Democrats

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‘Dangerous Historical Precedent’: Republican State Attorneys General Admonish Iimpeachment in Letter to Senate | The Washington Examiner & Trending Politics

While Washington is consumed by impeachment fever, nearly half of the country’s state attorney generals are speaking out to condemn the Democrat coup against President Trump.

In an unprecedented letter to the Senate signed by 21 state attorney generals, the top law enforcement officials rebuked the impeachment and warned that:

“This impeachment proceeding threatens all future elections and establishes a dangerous historical precedent”

The letter urges senators to reject the Pelosi-Schiff-Nadler sham and emphasizes that the impeachment was concocted as a politically motivated scheme to reverse the 2016 election which they lost as well as to improperly influence the upcoming one this year.

Via The Washington Examiner, “‘Dangerous historical precedent’: Republican state attorneys general admonish impeachment in letter to Senate”:

Twenty-one Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the Senate rebuking the impeachment of President Trump, claiming it would set a dangerous precedent moving forward.

The letter, which was sent on Wednesday morning, called for the Senate to dismiss the charges and end the trial, according to Fox News.

“This impeachment proceeding threatens all future elections and establishes a dangerous historical precedent,” it read. “That new precedent will erode the separation of powers shared by the executive and legislative branches by subjugating future Presidents to the whims of the majority opposition party in the House of Representatives.”

The attorneys general added, “Thus, our duty to current and future generations commands us to urge the Senate to not only reject the two articles of impeachment … as lacking in any plausible or reasonable evidentiary basis, but also as being fundamentally flawed as a matter of constitutional law.”

They went on to argue that the abuse of power charge against the president “is based upon a constitutionally-flawed theory” that is “infinitely expansive and subjective” because it is contingent upon knowing the motivation of the president. The attorneys general also claim that the second charge, obstruction of Congress, is “equally flawed” because it would ultimately render executive privilege “meaningless.”

The letter comes as the Democrat impeachment managers led by Adam Schiff have now come out and admitted before the Senate that the real reason why they seek to have President Trump removed from office is because he is going to win in November and that cannot be tolerated.

According to the letter:

Impeachment should never be a partisan response to one party losing a presidential election. If successful, an impeachment proceeding nullifies the votes of millions of citizens. The Democrat-controlled House passing of these constitutionally-deficient articles of impeachment amounts, at bottom, to a partisan political effort that undermines the democratic process itself.

That is exactly what is happening because in their rapacious lust for power, Democrats are determined to nullify the 63 million Americans who voted to elect Trump in 2016 and the tens of millions more who will vote for him again in November if he is not removed by the Senate.

By embracing the Soviet model, the current version of the Democratic party loves to pay lip service to “democracy” despite being anti-democracy to their very core and this cannot stand if America is to remain a free country.

Take it from the state attorneys.

Source: The Washington Examiner & Trending Politics

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‘No Confidence!’ Pelosi Opens Door For Parliamentary System | The Epoch Times

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) speaks to media at the Capitol in Washington on Dec. 19, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

By Roger L. Simon

With some justification, for years we have heard trumpeted the superiority of the American (with minor exceptions) two-party system as opposed to the typically unstable multi-party parliamentary system used by the Europeans and others.

For that reason, among others, we have often been the envy of the world. Our so-called Big Tent parties have held the country together. Legislation can be passed, progress made, without having to appeal to and compromise with a half-dozen or more warring constituencies.

That is now in danger. Due to the Speaker Nancy Pelosi-inspired impeachment of Donald Trump because they don’t like him and his policies (actually the policies are a minor part of it—it’s almost entirely him) we have our own version of the parliamentary system.

This evidence-free impeachment was virtually the American equivalent of the “confidence or no confidence vote” employed by parliaments, a vote that happens or is threatened so often in that system it is head-spinning (cf. the U. K., Israel, and Italy, which sometimes approaches the daily).

By dialing impeachment down in this manner, they have actually dialed it down and out and into something different and almost always self-defeating. From now on, our presidents will be effectively prime ministers.

Whether this was inadvertent or not, that has been the result. That the impeachment is now stalled because Pelosi refuses to pass the articles to the Senate only underscores that it was never real in the first place and was indeed, as in Europe, a vote of “no confidence.”

So does this mean we are about to fly apart? It’s almost a rhetorical question. To a great degree we already have.

Who knows what will occur in the aftermath of presidential election 2020?

The Democrats are already two relatively-equal parties, one center-left and the other almost purely socialist. On the Republican side, the Never Trumpers may want a party of their own. That makes four that actually already exist ideologically. Will they split? Where do we go from there? How many more possible parties are lurking in the political underbrush?

