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The Impeachment Clock By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-impeachment-inquiry-adam-schiff-working-against-the-clock/

Time is not on Adam Schiff’s side.

A dam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry is incoherent. Given the impossibility of a senatorial conviction, the only strategy is to taint the president with the brand of impeachment and weaken him in the 2020 election.

Yet Schiff seems to have no sense that the worm has already turned. Far from tormenting Trump and the Republicans by a long-drawn-out Schiff extravaganza, Trump’s supporters are beginning to feel that the longer the farce, the better the optics. Polls show that Trump is almost back to where he was in popularity when Schiff unleashed his late-September Ukrainian caper. And the point, after all, was again to drive down Trump’s popularity and render him politically inert.

From the day Schiff reemerged after his licking his wounds in hibernation, following the Mueller implosion, his efforts have insidiously gone downhill. Once Trump released the transcript of his July 25th call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, the nation learned that the Schiff’s gold-standard whistleblower was no such thing. Instead, he seems a rank partisan and sloppy leaker whose machinations and background are already boomeranging back on those who put him up to this present circus.

Schiff never expected that Trump would release a classified transcript of his own presidential call — Democrats expected secrecy and coverup, much as the deep-state intelligence-agency miscreants acted unethically and illegally on the presumption that Hillary Clinton would be easily elected and their dishonest efforts would be rewarded and kept quiet.

One of the strangest developments of the opening inquiry was Schiff’s own doubling-down admission that he didn’t know the name of the whistleblower. After previously lying that neither he nor his staff had contact with the whistleblower (“We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower”) — he now ups the ante, apparently assuming that neither his staff nor the whistleblower will testify under oath.

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FBI Looking Into Possibility that ‘Criminal Enterprise’ was Involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s Death By Tobias Hoonhout

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-looking-into-possibility-that-criminal-enterprise-was-involved-in-jeffrey-epsteins-death/

The FBI has opened an investigation into a possible “criminal enterprise” involved in the death of Jeffrey Epstein, according to the Tuesday Congressional testimony of Bureau of Prisons director Kathleen Hawk Sawyer

Sawyer announced the inquiry during a line of questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

“With a case this high profile there has got to be either a major malfunction of the system or criminal enterprise at foot to allow this to happen. So are you looking at both, is the FBI looking at both?” Graham asked, to which Sawyer responded that “the FBI is involved and they are looking at criminal enterprise, yes.”

Sawyer took her position in August after Attorney General William Barr demoted Hugh Hurwitz a week after Epstein died in his Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Epstein, 66, died in what New York City’s chief medical examiner ruled was suicide by hanging on August 10, despite being put on suicide watch after attempting suicide a few weeks earlier on July 23. Prison staffers recommended days before his death that Epstein be taken off the watch for unknown reasons.

  

News broke Tuesday morning that the guards assigned to Epstein have been arrested and are accused of falsifying log entries to read that they checked on the late financier every half hour as required, when in fact they had neglected to do so for several hours.

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The Progressive ‘Policy Community’ Ukraine Fantasy By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-progressive-policy-community-ukraine-fantasy/

The Ukrainians merit our support as an enemy of Moscow, but they’re still a nasty, untrustworthy bunch.

‘A strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security.” This is the gospel according to Lieutenant Alexander Vindman, self-proclaimed member of our federal government’s “policy community,” the interagency conglomerate of experts on which Democrats are staking their case for the impeachment and removal of President Trump.

We need Ukraine as a “strategic partner,” Vindman told Adam Schiff’s impeachment-inquiry panel. We need it to be “stable, prosperous, and democratic,” a nation that is “integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community.” On this our vital interests depend, we’re told, because Ukraine is a front-line state and a “bulwark against Russian aggression.”

This, indeed, is why we’re supposed to be appalled at a new disclosure in testimony last week by Ambassador Bill Taylor, another policy-community stalwart. He says someone told someone that someone heard the president say he cared more about getting Ukraine to investigate possible Biden-family corruption than he did about Ukraine itself.

