RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/04/bureaucrats-hurt-feelings-on-foreign-policy-dont-justify-impeachment/

Privileged bureaucrats are so high on their self-righteousness that they actually think they’re protecting the Constitution by obstructing the foreign policy of the elected president.

In recent testimony during his confirmation hearing, the nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Russia said, “Soliciting investigations into a domestic political opponent — I don’t think that would be in accord with our values.”

Never? Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Remember when Donald Trump said he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and still maintain his support? Suppose a candidate for office did shoot somebody and the only witness was a Russian national who then hopped a plane back to Moscow.

Now suppose that the only way to prosecute this candidate would be for his political rival (the incumbent president) to request cooperation from Russia to extradite this material witness back to the United States to participate in a trial. Should he do it?

Partisanship Is the Deciding Factor

Obviously, in today’s climate, the answer depends on one critical fact: Whose side is the candidate on? If the candidate aligns with the left, then investigating a political opponent would be totally beyond the norms established by our cherished traditions. But if the candidate opposes the left, then the deep state will step in “to protect the country from that menace.”

You see, it’s perfectly fine for Hillary Clinton to use her campaign funds to hire foreign national Christopher Steele to investigate Trump using (probably made-up) Russian sources. And there’s nothing wrong with the FBI using those partisan Steele smears to investigate the Obama administration’s political opponent.

Crossfire Hurricane, the official operational title for the investigation, employed assistance from the British government and an Australian diplomat. So the left believes there’s nothing wrong with asking a foreign government for help to investigate a domestic political opponent — so long as that opponent is Trump. After all, “Nobody is above the law, not even Donald Trump.” But if the shoe ends up on the other foot and Trump is the one investigating, it’s a constitutional crisis!

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-poised-to-mark-its-first-record-in-about-four-months-mcdonalds-shares-set-to-fall-2019-11-04?mod=home-page

The Dow Jones Industrial Average joined other major indexes in record territory Monday, with stocks propelled higher as optimism about a near-term U.S.-China trade resolution and a third-quarter earnings season that has been better than feared buoyed sentiment on Wall Street.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/john-durham-last-trusted-prosecutor-in-washington/

John Durham is the legendary lawman digging into how the intelligence probe of Donald Trump started.

John Durham may be the most consequential and least known figure in Washington right now.

In May, U.S. attorney general William Barr selected Durham, a longtime prosecutor with a résumé so sterling it nearly glows, to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether it was properly predicated. Some Trump fans believe there was a vast effort by a “deep state” of high-ranking intelligence and law-enforcement officials to smear Trump or hinder his campaign by creating a perception of corrupt ties to Russia. In late October, the New York Times quoted unnamed sources who said that Durham’s probe had officially become a criminal investigation, meaning he now has the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury, and to file criminal charges.

Since he is an attorney general appointed by President Trump, almost every decision from William Barr is criticized by Democrats as a partisan abuse of law-enforcement powers. But the appointment of Durham received no backlash, and in fact received praise far and wide.

Who is Durham, this rare-as-a-unicorn figure who can reassure lawmakers, talking heads, and court-watchers on both sides of the aisle, in an era when everything seems destined to turn into a loud partisan food fight?

To say Durham is tight-lipped is an understatement; he lets his courtroom arguments speak for him and rarely talks to reporters at all. Those who have covered him for years — or, more accurately, tried to cover him — say that when he does run into reporters, he is cordial but uninformative, and almost never on the record. In Durham’s questionnaire for the Senate while awaiting confirmation to be a U.S. Attorney, he was asked to list his written work. He answered that he had never written or published any books, articles, reports, or letters to the editor. (The Senate confirmed him unanimously, with home-state senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) calling him “a fierce, fair prosecutor” who “dedicated his life to public service and the pursuit of justice.”) Durham is nicknamed, inevitably, “the Bull,” and his reputation makes clear he doesn’t take any of it from anyone.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-tax-returns-second-circuit-rules-against-president/

No Surprise: The Second Circuit in NYC clears the way for the president’s accountants to turn over records relating to his dealings more than a decade ago.

Today’s Trump v. Vance decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, holding that President Trump’s tax-return information must be turned over to state prosecutors, is no surprise.

As the court relates, a New York State grand jury is investigating the circumstances surrounding the “‘hush money’ payments made to two women” — a reference, no doubt, to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stefanie Clifford (a.k.a. “Stormy Daniels”), who claim to have had flings with Donald Trump a decade before he was elected president. In the course of the investigation, a subpoena was issued to the Trump organization for related “documents and communications.” Prosecutors interpreted this subpoena to cover the president’s personal tax returns from the relevant period (June 2015 through mid-September 2018). The president’s private counsel objected, and the Trump organization (which is wholly owned by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, of which the president is grantor and beneficiary) has not produced any such tax documents.

Meanwhile, prosecutors served another subpoena, this time on Mazars USA LLP. That is the accounting firm that possesses financial records pertaining to the president’s personal and business dealings. The Mazars subpoena covers a period stretching back to 2011. It explicitly demands production of any “tax returns and related schedules, in draft, as-filed, and amended form.”