Don’t we have enough gridlock already?

Thanks, Madame Speaker.

Author and screenwriter Roger L. Simon is the Senior Political Analyst of The Epoch Times. His new novel is “The GOAT.”

Source: The Epoch Times

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Impeachment Professors: Welcome to My World | American Crossroads

Editor’s Note: Take special note of the fourth academic Professor Jonathan Turley who cared to differ with his colleagues regarding impeachment and the grounds thereof. As a result he may suffer the consequences of stepping “out of line” from the other hard core socialist academia who testified before the House Judiciary Committee.

Commentary by Mary Grabar

Welcome to my world all you people appalled by the testimony of professors presenting Constitutional grounds for impeaching President Donald Trump.

Are you disgusted by the display of feminist rage, graduate student earnestness, and droning about the “framers” by tenured elites who have built careers presenting the Constitution as a “living document”?

Ha! Welcome to my world where I spent 20 years until 2013 studying and teaching college English.

I would still be in that world, having to listen to morning-after faculty lounge debates about the relative merits of these three scholars, were it not for the fact that a department chair, and then a college president, did not like op-eds I wrote, because the First Amendment applied only to people with their views. Then the privately funded program under which I was teaching at Emory University ended.

It’s not that I could get beyond the low-paying year-to-year contracts. My thesis and dissertation focused on dead white male cis-gendered (with no “homosexual,” or even “homo-social” tendencies) Christian writers. So I never had a chance.

During my years of struggle, I would try to convey what it was like to those on the outside—family members, friends, and people I met. I described the witchy cackling at meetings, screams about oppression from lecterns, inquisitorial stares from colleagues passing by in hallways, and examples of “scholarship”—like the poster with the giant phallus (and more that I can’t describe in this forum) adorning the office door of the head of “Sexuality Studies,” which was within the English department at Emory. Every day I trudged past that looming phallus, above the poster of Shakespeare in drag advertising a “Shakesqueer” conference.

Oh, that’s just those crazy English professors, said people in the business world and in the sciences. They looked at me slant-eyed after I stammered, “but, but … the giant phallus, and …”

Today, the standards of academe have infiltrated the business world. My former skeptics on the political right no longer post political comments on Facebook. Techies such as James Damore and CEOs are fired for their words and actions that have nothing to do with their job performance. Math and science professors are required to sign statements pledging allegiance to diversity, which means admitting less-qualified women and minorities. They’re required to believe their magical diverse powers will ensure that bridges do not collapse and patients, with their skulls cut open on the operating table, do not die. They must embrace Afrocentric math, “women’s ways of knowing” anatomy, and the path-breaking theory of Lysenkoism.

My world was the faculty lounge (the office with broken-down furniture where several instructors at one time held “office hours”). It’s a world where even such poorly paid hacks thought they were better, smarter, and holier than the majority of Americans and 100 percent of Republicans.

These people need not even look at evidence or consider scholarly shoddiness because they know that if it comes from the wrong source, it is wrong, as an Amazon review respondent who agreed with commentator “Prof. JayG” that I had not cited “any evidence” in my book “Debunking Howard Zinn,” affirmed. My book is simply “right-wing trash.” No doubt, philosophy professor David Detmer still believes I suffer from “Zinnophobia.”

Such “profs” do not need to read entire books and review footnotes because of their superior abilities to “deconstruct” texts. The deconstructionist theorists I had to read in graduate school saw the real meaning of an author’s words. While mere mortals may attach the signifier (the word) to the signified (the thing or concept), the deconstructionists could see beyond. They used this ability to also discern the motives of outsiders: white people, heterosexuals, men, Republicans—and those inside and outside these groups (excluding Republicans) who did not adhere to their ever-evolving standards of what today is called “wokeness.”

These people, unlike mortals, do not need facts. This was true about Donald Trump’s election. They knew there was cause to impeach him immediately after the election, and they said so to their students. I saw this here in Clinton, New York. Mere days after the election, professors chaperoned students from Hamilton College on the “hill” to the village square, where they marched and yelled “Impeach!” before they got on the luxury buses for the mile-and-a-half ride back to campus.

This ability to see beyond evidence has been honed for a long time. Back when a few middle-class Americans dared to form a “tea party” movement to protest with speeches, bunting, and prayer against the newly elected “global citizen” President Barack Obama’s agenda of “transforming” this country, the Ph.D.s and other super-intellects discerned that this was not really the desire of law-abiding, hard-working Americans to prevent their country from turning into Cuba. They knew, just knew, that this was racism.

