A Complete Farce Of A Trial

Will millions of Americans tune in to watch Day Three of House impeachment managers repeating themselves endlessly and replaying clips of videos that are deliberately edited to remove all context?

Of course not.  Senators have been seen dozing off, passing notes, making paper airplanes, playing with fidget spinners and stress balls.

This whole thing revolves around a temporary hold on a foreign aid package that was released by the deadline and turned into some sinister act of treason, bribery and extortion.

I think it is fair to say the House Democrats have painted themselves into one hell of a corner.  

Their case against the President is neither “overwhelming” nor “uncontested”. Democrats rigged the House impeachment proceedings.  They rode rough-shod over witness lists, leaked selectively to complicit press poodles and rushed head-long to indict President Trump declaring breathlessly that every day the President is not impeached is another day the country is in peril.

The bipartisan support they hung their hat on never materialized.  They got squat from the Mueller Report.  The FISA Court just yesterday officially admitted that half of the secret surveillance applications it sought to spy on the Trump campaign were illegitimate.  There is no majority support for impeachment.  They haven’t moved the needle.  There has been no proof of high crimes and misdemeanors.  And now their worst fears are about to be realized:  a disastrous and thoroughly embarrassing Senate acquittal.

On Saturday, to quote Eddie Murphy from the movie 48 Hrs, there’s a new sheriff in town.

The seven House impeachment managers are about to cede the floor to the President’s legal team—perhaps for three full days.

UPDATE:  The attorneys general of 21 states have come forward with a blistering rebuke of the impeachment of President Trump, asserting in a letter to the U.S. Senate that it "establishes a dangerous historical precedent" and urged the chamber to reject the impeachment articles.

"If not expressly repudiated by the Senate, the theories animating both Articles will set a precedent that is entirely contrary to the Framers' design and ruinous to the most important governmental structure protections contained in our Constitution: the separation of powers," they wrote.

Jerry Nadler’s Zipper Vs. The Horowitz Report

As this decade draws to a close, the political calendar for Monday will feature the Heavyweight Fight Card of Fat Jerry Nadler’s Zipper versus The Horowitz Report.

At 9:00 AM from the Longworth House Office Building, the House Judiciary Committee will hold its second impeachment hearing entitled “The Impeachment Inquiry into President Donald J. Trump:  Presentations from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Judiciary Committee.”

Sometime Monday morning DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report into the FBI’s intrusive wiretapping powers will be made public.  Release of the IG’s report follows revelations in October that a related—and equally politically charged—examination of the origins of the Russia investigation has shifted to a criminal probe.

Horowitz, during the more than a year-and-a-half investigation, has not commented on his investigation into FISA court abuses to issue secret warrants by “dirty cops” to monitor persons within the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.  Warrants were renewed several times by judges based on uncorroborated information obtained by disgraced British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Thus far, four Inspector General reports and internal Justice Department documents have found senior FBI officers guilty of lying, insubordination, security violations, mishandling confidential material and personal biases against President Trump.

Media outlets whose implicit agenda has been to damage this president have deliberately downplayed the significance of Horowitz’s report.

If you believe, as many do, the Democrats are governed by the clock and the calendar in moving forward with Articles of Impeachment the facts are these:

Lindsey Graham, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Horowitz on November 18th inviting him to testify before the committee on his findings.  Horowitz agreed to the date authorized by Graham which he set for December 11, 2019.

Horowitz Cc’d his letter to Dianne Feinstein who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and to Jerry Nadler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  In addition, copies were sent to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Horowitz gave assurances the “lengthy” report would be published with few redactions and without a need to prepare or issue “separate classified and public versions of the report.”

When asked if Chairman Nadler would hold a hearing on the FISA report once it is released, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) said, "No chance. Jerry Nadler is going to run, not walk, away from any opportunity to bring the Inspector General in to talk about these issues."

The ranking member on the Committee, Georgia Republican Doug Collins, has asked Nadler to schedule a hearing. "FISA oversight falls squarely within the Judiciary Committee’s jurisdiction. We must act swiftly to address concerns outlined in the Inspector General’s report," he wrote in a letter to Nadler.

“I’m not aware of any terrible problem with the FISA court and specifically not with the Carter Page application,” Nadler said.