The president discouraged Mazars from complying. He claimed sweeping immunity from state criminal process while he is in office, and thus sought a declaratory judgment that the subpoena was invalid, along with an injunction barring the district attorney from taking any action to enforce the subpoena.

That was the claim rejected today by the unanimous three-judge panel.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/03/the-military-intelligence-complex/

Many retired high-ranking military officers have gone beyond legitimately articulating why President Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to smear him personally or speak openly of removing their commander-in-chief from office. And the media and the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment are with them every step of the way.

Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the melodramatic sense of current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.

We know from a variety of disinterested watchdog institutions and foundations that the media has offered 90 percent negative coverage of the Trump Administration. CNN in its anti-Trump zeal has ruined its brand by serial fabrications and firings of its marquee biased reporters. 

An entire array of CNN journalists and analysts either has resigned, been fired, retired, forced to offer retractions, or been disgraced either for peddling ad hominem crude attacks on Trump, displaying unprofessional behavior, concocting or repeating false stories, engaging in obscene commentary, or being refuted, including but not limited at times to Reza Aslan, Carl Bernstein, Donna Brazile, James Clapper, Marshall Cohen, Candy Crowley, Kathy Griffin, Julie Joffe, Michael Hayden, Suzanne Malveaux, Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Julian Zelizer, and teams such as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, and Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.

About every month or so, a Hollywood or entertainment personage offers a new assassination scenario of shooting, torching, stabbing, beating, blowing up, caging, or lynching the elected president. 

Likewise, the country witnesses about every six weeks a new “turning point,” “bombshell,” “walls are closing in” effort to subvert the Trump presidency.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/04/trumps_true_crime_he_made_people_laugh_at_congress_141643.html

“Let’s hope some Democrats and Republicans will earn their way into a sequel to “Profiles in Courage” by standing against the naked power grab of Democrats who wanted to overturn an election and eliminate an “Unacceptable President.”

Since impeachment is a political rarity, it is not unexpected that analysts would seek out the few parallels from U.S. history to put in context the assault being waged against President Trump by the Democrats. It has been argued that Trump is not being afforded the same rights by the opposition party in Congress  that were extended to his impeachment predecessors Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But, while significant, those are not the most relevant precedents.

To draw a more apt comparison to the political persecution of Trump, we need to go back to the first actual impeachment of a president, which happened in 1868, when Andrew Johnson was harassed by his Republican opponents in Congress, in part because he did not agree with their policies on Reconstruction of the South following the Civil War.

The meat of the impeachment hinged on Johnson’s rejection of the Tenure of Office Act, which added to the Senate’s constitutional power to confirm presidential appointments by also denying the president the right to fire Cabinet members once they had been confirmed. To modern sensibilities, this seems absurd and unworkable, and so too did it seem to Johnson. He fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had been appointed by Lincoln, and promptly found himself facing  charges of committing an impeachable offense.

Johnson was a Tennessee Democrat who had been selected by Lincoln — the first Republican president — as his second-term running mate to symbolize the coming together of the nation as the Civil War approached its end. Most of the Republicans in Congress – they proudly called themselves “Radical” Republicans –  did not share Lincoln’s confidence in Johnson, who was an unpolished populist in the same vein as Donald Trump. Moreover, they thought Johnson should never have become president in the first place, much like Democrats’ attitude toward Trump today. Lincoln wasn’t supposed to die. By removing Johnson from office, the Republicans were just restoring the natural order and disposing of someone they considered an accidental president.

Whether they had used the Tenure of Office Act specifically to entrap Johnson or not, it had that effect. Johnson believed that the new law was an unconstitutional abridgment of his authority, and so he ignored the law in order to challenge it. He knew that Congress was trying to neutralize him because he opposed the Republican plan for Reconstruction.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15120/weaponizing-impeachment

To be impeached, a president must commit a crime (misdemeanor is a species of crime) and the commission of that crime must also constitute an abuse of office. An abuse of office without an underlying crime is a political sin, but not an impeachable offense.

This very issue was debated at the Constitutional Convention, where one delegate proposed “maladministration” as the criteria for impeachment and removal of a president. James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, strongly objected on the ground that so vague and open-ended a criterion would have the president serve at the will of Congress and turn us from a Republic with a strong president into a parliamentary democracy in which the chief executive can be removed by a simple vote of no confidence. Instead, the Convention adopted strict prerequisites for impeachment: treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Congress is not above the law. It is bound by what the Framers accepted and cannot now apply the criterion the framers explicitly rejected.

Most important, misusing the impeachment power in a partisan manner would pose, in the words of Hamilton, “the greatest danger” to our Constitution.

The constitutional power to impeach a duly elected president was intended by the Framers of the Constitution as a neutral, non-partisan tool of last resort to be used against only criminal incumbents in extreme cases. It is now being deployed as a partisan weapon that can be used routinely against presidents of a different party from those who control the House of Representatives.