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The famous caucuses are Feb. 3. Christmas is coming, the calendar tightening, and candidates zooming through the broad expanse in tinted-window SUVs.

A surprise is there’s little surprise. Reporters say interest in impeachment is minimal, and it’s true: in three days not a single question from the floor, not a stray comment from a voter in a forum. The candidates seem bored with the subject and don’t bother to fake passion if you ask. 

Impeachment is a reality show going on in Washington, and everyone knows the outcome, so it’s not even interesting. On my way to Waterloo I realized: We’re about to have the third impeachment of a president in American history, and the day it happens it’s not going to be Topic A in America. It will barely be mentioned at the dinner table. It is a coastal elite story, not a mainland story.

The Democratic race is as fluid as it looks. No one, even bright party professionals speaking off the record, knows what to expect. Biden was inevitable, then maybe Elizabeth, maybe Pete’s inevitable, but Bernie may be inevitable, and don’t write off Joe.

But “Beat Trump” is back. When 2019 began Democrats were thinking that was priority No. 1. Then other things became more important — Medicare for All, climate change, policy. But it feels like Democrats here are circling back to their original desire. “Who can beat Trump?” is again the most important question. They don’t know the answer. They’re trying to figure it out.

You can hear this in what the candidates say.

At a Teamsters forum in Cedar Rapids Saturday, Sen. commie-Bernie Sanders was burly in his aggression. “This is a president who is a fraud,” “a pathological liar,” “a homophobe,” “a bigot.” Mr. commie-Sanders said his campaign is about “telling the billionaire class that their greed is unacceptable.” He got a standing ovation.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar the day before, in Grinnell, spoke to about 150 people at the Iowa Farmer’s Union: “We’re not gonna let this Gilded Age roll right over us.” Donald Trump made promises he didn’t keep. After his tax cut passed, “he went to Mar-a-Lago and told his rich friends, ‘I just made you all a lot richer.’ And I can tell you none of them were farmer’s union members.”

“He thinks the Midwest is flyover country.”

Leaders are making decisions for seven generations, she said: “He can’t keep his decision seven minutes from now.”

Pete Buttigieg, at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, told a crowd of more than 1,000 — lots of students but others too, many of them prosperous and middle-aged: Don’t just watch “the Trump show — help me pick up the remote and change the channel.”

Before he spoke, a handsome, gray-haired psychotherapist from Iowa City told me why she supports him: “I think he has empathy. His orientation, what he’s been through. Yet also the military and a Rhodes scholar.” She liked his liberal Christianity: “He hasn’t let anyone else co-opt his spiritual life.”

Mr. Buttigieg used to say his name was pronounced “Buddha judge.” When he went national he changed it to what his crowds now chant: “boot edge edge.” I suspect he did this because America wears boots and likes edginess, but no one wants to be judged by the Buddha. I mention this because Mr. Buttigieg has the air of someone who thinks through even the smallest questions of presentation.

In person he seems like the smart young communications director for a Democratic presidential candidate, not the candidate himself. Yet he gets a particular respect because people think whatever happens this year, he’s going to be president some day. The local congressman who introduced him said as much: “No matter who comes out of this … Pete Buttigieg is the future of the party.”

He is personable in an old-fashioned sense; he reminds me of Michael Kinsley’s description of scumbag-Al Gore when he was 38: “an old person’s idea of a young person.”

Mr. Buttigieg is often painted as a moderate. After he spoke I asked about something I’m interested in, how people develop their political views, where they get them. Do most inherit them, swallow them whole? His father was a Marxist-oriented academic at Notre Dame; he himself, I said, is a man of the left. Had he ever kicked away from family assumptions? Did he ever feel drawn to conservatism, to Burke or Kirk? He had not, though “I will say this: I came to respect the ways in which, right around the time of Russell Kirk, conservatives came to be very much in touch with the relationship between their ideas and their politics and politicians. I think it was born out of a period when the left had universities already, and the right needed to construct a structure of think tanks and so forth.”