So were the questions about Obama’s longtime “god-damning America” pastor, Weatherman friend Bill Ayers, brobuddy Hugo Chavez, and Communist Party USA mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Obama’s fundraising party comments about “bitter” Bible- and gun-toting Americans were simple truth. His declaration of being able to rule with his pen and phone was not any threat to the Constitutional separation of powers at all. The Obama Youth Brigade Formation’s chants of “because of Obama I’m inspired to be the next” architect, engineer, lawyer, etc., repeating points of Obama’s platform, and shouts of “Yes, we can!” were signs of rejuvenated youthful optimism.

Whereas professors had proudly sported bumper stickers proclaiming “Somewhere in Texas a village has lost its idiot” during the George W. Bush administration, they recognized Obama’s words as poetic genius.

Michelle Obama, a broad-shouldered statuesque woman was treated like the most beautiful and fashionable woman in the world—even when she dressed up like a giant banana. But a supermodel married to a Republican can have no fashion sense. Melania Trump’s white coat in a Christmas video among white-themed Christmas decorations, “exude[d] cold, dismissive aloofness”—so unlike the Santa Clausy Mao Christmas tree decorations in the Obama White House!

The fact that such reactionary outlets such as Fox News reported this as if there was something wrong with having the author of the famous Little Red Book on the tree alongside a drag queen and Obama etched into Mount Rushmore proves how close-minded they are. They’re incapable of seeing the brilliance of a theory developed by the natural genius Karl Marx whose social justice work was supported by the wealthy industrialist Friedrich Engels. (And isn’t it nice that George Soros and other billionaires support similar scholarship these days?)

Marx understood history so well because he had deconstructed it and could see the patterns. Therefore, he was able to predict the future. And he could tell what would usher in a paradise.

When everyday people, like peasants, or reporters doing reporting instead of going to the Kremlin’s fancy parties, presented counter-evidence (in the case of peasants by dropping dead from starvation), the professors shot back. They accused the few reporters jotting down the numbers of beggars and dead bodies (like William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons) of being reactionaries. They accused the peasants of bringing on their own starvation by not working enthusiastically enough on the collective farms the government had so generously provided them.

Even after Kruschev had denounced Stalin for errors, the professors did not lose faith. They knew socialism could work—if only the “right” people were in charge.

The professors in the 1960s kept teaching about the superiority of socialism, hoping as Bill Ayers and company did, that through the reeducation of their charges they would usher in and rule over a socialistic utopia. And even though the Vietnamese fled North Vietnam, the people there really wanted a communist government. These thinkers knew that Ho Chi Minh was more of a democrat than the slave-owning writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.

So, when I recently watched the testimony by the Constitutional scholars Pamela Karlan (Stanford), Noah Feldman (Harvard), and Michael Gerhardt (University of North Carolina), I thought, welcome to my world.

Welcome to my world where someone like Karlan, who at a 2017conference claimed she had to cross the street from Donald Trump’s hotel (the building apparently shoots cootie rays onto the sidewalk) and to know that Trump did not “believe in” democracy, “the rule of law,” or a “free press.” The legal scholar had denounced “voter suppression” (no, no, not about New Black Panthers outside the Philadelphia polling station in 2008; those were civil rights activists) and claimed that Trump’s sexual assault record was higher than “99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally.” (Let us hope the FBI takes note of this inside information.)

In addition to being an ace legal mind, she was able to go beyond Freud and diagnosed Trump as not being able to tell the difference between truth and falsity. She claimed that he was trying to “destabilize the courts” and predicted that he would blame a Muslim on a future terroristic attack like the one in Oklahoma City in 1995.

At the hearing, she explained that “one of the most important provisions of our original Constitution is the guarantee of periodic elections for the presidency.” Therefore, this president needed to be removed. There are so many reasons—like the president’s reference to “Russia, if you’re listening,” i.e., to get on it about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. All smart people know that this is not a joke, for Republicans are incapable of making jokes.

But those with Ph.D.s learn all the clever inside jokes at conferences. It was too bad that the rubes didn’t understand Karlan’s witty reference to the president’s 13-year-old son. She told Americans that “Trump is not a king” and that he could “name his son Barron” but could not “make him a baron.” But they just didn’t get it. So she magnanimously gave a “qualified apology,” pointing out that Trump had much to apologize for himself—like being born. And like all those feminists attacking phallologocentrism in “Paradise Lost” and “Huckleberry Finn,” she was applauded for “schooling” a “Trump crony,” Congressman Doug Collins (R-Ga.).

In my world, earnest graduate students presented comparison/contrast papers at conferences knowing, just knowing, that someone would recognize their genius. Noah Feldman may have known that his “insights” had been discussed thousands of times before at such insider events, but for the benefit of the folks he spelled it out, explaining that the “framers provided for the impeachment of the president because they feared the president might abuse his power of his office.”