Imagine not caring about . . . Ukraine!

I can. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it.

I am pretty sure I care more about Ukraine than President Trump does. That said, it’s a lousy country. I’m very sympathetic to the goal of supporting it as a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin’s formidable anti-American regime. But I am certainly much more interested in knowing about what the Bidens were up to in Ukraine (and China), and in getting a full accounting of Ukraine’s collusion with Democrats in connection with the 2016 election, than I am in Ukraine.

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Why the U.S. Is Right to Recognize West Bank ‘Settlements’ as Legal By David Harsanyi

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/why-the-u-s-is-right-to-recognize-west-bank-settlements-as-legal/

Final-status negotiations between Israel and Palestinians will be predicated on the reality of disputed land.

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s mercurial foreign policy, his support for Israel has been resolute in ways that no other president can match.

It was Trump who finally followed the law and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. Every president since 1995 — the year the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which funds the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizes the city as the “undivided” capital of Israel, was passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate — had promised to move the embassy. None did.

It is probably Trump’s uniquely defiant disposition toward group-thinking State Department types that made the move possible. It’s difficult to imagine any of the other 2016 presidential hopefuls braving the massive internal opposition such a decision would provoke. But Jerusalem proper was never going to be the Palestinian capital, and it was about time everyone involved dealt with reality.

It was also the Trump administration that finally recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, a strategically vital strip of land from which Syria and her proxies have launched numerous wars, bombings, and terror operations against Israeli civilians over the past 70 years. Many of the same experts who claimed to be utterly disgusted by the idea of the U.S. ceding land in northern Syria were also grousing about how counterproductive it was for the United States to unilaterally affirm that Israel would control the Golan Heights. Well, Israel was never going to hand back this land to the Assad regime, or negotiate with it, and it was about time everyone accepted this reality.

And yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that United States would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian “settlements” in the West Bank are “inconsistent with international law.” (Or, as our German ambassador Richard Grenell aptly put it, the United States would “no longer meddle in local Israeli zoning and building-permits issues.”) Many of those “settlements” — cities, really, some of them in existence for decades — are part of a de facto border, and they are never going to be bulldozed. That’s also reality.

It has always been a mistake for the United States to treat disputed territories in the West Bank as occupied. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to “occupy” Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. Israel spilled much blood taking the West Bank in self-defense from Jordan after that nation joined Egypt and Syria in the attempted destruction of Israel in 1967. Even then, Jordan had no legal claim to the territory. Israel offered 98 percent of the West Bank back right after the 1967 war, and on numerous occasions afterward. It was always refused.

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IMPEACHMENT FOLLIES

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

The Impeachment ‘Partial Transcript’ Lie Just Got Blown Out Of The Water

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/the-impeachment-partial-transcript-lie-just-got-blown-out-of-the-water/

In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, both Jennifer Williams, an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman stated that the transcript of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zolodymyr Zelensky was substantively accurate.

In direct response to a question as to whether the transcript was complete and accurate, neither suggested that it was not, except for minor details they found in their notes of the call.

This testimony blows up a month-long lie pushed by Democrats and their media allies that the transcript was partial, or redacted, suggesting that the White House was potentially hiding important details. For weeks the baseless claim that the transcript was so doctored that we don’t really know what happened on the call has been floated all over mainstream media coverage.

 
Vindman Just Admitted To Leaking To The Anti-Trump Whistleblower

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/vindman-just-admitted-to-leaking-to-the-anti-trump-whistleblower/

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman admitted to the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday to leaking information to the anti-Trump whistleblower at the center of the Democrats’ partisan impeachment proceedings.

Vindman Exaggerated His Resume In Prepared Congressional Statement

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/vindman-exaggerated-his-resume-in-prepared-congressional-statement

Vindman claimed to be the “principal advisor to the National Security Advisor and the president on Ukraine.” Turns out, he’s never spoken to the president.