More than two months later, a hearing focused on Horowitz's report has not been scheduled by the committee. A representative for Nadler did not respond to a request for comment.

Republican Reps. Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows also pressed House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (she replaced Rep. Elijah Cummings who died recently) to hold a FISA report hearing, making the request in a letter. A representative for Maloney did not respond to a request for comment about whether such a hearing might be scheduled.

The Grinched Impeachment Inquiry

The House Judiciary Committee’s July hearing featuring Special Counsel Robert Mueller was a circus under the chairmanship of tubby Jerry Nadler.  The is-it-or-isn’t-it-impeachment debacle forced Speaker of the House Pelosi to change horses midstream and hand the reins over to smarmy Adam Schiff where he tortured the investigation.

While President Trump is in London for a NATO summit dealing with crucial national security issues, Schiff insists he’s doing “potentially irrevocable” damage to the system of checks and balances and is an existential threat to the Constitution.

From the House Republicans Report of Evidence in the Democrats’ Impeachment Inquiry:

The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is not the organic outgrowth of serious misconduct; it is an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system. The Democrats are trying to impeach a duly elected President based on the accusations and assumptions of unelected bureaucrats who disagreed with President Trump’s policy initiatives and processes. They are trying to impeach President Trump because some unelected bureaucrats were discomforted by an elected President’s telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. They are trying to impeach President Trump because some unelected bureaucrats chafed at an elected President’s “outside the beltway” approach to diplomacy. 

The sum and substance of the Democrats’ case for impeachment is that President Trump abused his authority to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, President Trump’s potential political rival, for President Trump’s benefit in the 2020 election. Democrats say this pressure campaign encompassed leveraging a White House meeting and the release of U.S. security assistance to force the Ukrainian President to succumb to President Trump’s political wishes. Democrats say that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney, and a “shadow” group of U.S. officials conspired to benefit the President politically. 

The evidence presented does not prove any of these Democrat allegations, and none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor. 

[SKIP] 

The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, is merely the outgrowth of their obsession with re-litigating the results of the 2016 presidential election. Despite their best efforts, the evidence gathered during the Democrats’ partisan and one-sided impeachment inquiry does not support that President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rival to benefit the President in the 2020 presidential election. The evidence does not establish any impeachable offense. 

But that is not for Democrats’ want of trying. 

[SKIP] 

Speaker Pelosi, Chairman Schiff, and House Democrats seek to impeach President Trump—not because they have proof of a high crime or misdemeanor, but because they disagreed with the President’s actions and his policies. But in our system of government, the President is accountable to the American people. The accountability to the American people comes at the ballot box, not in the House Democrats’ star chamber.

Starting today, Nadler gets a second chance to be the leader of the would-be hanging party and has scheduled four lawyers who are constitutional scholars, three of whom already support impeachment.  Jonathan Turley will appear as a witness on behalf of Republicans.

Unless you are hoping to get continuing law education credits, your decision to watch this sham, requires a pillow and woobie.  This will most assuredly be a coma-inducing snooze fest.

UPDATE:  Welcome readers of Whatfinger News.

A Very Curious Spectacle: The Trained Parrot And The Democrats’ Holy Grail

The Mueller testimony before both the House and Judiciary Committees was supposed to be the impetus that would open an impeachment inquiry against President Trump.

The report filed by Special Counsel Mueller found Russia did interfere with the election, but “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

As far as obstruction, the report laid out facts on both sides but did not reach a conclusion that the President committed a crime, nor did it exonerate him.  The Democrats lacked a clear message about impeachment.

Russia, Russia, Russia went by the wayside.  Trump-hating Democrats were left flopping on the dock like a hooked fish pulled from the water.

This week headlines blared from progressive left outlets from widely leaked closed-door testimony by William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who assumed that position in July. Taylor reportedly testified he was “alarmed” the Trump Administration allegedly withheld military assistance unless Ukraine committed to investigating 2016 election corruption, including alleged wrongdoing by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Ambassador Taylor is very familiar with the process of “conditioning” U.S. foreign aid. He spoke of it extensively in November 2011 after he had just been handpicked by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a new position as the State Department’s Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions, specifically Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

According to the Employee Post-Travel Disclosure Form and the Sponsor Post-Travel Disclosure Form for Thomas Eager, a member of Adam Schiff’s staff, he traveled to Ukraine in August to meet with Taylor who was deemed to be the key impeachment witness.  The official partner of Burisma is the Atlantic Council.  The Atlantic Council sponsored the trip.