“Let me begin now,” he continued, “of why the framers provided for impeachment in the first place. The framers borrowed the concept of impeachment from England, but with one enormous difference. The House of Commons and the House of Lords could use impeachment in order to limit the ministers of the king, but they could not impeach the king. And in that sense, the king was above the law.”

He then asked his enthralled audience, “I would like you to think now about a specific date in the Constitutional Convention, July 20, 1787. It was the middle of a long hot summer. …”

Feldman had been cogitating on impeachment for a while. Back in 2017, Feldman and Jacob Weisberg compared and contrasted “the collusion of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia” to Watergate, likening “Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and warnings to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller” to “President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.”

Feldman also contributed to a collection edited by Cass Sunstein, who served in the Obama White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Titled quite originally “Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America,” the book delved, naturally, into Trump’s authoritarianism. (Sunstein’s earlier book, “Nudge,” spelled out how the government could “nudge” citizens to do what it knew was good for them.) Sunstein, in his introduction, took some creative Sinclair Lewis-like liberties, presenting a future as Lewis did in his novel, even though it was fiction and did not come true then—even under a president who tried to pack the Supreme Court so he could fully take over the economy and who let in British spies to encourage war fervor.

Gerhardt (who has evolved on the Constitution since the Obama presidency) also lectured about the difference between the British system under monarchy and “in our constitution” where “no one, not even the president is above the law” and where there is “a separation of powers.” He concluded “from the public evidence” that the president had attacked the Constitution’s “safeguards against establishing a monarchy in this country.”

With all this talk of kings and monarchy I was reminded of the June 18, 2018, issue of Time Magazine, which on the cover presented Trump looking into a mirror and seeing his reflection with a crown and a king’s regalia—not that I’m doubting that the three professors came to their opinions after a careful review of the evidence—even over a pre-cooked mail-order turkey on Thanksgiving.

Then there was Jonathan Turley, an independent who has always voted Democrat, but who just didn’t get it. He blasphemed in stating that he didn’t believe that there was enough credible evidence to impeach and that Democrats were offering “passion” instead of “proof.” He dared to write about it, along with describing receiving “threatening messages and demands” that he be “fired from George Washington University”—even before he had finished his testimony. I fear that he may fall victim to the kind of purge to which others have succumbed, like Trotsky, and like the more recent one attempted on feminist professor Laura Kipnis.

Over 500 legal scholars after the testimony affixed their names to an open letter to Congress, stating their agreement with Karlan, Feldman, and Gerhardt. Turley had better see the light—that the king must be impeached—soon!

Whoever let him teach at George Washington Law School anyway?

The American people do not appreciate the wisdom of their betters, but President Bernie Sanders will be sure to remind them of how lucky they are to live in a country where the government provides all the food they need and where all they need do is stand in line for it, and not even worry their little brains about what to eat because the Director of the Department of Nutritional Guidance, Provision, and Distribution, Michelle Obama, will see to it that every American gets as much as he, she, they, or it truly needs. Now let’s move! Hop on that tractor! You have a quota to fill.

Mary Grabar holds a doctorate in English from the University of Georgia and is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Grabar is the author of “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation against America,” recently published by Regnery History.

Source: American Crossroads

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House Judiciary Committee Releases Report Defining Grounds for Impeachment | The Epoch Times

Editor’s Note: What is particularly disturbing is that the Judiciary Committee chairman was associated with the Socialist Party long before he was a U.S. Congressman. Afterwards, he led the Congressional Progressive Caucus which from a policy standpoint is synonymous with the Socialist Party. Now, he’s overseeing a report interpretation what the founders meant by the impeachment clause. Curious and dangerous!

The House Judiciary Committee released on Saturday a report that attempts to define what the founders of the Constitution meant in their impeachment clause, days after the Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked the committee’s chair to move forward in impeaching President Donald Trump.

The 52-page report, titled “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment” (pdf), is meant to act as a guide for impeachment as the committee’s Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) prepares to draft articles of impeachment against the president.

The report was drafted by majority staff and provides details about the “history, purpose, and meaning” of Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution—the impeachment clause.

House Democrats are investigating in their impeachment inquiry allegations that the president had leveraged his office during a call with Ukraine in July where he asked the Ukrainian president to look into corruption accusations on former Vice President Joe Biden—who is running for president in 2020.

The release of the report comes after the House heard from a panel of four legal scholars to provide their understanding of what they think are impeachable offenses and how to apply it to the facts. Many of the academics had previously criticized Trump or have defended the impeachment against the president. The empaneled scholars drew criticism from the president’s allies and opponents of impeachment due to their apparent anti-Trump bias.