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The Trump Administration Is Right: Israeli Settlements Do Not Violate International Law Mike Pompeo’s announcement affirms the inhabitance of Jews in territories recaptured in the Six-Day War in 1967 does not violate international law.By Erielle Davidson

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/no-israeli-settlements-do-not-violate-international-law/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that the United States is abandoning a Carter-era bureaucratic decision that Israeli settlements – the homes of Jews living in Judea and Samaria – are illegal under international law. Pompeo’s statement represents a dramatic reversal from the Obama administration, which under the auspices of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, publicly held that Israeli settlements constituted a violation of international law.

Pompeo’s action is particularly notable coming shortly after the European Court of Justice ruled the EU was required by international law to label Israeli products from the West Bank as made in “settlements” in “occupied” territory. That decision, like the Carter-era policy Pompeo rejected, applied a unique rule, crafted solely for Israel, and masquerading as international law. Pompeo’s latest statement serves as a reminder that the Trump administration does not bow to anti-Israel sentiment positing itself as “international law,” no matter what shape it arrives in.

In challenging the international law consensus, Pompeo noted that the labeling of Israeli civilian settlements as “inconsistent with international law” has not actually forwarded the objective of long-term peace. Pompeo’s declaration is also an affirmative nod to what a host of others in the international community, particularly Professor Eugene Kontorovich of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, have been asserting in opposition for decades—the inhabitance of Jews in territories recaptured in the Six-Day War in 1967 does not violate international law.

The outrage over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s September announcement regarding the potential application of Israeli civil law in the Jordan Valley mirrors the current outrage being lodged at Pompeo’s declaration. Both Netanyahu and Pompeo’s assertions, however, find solid grounding in international law.

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Americans Need To Stop Funding The Chinese Gulag Ben Weingarten

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/americans-need-to-stop-funding-the-chinese-g

The Chinese have for decades banked on the world, and in particular its richest nation, prioritizing money over all else, including evidently its long-term national interest.

One can learn a lot about how a nation will treat others by how it treats its own. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) oppressive treatment of its people then should send a chilling message to the rest of the world, considering the regime’s global ambitions, and its aggressive effort to achieve them with our cooperation.

While Hong Kong continues hurtling towards a potential modern Tiananmen Square massacre, recently a claimed member of the Chinese political establishment leaked a trove of purported documents to The New York Times regarding the CCP’s establishment of modern-day gulags in Xinjiang province’s “re-education camps.”

Among the major revelations of the 403 pages described by the Times, encompassing speeches from CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping and other officials, are:

In the wake of several Uighur terror attacks, Xi led the effort to exert totalitarian control over China’s Uighur population, commanding the state to employ “organs of dictatorship” and show “absolutely no mercy” in removing “the toxicity of religious extremism”—manifesting itself in not a targeted counterjihadist campaign but the apparently widespread, indiscriminate, and totalitarian concentration camp-building effort of the last several years;
Xi believed repression of the Xinjiang population was essential as a broader signal to other potentially problematic cohorts, or otherwise “social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected”—that is, unrest would threaten the CCP’s objectives, chief among them the perpetuation of its own rule;
Consistent with this view, under CCP leader of Xinjiang Chen Quanguo, authorities developed propaganda scripts for officials encountering returning students to Xinjiang whose family members had been taken to the camps that downplayed the authoritarian nature of the detentions while threatening the students should they protest;
Interestingly, perhaps demonstrating a weakness in the CCP system that its foes might exploit, documents indicate a level of resistance among officials tasked with implementing the party’s policies. Thus the party unleashed investigators who conducted more than 12,000 probes into party members alleged to be insufficiently dedicated to the “fight against separatism,” making a public example of one of the most prominent of the resisters. To the extent the leaker’s desires were genuine, and the documents are true, the leak itself might also reflect broader fractures in the system.

