in the ears of every Democrat and NeverTrumper across the land were the iconic words of #TheResistance hero Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Mich.): “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!” You will recall that the freshman Democratic congresswoman from Michigan didn’t waste any time before uttering that profundity. She shouted it on January 4, 2019, just hours after she was sworn in.

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

Well, Happy Halloween.

The whistleblower is now pretty well outed by investigative journalist Paul Sperry, and it’s underwhelming.  He’s been identified as one Eric Ciaramella, 33, prep school grad, Yalie, Obama backwash, political operative, and fanatic Trump-hater.  Hardly the Mister Probity concerned about national security that’s been painted.

Sperry did the digging but pointed out that that the man’s identity had been an open secret in the Beltway, with mainstream media doing their darnedest to keep his name from being attached to his rather spectacular charges.

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Ciaramella’s name should be out there because it’s relevant whether all the hearsay in his legally couched charge was actually made in good faith or was just another leftist smear job under cover of government mechanisms, same as the Steele dossier.

Based on Sperry’s digging, it certainly looks like the latter. 

From Sperry’s reporting, we learn that this creep wasn’t trying to make anything better within government, which is what whistleblower protections are for.  He was just another leftist trying to overturn the 2016 election, and it dated from way back, starting with his propensity to leak.

In May 2017, Ciaramella went “outside his chain of command,” according to a former NSC co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had phoned the president a week earlier.

Contents of the email appear to have ended up in the media, which reported Trump boasted to the Russian officials about firing Comey, whom he allegedly called “crazy, a real nut job.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/31/the-rules-of-the-democrat-backed-impeachment-inquiry-are-stacked-against-trump/

House Democrats rubber-stamped an ad hoc anti-Trump investigation Thursday aimed at overturning the results of the 2016 election after the spectacular failure of the grand Russian collusion hoax collapsing earlier this year.

The text of the resolution lays the framework for the official impeachment proceedings going forward led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has been operating an illegitimate process since Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced the beginning an investigation in September.

Despite Democrat claims that the resolution would mean an open and transparent process, House members are still holding hearings in secret even after its passage.

The Democrat passed rules for impeachment also bar Republican lawmakers from calling witnesses or subpoenaing evidence without prior approval from Democrats. Members of the minority party were granted these rights in both the Nixon and the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Schiff, whose credibility was shattered by his peddling of the Russian conspiracy theory for the last three years, has run an unfair process from the start. Behind closed doors, Schiff interviewed witnesses and selectively leaked parts of their testimonies to frame the president while Trump’s legal counsel has been barred from participating, denying the president rights to due process.

On Wednesday, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., exposed Schiff for directing witnesses testifying not to answer questions asked be Republican members.

“He’s directing witnesses not to answer questions that he doesn’t want the witness to answer if they’re asked by Republicans,” Scalise told reporters on Capitol Hill. “He’s not cut off one Democrat. He’s not interrupted one Democrat and told a witness not to answer Democrat members’ questions but today he started telling witnesses not to answer questions by certain Republicans.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/house-impeachment-inquiry-resolution-observations/

Some observations

On Tuesday, House Democrats published the resolution that, once passed, will approve and govern the impeachment inquiry on the question whether President Trump should be impeached. The vote is likely to take place on Thursday.

Some observations about the eight-page resolution.

1) The resolution is flawed, for reasons we’ll get to (the flaws could be major or minor, depending on how the resolution is implemented). By any measure, though, it is a significant improvement over the status quo ante. Once it’s passed, the House as an institution will have endorsed the impeachment inquiry. As we have pointed out, the Constitution commits the impeachment power to the House, not to the Speaker or the majority party in the House. The House acts as institution only by voting. It will finally have done so once this resolution is approved. The president and Republicans will no longer have a valid argument that the inquiry is constitutionally infirm. That has been the White House’s main justification for refusing to cooperate. (This refusal is overstated since a number of executive officials have submitted to closed-door interviews and otherwise participated. This has largely been done, though, despite the discouragement of the White House, which has otherwise declined to cooperate.)

2) Not surprisingly, Democrats are posturing that the passage of the resolution means the president must produce any information directed by the House. This is an overstatement. What the resolution means is that the White House’s position of blanket, indiscriminate non-cooperation will no longer be justifiable. Nevertheless, the president maintains all the legal privileges he enjoyed — including executive privilege and attorney-client privilege — regardless of whether there was a resolution.

3) It is not clear how extensive executive privilege is. In United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court recognized that the president’s communications with key advisers in carrying out his official duties were presumptively privileged; but it further held that the privilege was not absolute and would have to give way to the needs of a criminal investigation — particularly if the evidence at issue was critical and there was no alternative source for obtaining it. A House impeachment inquiry is not a criminal investigation. It is, however, a core constitutional function, and I believe the courts would find that its needs for information are at least as compelling as those of a criminal investigation.

swtotd.blogspot.com

“Have we lost our minds?” Andrew Cuomo (1957-)Governor, New York

While Governor Cuomo’s exclamation was in response to the increasing number of assaults by the mentally deranged in New York City, it is one that has applicability across our political landscape, not just for the unhinged way Leftist politicians treat truants and criminals in our cities, but in most all ways political. Have we all gone bonkers? I wince at President Trump’s coarseness and grimace as he Tweets as fast as a Shetland Pony sheds its winter coat. Then I listen to anti-Trumpers and their lemming-like hatred that betrays an emotional response rather than a reasoned reaction. Seen as a threat to the comfortably established elite, the majority of Democrats wanted to impeach Mr. Trump on November 9, 2016. And I wonder: What ever happened to e Pluribus Unum?

Phrases and words: Identity politics; victimization; equality; wokeness. Identity politics is segregation by a different and more politically correct name. Real victims are ignored, while perpetrators are mollycoddled as deserving of special care for having been “victims” of society governed by old, white men. Equality has morphed into homogenization, deflating the individual to an inflated collective. The cream in our public schools can no longer find its way to the top. Wokeness is a Tesla-like vehicle for social justice warriors.

Politicians, abetted by a media that has foregone any semblance of investigative independence, to become a propaganda arm of the Party they prefer. They have given new meanings to those phrases and words mentioned above. The consequence has been a shock to the Judeo-Christian culture in which most of us were raised, when Albert Einstein once wrote, and we all believed, that “only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”

Here we are now, three years after the fact, yet a refusal to accept the outcome of the 2016 election persists. Civil discourse is a thing of the past. We have intelligence agencies that colluded against a Presidential candidate. Public schools, especially those in inner cities who keep a watchful (and jaundiced) eye on equality, teach to the lowest common denominator, which means that those who have been identified as “gifted and talented” cannot be separated, so taught differently and thus given a chance to disengage from the claws of mediocrity that entrap them. In many of these same cities, the homeless – some mentally sick, others addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and a few simply down on their luck – ply our parks and streets. Instead of offering the dignity of a job and asking proper behavior in return for food and shelter, we provide them free needles and let them soil streets, sidewalks and parks. In our desire to explain away criminal acts and civil misbehavior as a consequence of victimization, we ignore the plight of real victims. Men and women are tried in the press, without benefit of due process. The “broken windows” policy of policing, first described in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling and based on the theory that if man lives in a neighborhood where property and people are respected crime rates will decline. It worked in New York City in the ‘90s and early 2000s but has been abandoned because of accusations that minorities were unfairly targeted. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss: “How did we get so stupid so soon?”

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-california-becoming-premodern/

More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric — which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year — preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon — the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation and green mandates — add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.