The report, which updates a 1974 version of the document that was used during the impeachment inquiry into President Richard M. Nixon, lays out reasoning to justify the House Democrat’s interpretation of what the impeachable offenses include. The Constitution does not explicitly define what “high crimes and misdemeanors” are, which is then open to legal analysis. According to the document, treason and bribery, abuse of power, betrayal involving foreign powers, and corruption are considered impeachable offenses.

“Within these parameters, and guided by fidelity to the Constitution, the House must judge whether the President’s misconduct is grave enough to require impeachment,” the report states. “That step must never be taken lightly. It is a momentous act, justified only when the President’s full course of conduct, assessed without favor or prejudice, is ‘seriously incompatible with either the constitutional form and principles of our government or the proper performance of constitutional duties of the presidential office.’”

The report also serves as a formal rebuttal of hotly contested issues during the impeachment process that the Democrats have deemed as “fallacies” such as the law that governs House procedures for impeachment, which states: “the law that governs the evaluation of evidence, including where the President orders defiance of House subpoenas, and whether the President is immune from impeachment if he attempts an impeachable offense but is caught before he completes it.”

On Wednesday, during a brief press conference, Pelosi said Trump’s dealings with Ukraine “have seriously violated the Constitution.” She added, “He is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit. The president has engaged in abuse of power, undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections.”

In response, Trump raised concerns about the House Democrat’s actions, warning that the extraordinary act of impeaching a president will be used on future presidents, as some legal scholars and Republicans have previously noted.

“This will mean that the beyond important and seldom-used act of Impeachment will be used routinely to attack future Presidents. That is not what our Founders had in mind. The good thing is that the Republicans have NEVER been more united. We will win!” Trump wrote.

Source: The Epoch Times

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Nunes Taking Legal Action Against CNN & Daily Beast | Trending Politics

On Friday, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes revealed that he was filing a lawsuit against left wing news network CNN for publishing a false report.

In their report, CNN alleged that, “an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani was willing to testify to Congress that Nunes met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor last year to discuss digging up dirt on former Vice President and current Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden,” according to the Daily Wire.

“The attorney, Joseph A. Bondy, represents Lev Parnas, the recently indicted Soviet-born American who worked with Giuliani to push claims of Democratic corruption in Ukraine,” CNN reported. “Bondy said that Parnas was told directly by the former Ukrainian official that he met last year in Vienna with Rep. Devin Nunes.”

“Mr. Parnas learned from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin that Nunes had met with Shokin in Vienna last December,” Bondy said to CNN. “Nunes had told Shokin of the urgent need to launch investigations into Burisma, Joe and Hunter Biden, and any purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.”

The report by CNN claims that Bondy told them that Nunes communicated with Parnas at the same time as his trip to Vienna.

In a statement to Breitbart News, Nunes says: “These demonstrably false and scandalous stories published by the Daily Beast and CNN are the perfect example of defamation and reckless disregard for the truth. Some political operative offered these fake stories to at least five different media outlets before finding someone irresponsible enough to publish them. I look forward to prosecuting these cases, including the media outlets, as well as the sources of their fake stories, to the fullest extent of the law. I intend to hold the Daily Beast and CNN accountable for their actions. They will find themselves in court soon after Thanksgiving.”

Nunes has made it increasingly clear that he is tired of the Democrats’ games which is why he is going on the offensive.

During his opening statement on Thursday at the impeachment hearing, Nunes laid out seven times where Democrats were “caught” obstructing President Donald Trump.

“The Democrats have tried to solve this dilemma with a simple slogan: ‘He got caught!’” Nunes said. “President Trump, we are to believe, was just about to do something wrong, and getting caught was the only reason he backed down from whatever nefarious thought-crime the Democrats are accusing him of almost committing.”

“I once again urge Americans to consider the credibility of the Democrats on this committee who are now hurling these charges,” Nunes continued. “For the last three years, it’s not President Trump who got caught, it’s the Democrats who got caught.”

Read his seven examples below:

  • They got caught falsely claiming they had more than circumstantial evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians to hack the 2016 elections.
  • They got caught orchestrating this entire farce with the Whistleblower and lying about their secret meetings with him.
  • They got caught defending the false allegations of the Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Democrats.
  • They got caught breaking their promise that impeachment would only go forward with bipartisan support because of how damaging it is to the American people.
  • They got caught running a sham impeachment process featuring secret depositions, hidden transcripts, and an unending flood of Democrat leaks.
  • They got caught trying to obtain nude photos of President Trump from Russian pranksters pretending to be Ukrainians.
  • And they got caught covering up for Alexandra Chalupa—a Democratic National Committee operative who colluded with Ukrainian officials to smear the Trump campaign—by improperly redacting her name from deposition transcripts and refusing to let Americans hear her testimony as a witness in these proceedings.
  • Nunes continued by noting how this hearing was the last hearing as he called for Congress to do their actual job.