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Brennan And Clapper’s Secret Surveillance System – Kelleigh Nelson

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

http://newswithviews.com/brennan-and-clappers-secret-surveillance-system/

The following information has been gathered from countless articles by Mary Fanning and Alan Jones of theAmericanreport.org.  Their reports should be read by every American, including our nation’s politicians.

Dennis Montgomery is a software designer and former CIA/NSA/DoD/DHS contractor. Montgomery built a surveillance system known as “The Hammer.” He blew the whistle on the Obama administration’s allegedly illegal use of that system to wiretap Donald Trump. (Rand Paul claims Brennan, Clapper, Comey sent spies into the Trump campaign.)

Montgomery also developed technology for analyzing surveillance video from U.S. Air Force predator drones remotely piloted from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.  Nellis Air Force Base is also the home of a charter school run by imam Fethullah Gulen. Clinton’s hand-picked CIA handlers, Graham Fuller and Mark Grossman, were selected to manage and direct Gulen’s cells in the U.S. and abroad.  Link

Reminiscent of the theft of Bill Hamilton’s Inslaw Promis software allegedly by the Reagan administration’s Ed Meese, this is much the same thing. The government seems to steal from private enterprises what they want for their own.

Montgomery asserts that intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper ran “The Hammer” surveillance system. According to CIA Vault 7 documents released by WikiLeaks on March 7, 2017, The Hammer (HAMR) is a browser exploit throwing framework that infects targeted devices and systems.  The Hammer allowed spying on Supreme Court Justices, 159 Article III judges,elected officials, and 20 million other Americans.

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Clinton Foundation Reports $16.8 Million Loss in 2018 Andres Stiles

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-foundation-money-loss/

The Clinton Foundation reported a loss of more than $16 million in 2018, according to newly released tax records, marking the second consecutive year of losses since Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat to President Donald J. Trump in 2016.

The foundation reported total revenue of just $30.7 million, including $24.2 million worth of grants and contributions, a record low for the alleged “charity.” That figure was well short of the foundation’s total expenses for the year—$47.5 million— resulting in a net loss of $16.8 million.

The previous year, the Clinton Foundation reported a net loss of $16.1 million. In total, the organization has lost a staggering $32.9 million since Hillary Clinton’s lifelong quest for the presidency crumbled to dust in November 2016.

Shockingly, the foundation’s revenues have plummeted compared to the massive figures reported during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state (2009 to 2013), and during her campaign as the Democratic Party’s essentially unchallenged presidential nominee in 2016.

The Clinton Foundation posted its highest revenue haul ($249 million) in 2009, the year Hillary was sworn in as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. By 2013, the foundation had reported an additional $392.2 million in revenue, and went on to raise $344.4 million between 2014 and 2016.

Between 2008 and 2016, the Clinton Foundation reported total revenue in excess of $1.1 billion, or an annual average of $130.4 million. Needless to say, Clinton’s stunning failure to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election appears to have had a significant impact on the foundation’s ability to raise money.

The foundation’s financial prospects will presumably look much brighter after Hillary inevitably declares her candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020.

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Trump makes pro-Israel history again by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/writers/ruthie-blum/

Every action that his administration has taken stems from the understanding that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian peace process” has failed repeatedly—not only as a result of being based on a false premise, but of following the same old paradigm.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s dramatic announcement on Monday that the “establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law” sent shockwaves around the world. In retrospect, however, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.

Since his election three years ago, U.S. President Donald Trump has been consistent in his efforts to reverse the policies of the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Not only in relation to Israel. But his pro-Israel stance has been steady and unapologetic from the get-go, which is as it should be.

Indeed, each of his decisions—such as recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the embassy accordingly, defunding the Palestinian “pay for slay” machine and acknowledging Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights—has been geared towards cementing the natural U.S.-Israel relationship in a healthy way. Every action that his administration has taken stems from the understanding that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian peace process” has failed repeatedly—not only as a result of being based on a false premise, but of following the same old paradigm.

Team Trump has been engaging in what the high-tech sector refers to as “disruption.”