William Taylor also has strong connections to other dark power players, many of whom are embroiled in the spying scandal currently under investigation by Attorney General William Barr and US Attorney John Durham.

Taylor was a senior advisor to the US- Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), where he often presented round table discussions about policy with David Kramer from the McCain Institute. Kramer was responsible for laundering the Steele Dossier into the FBI on behalf of John McCain. Also a key player at the USUBC is the Atlantic Council, a Washington DC-based organization funded in part by Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who was a donor to the Clinton Foundation. Crowdstrike co-founder and CTO Dmitri Alperovitch is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Crowdstrike was responsible for the DNC servers, and claims that it was Russia that hacked the servers and provided the information to Wikileaks.

Crowdstrike also held them privately for analysis rather than allow the FBI to forensically analyze them. In the now-infamous call with the President Zelensky, President Trump asked him to look for the missing DNC servers suspecting they were in Ukraine.

Breaking overnight was the revelation that the Department of Justice has moved its review of the Russian investigation into a criminal probe according to the New York Times giving prosecutor John Durham subpoena power over testimony and documents in the Russia probe.  Former DNI Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan should lawyer-up now.

A scant twenty minutes elapsed after the NYT published the news prompting Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff to issue a joint statement accusing the President of politicizing the DOJ saying, “These reports, if true, raise profound new concerns that the Department of Justice under AG Barr has lost its independence and become a vehicle for President Trump’ political revenge.”

That’s rich coming from these two charlatans as they continue to foist an unauthorized impeachment inquiry that is itself a political narrative for the next election intended to destroy this president.

UPDATE:  Welcome readers of Whatfinger News.

UPDATE II:  Welcome readers of Pirate’s Cove.  We are grateful to Admiral Teach for the linky-love.

Operation Crossfire Hurricane: Mueller, Comey, Brennan and Steele’s Inside Job

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating disgraced former FBI Director James Comey was misleading President Trump. Even as he repeatedly assured the President he was not a target, Comey was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case while acting as an investigative agent.

Two U.S. officials briefed on the Inspector General’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the President, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during their January 2017 meeting in New York.

We learned yesterday the Justice Department instructed former Special Counsel Robert Mueller in a letter not to answer a wide variety of questions about his investigation of President Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election when he testifies tomorrow.

Mueller will first appear before the House Judiciary Committee starting at 8:30 AM. Because of the Committee’s size, that hearing is expected to last about three hours. He will then appear before the House Intelligence Committee at noon, in a hearing that is expected to last about two hours.

The Justice Department expects that Mueller will “not go beyond” the public version of his March report.

Let it be known Mueller will be a reluctant witness appearing only under the threat of subpoena. Democrats have this fever dream in which they get Mueller to read from his report and the public will be jarred to hear what’s in it.

On Sunday, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler said on Fox News Sunday, “the report presents very substantial evidence the President is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The hearings are being billed as the last chance for the Democrats to rekindle fading public interest in the Mueller investigation.

There are more than 2,000 footnotes included in Mueller’s report. Most of the citations are matter-of-fact support for claims made in the main text. But a close reading reveals that many of the footnotes raise more questions than they answer, especially regarding Mueller’s methods and intent. Some footnotes show that key allegations often rely on the flimsy say-so of media accounts; others show a willingness to accept the claims of anti-Trump critics at face value. Mueller and his team also used the footnotes as the place to include unsubstantiated gossip and speculation.  

Yes, Mr. Mueller’s testimony will indeed be must-see TV.  I have an inflatable swimming pool in my storage shed for Jerry Nadler and his ilk to swim in their own tears after this circus is over.  No minds will be changed. 

It is paramount to remember Mueller could never establish the underlying crime he was assigned to investigate. So, Democrats will showcase an investigation that was not obstructed into a crime that investigators could not establish actually happened.

UPDATE:  Welcome readers of Bad Blue Uncensored News.  We thank Doug Ross for linking to this post.