“I sincerely hope the Democrats end this affair as quickly as possible so our nation can begin to heal the many wounds it has inflicted on us,” Nunes said. “The people’s faith in government, and their belief that their vote counts for something, has been shaken.”

“From the Russia hoax to this shoddy Ukrainian sequel, the Democrats got caught,” Nunes concluded. “Let’s hope they finally learn a lesson, give their conspiracy theories a rest, and focus on governing for a change.”

Source: Trending Politics

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Tulsi Gabbard Nukes Dem Party During Primary Debate | Trending Politics

On Wednesday evening during the 2020 Democratic primary debates, Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard shredded her own party, stating that the Democratic party was no longer “for the people.”

“Our Democratic Party is unfortunately not the party that is of, by, and for the people,” Gabbard said.

“It is a party that has been and continues to be influenced by the foreign policy establishment in Washington represented by Hillary Clinton and others’ foreign policy, by the military industrial complex, and other greedy corporate interests,” Gabbard added.

Gabbard went on to say, “I’m running for president to be the democratic nominee that rebuilds our Democratic Party, takes it out of their hands, and truly puts it in the hands of the people of this country.”

Gabbard stated that she wanted the Democratic Party to become “a party that actually hears the voices who are struggling all across this country and puts it in the hands of veterans and fellow Americans who are calling for an end to this ongoing Bush, Clinton, Trump foreign policy doctrine.”

Gabbard’s attacks on her own party have been on the rise after failed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused her of being a Russian asset.

“They are also going to do third party again,” Clinton said during an interview with David Plouffe. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said while referring to Gabbard.

“She [Gabbard] is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset,” Clinton bizarrely continued.

“They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate, and so I do not know who it’s going to be, but I can guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”

In response to the attacks by Clinton, Gabbard said, “Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.” Gabbard tweeted. “From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.”

She continued: “Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”

Source: Trending Politics

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The ‘Whistleblower’ and the President’s Right to Present a Defense | National Review

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Right church, wrong pew, as we Catholic types are wont to say.

As I tried to explain in Thursday’s column, Rand Paul is wrong to insist that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause demands that the so-called whistleblower be unmasked and publicly questioned. That does not mean, though, that Senator Paul’s general idea (that the “whistleblower” should testify) is wrong; nor does it mean that the Constitution’s guarantee of trial rights is irrelevant.

The right to present a defense, also vouchsafed by the Sixth Amendment, is the guarantee on which Paul and the rest of the president’s supporters should focus.

This comes with the same caveats elaborated on Thursday. The Constitution vests the House and Senate with plenary authority over their respective impeachment proceedings (the House to decide whether to file articles of impeachment, the Senate to try the case). No court has the power to make either legislative chamber afford a particular quantum of due process.

That said, impeachment is inherently political. Here, it has been launched when we are less than a year out from an election in which the American people are supposed determine for themselves whether the president should keep his job. By the time impeachment has run its course, we could be just a few months from Election Day. Apparently, though, the political class is intent on end-running the sovereign, attempting to remove President Trump on its own. To pull that off, it will need to convince the country that (a) it has grounds so extraordinarily serious that Trump must be ousted forthwith and (b) the procedures under which it impeached were fundamentally fair.

I don’t think they have a prayer of demonstrating the former, such that two-thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate would be spurred to remove the president. (Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is hovering around 90 percent.) As for the latter concern, due process, there must be some and it must be meaningful — not because it is legally mandated, but because it is politically essential.

This is why many of the more pragmatic Democrats knew impeachment was a bad idea. As a practical matter, they don’t have close to the votes to remove, so it’s doomed to fail. The public knows it’s doomed to fail and may well resent Democrats for gratuitously putting the country through it. If Trump is denied due process, the proceedings will look like a kangaroo court and Democrats will be blamed. And if Trump is afforded due process, the case he presents may damage Democrats come November.

We do not have a ton of prior impeachment experience to go on, but the presidents in each episode were afforded the right to present a defense — both in the House proceedings leading to articles of impeachment and in the Senate trial.

The right to present a defense is importantly different from the right to confront the House Democrats’ case for impeachment.

As I noted in Wednesday’s column, the confrontation right emphasized by Senator Paul only allows the accused to cross-examine whatever witnesses the prosecution chooses to call in making its case. It does not give the accused a right to cross-examine every source who may have provided accusatory information, even sources whom the prosecutor does not call. Consequently, if the Democrats believe (as they do) that they could establish their case for articles of impeachment without summoning the so-called whistleblower as a witness, the president and his Republican defenders would have no right to call the whistleblower merely to cross-examine him on the statements made in his hearsay complaint.

By contrast, the right to present a defense is more extensive. Broadly speaking, it empowers an accused to do two things: (1) pointedly discredit the prosecution’s version of events, whether through cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses or presentation of the accused’s own witnesses, and (2) present the accused’s own witnesses and evidence in order to prove facts and theories that favor the accused and cast doubt on the worthiness of the prosecutor’s case.

In most any criminal case, courts will give the accused a decent-sized berth to prove and argue that the accused was set up by the investigators; or that the investigative procedures used were underhanded or otherwise skewed against the accused. Here, the president will want to persuade the factfinders (and the country) that Democrats have conspired with like-minded officials in the bureaucracy, particularly in the intelligence agencies (including the FBI and the Justice Department), to paralyze and, if possible, shorten the Trump presidency.

Most defenses based on government misconduct do not get very far. They tend to be fabricated, overblown, or focused on prosecutorial misconduct that is far afield from the charges against the accused. In this instance, however, the president has a great deal to work with.

Prominent Democrats and Trump detractors have been quite brazen in their public rhetoric about Trump (including, as is now being reported, the so-called whistleblower’s counsel, who has spoken explicitly about a “coup” by bureaucrats). Moreover, the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Clinton emails investigation outlines in wince-inducing detail pervasive anti-Trump bias on the part of government investigators.

The same IG is about to release a report specifically dealing with investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia investigation. Of course, we do not yet know what that report will yield (and even less what will come of the Barr/Durham probe of the Trump-Russia investigation’s origins). We do know, though, that the FBI and Justice Department represented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the FBI believed Trump’s campaign was likely complicit in Russia’s hacking operations to influence the 2016 election. And we know that the Obama administration — undoubtedly in collusion with foreign intelligence services — ran informants against Trump-campaign officials in an effort to establish a Trump–Russia conspiracy. Finally, we know that the president was repeatedly told that he was not a suspect of the FBI’s investigation, under circumstances where he appears to have been the central suspect.

After years of very aggressive, expensive investigation — by a special counsel who staffed his investigation with notorious partisans — no Trump–Russia conspiracy was found. Moreover, the FBI and the Justice Department on four occasions obtained warrants to monitor a former Trump-campaign adviser, telling the federal court under oath that he was a clandestine agent of a foreign power and a key cog in the Trump–Russia cyberespionage conspiracy; yet that adviser, Carter Page, was never accused of any crime, much less the traitorous misconduct outlined in the warrant applications.

The president and his supporters will want to lay much of this out in his defense case against any impeachment allegations. It is clearly relevant on the question whether the Democrats are to be believed that the Ukraine episode is what they portray it to be: a matter of such grave severity that Congress should remove the president from power just ahead of an election. The fact finders and the public are entitled to consider whether Democrats are blowing the Ukraine episode way out of proportion, just as they did with the collusion caper. Indeed, in the Clinton impeachment case, the president and his Democratic supporters were permitted to press the case that Republican claims about the egregiousness of his misconduct were overwrought, as evidenced, for example, by Clinton’s high approval ratings.

In the presentation of his defense, President Trump would thus seek to call the “whistleblower” as a witness (a hostile one, no doubt). His counsel and Republicans would proceed to try to demonstrate his connections to senior Democrats with intelligence-community ties who have been scurrilous in their public comments about the president. They would grill him on allegations that he is among the intelligence-community officials who leaked information in a manner intended to cast the president in a poor light. And they would press him on the preparation of his hearsay complaint — his consultation with an Adam Schiff staffer, his close collaboration with overtly anti-Trump lawyers, and so on. I might even have him read aloud from Schiff’s wannabe Godfather IV caricature of the Trump-Zelensky conversation and ask whether he helped the chairman’s staff write it.

It is in connection with the president’s right to present a defense, not his confrontation-clause right, that Senator Paul and the president’s defenders should frame their argument that the “whistleblower” should be subpoenaed to testify at public impeachment hearings.

A cautionary note. When I was a prosecutor, I loved defense cases. They were often not very well thought through — just an effort to dirty up investigators toward no coherent end, or toss in some favorable details about the accused that were quite beside the point of the charges. A defense case can open the door to prosecutors to place before the factfinders a great deal of unflattering information about the accused that would otherwise have been excluded as irrelevant. Defense lawyers tend to be much better at dismantling the prosecutor’s case for conviction than at presenting their own affirmative case for acquittal. When a defendant proceeded with an extensive defense case, I almost always ended up concluding that it had helped me more than it helped the defendant.

Presenting an affirmative case would not be without risk for the president. If the Democrats’ case for impeachment is weak and has no chance of success, he would probably be better advised to leave well enough alone. Nevertheless, if the president wants to argue that the bureaucracy has had it in for him from the start, and has coordinated with Democrats to undermine him, he has an unusual embarrassment of riches to exploit.

Source: National Review

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GOP Sen. Kennedy on Impeachment Inquiry: ‘It’s Not Only Dumb’ — ‘It’s Dangerous’ | Breitbart

Editor’s Note: We couldn’t agree more.

In a Friday interview with Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) issued a stark warning for the House Democrats’ impeachment process over the alleged quid pro quo demand during a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Kennedy said the process is “not only dumb,” but it is also “dangerous” because it could lead to future “partisan impeachment” pushes.

“This whole process is not only dumb, but it’s dangerous,” Kennedy cautioned. “This is going to be the first partisan impeachment in the history of our country, and I’m worried that it’s going to establish a new normal. Some day we’ll have a Democratic president and then half of the country will be pushing us to impeach him or her. They’ll say, ‘Well, you did it to Trump, now do it to the new president.’ And I think that’s dangerous.”

Source: Breitbart News

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2016 United States presidential election | Wikipedia

Editor’s Note: Despite the liberal media dominating the leftist narrative and the Democrats leading the charge in the impeachment inquiry, it seems the tables are turning positively towards reclaiming and restoring the Republic and the principles that once made America great. Since the impeachment inquiry began In September 2019 Trump’s twitter numbers have increased from 62.5 million to 66.6 million in little over a month. Polls have shown between a 50% overall support for the Trump Administration. The Republican Party has raised $305 million in this last quarter towards Trump’s reelection bid. Over 95% of Republicans stand behind Trump and his policies. What is also outstanding is how these numbers are comparable to the 2016 election results with the popular vote of 62,984,828, electoral vote of 304 with 30 states carried.

The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial American presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana Governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket of former Secretary of StateHillary Clinton and U.S. Senator from Virginia Tim Kaine, despite losing the popular vote.[2] Trump took office as the 45th president, and Pence as the 48th vice president, on January 20, 2017.

Trump emerged as the front-runner amidst a wide field of Republican primary candidates, while Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders and became the first female presidential nominee of a major American party. Trump’s populist, nationalist campaign, which promised to “Make America Great Again” and opposed political correctness, illegal immigration, and many free-trade agreements,[3] garnered extensive free media coverage.[4][5] Clinton emphasized her extensive political experience, denounced Trump and many of his supporters as bigots, and advocated the expansion of President Obama’s policies; racial, LGBT, and women’s rights; and “inclusive capitalism“.[6] The tone of the general election campaign was widely characterized as divisive and negative.[7][8][9] Trump faced controversy over his views on race and immigration, incidents of violence against protestors at his rallies,[10][11][12] and his alleged sexual misconduct, while Clinton’s campaign was undermined by declining approval ratings[13] due to concerns about her ethics and trustworthiness,[14] and an FBI investigation of her improper use of a private email server, which received more media coverage than any other topic during the campaign.[15][16]

Clinton led in nearly every pre-election nationwide poll and in most swing state polls, leading some commentators to compare Trump’s victory to that of Harry S. Truman in 1948 as one of the greatest political upsets in modern U.S. history.[17][18] While Clinton received 2.87 million more votes than Trump did (the largest margin ever for a losing presidential candidate),[19] Trump received a majority of electoral votes and won upset victories in the pivotal Rust Belt region. Trump won six states that Democrat Barack Obama had won in 2012: Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.[20] Ultimately, Trump received 304 electoral votes and Clinton garnered 227, as two faithless electors defected from Trump and five defected from Clinton. Trump is the fifth person in U.S. history to become president while losing the nationwide popular vote.[b] He is the first president with neither prior public service nor military experience, and the oldest person to be inaugurated for a first presidential term.

The United States government’s intelligence agencies concluded on January 6, 2017, that the Russian government had interfered in the 2016 elections[22][23][24] in order to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency”.[25] A Special Counsel investigation of alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign began in May 2017[26][27]and ended in March 2019. The investigation concluded that Russian interference to favor Trump’s candidacy occurred “in sweeping and systematic fashion”, but “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government”.[28]

Source: Wikipedia