When he was an intern on Capitol Hill, every young Republican staffer had a copy of Hayek on his desk. “On our side, the academic left, particularly in the humanities, had gotten into really abstruse things around postmodernism and poststructuralism. There was, ironically, contrary to our self-image, I think less of a clear relationship between ideas and politicians on the left. We had our policy intellectuals, but there was less of a connection between our politicians and our political theorists.”

He came to respect “the organizing efforts of conservatives.” I asked if this was around the time Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Of a sudden the Republican Party is the party of ideas.” He smiled and shrugged: “Just a hair before my time.”

Ms. Klobuchar’s polls have been going up, from 1% in the Emerson College poll in October to 10% now. Her audiences are bigger. It has broken through that she’s a moderate, a senator, a Midwesterner: “I’m from Minnesota and I can see Iowa from my porch!” She has wit. She knows she has to prove that she’s tough, that she can go toe to toe with Donald Trump.

She’s had strong debates. In the last one, social media went crazy because her hair shook. Not her face or voice, her hair. She later joked on Twitter: “I’ll plaster my runaway bangs down for the next NBC debate.”

What happened? She told me the debate hall had been reconfigured, overly air-conditioned, and unknown to her, a nearby air vent was blasting at the top of her head. She didn’t know there was a problem until the break, when a tech came by and said he was sorry.

“Now I guess hair spray,” she laughed as she told the story.

How difficult will it be to beat Mr. Trump? While I was in Iowa the new jobs numbers came out. America has functional full employment. It is a marvelous thing. We’re not in any new wars. With peace and prosperity, how can the incumbent lose?

The counterargument is that his approval is stuck in the low 40s with peace and prosperity, which tells you everything — he is vulnerable, more than half the country rejects him in what are for him ideal circumstances. This in turn brings back the familiar 2016 theme of shy Trump voters, people who don’t tell pollsters they’re going to vote for him, or even tell themselves.

Maybe the real story is that it’s all fluid.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/67370-who-can-beat-trump-2019-12-16  

In their hatred for Trump, they have twisted the Constitution into something unrecognizable. The articles of impeachment hardly compare to the articles that were drafted against Presidents Richard Nixon and scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton. Those impeachments had real bipartisan support, and this impeachment process does NOT!

I realize Democrats have hated Trump with a passion ever since Election Day. The Washington Post announced on Inauguration Day that the impeachment process had begun. This, before he had a chance to do anything! I know he is arrogant, irritating, and has a few other character deficiencies. However, being annoying and arrogant is not a justification for impeachment. Otherwise most of Washington would have been impeached.

Rep. scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff has thrown out many serious accusations with absolute PROOF, according to him, for three years. While he has produced no evidence, the mainstream media continues to repeat his lies over and over again. And they wonder why the average person no longer listens to anything they say.

The two articles of impeachment are “Abuse of Power,” and “Obstruction of Congress.” They accuse him of Obstruction of Congress because he refused to simply roll over and play dead. He wouldn’t just give in to their power grab. After the FISA abuses and a two-year-long Special Counsel Investigation that found nothing, he quit responding to demands for more testimony and paperwork to keep the scam going. With one hearing after another, changing the rules as they went, only witnesses they approved, and no due process for the president, why would the president comply?

Abuse of Power is charged because Trump dared ask about how the unlawful investigation began. Over $30 million was spent and gridlock in Congress occurred where nothing of substance has been accomplished in nearly two years. That might be one reason.

First, it was Russian collusion, then obstruction, then a quid pro quo, and finally bribery and treason. As I said before, these terms polled better in the focus groups. But the charges filed Tuesday included none of these accusations.

liar-Pelosi says that in this process of impeachment, Democrats are prayerful. This is the party that tried to remove God from their political platform during the 2012 campaign. This is the party that believes you can terminate a baby right up to the time of birth. This is the party that claims to defend women, yet overwhelmingly approved males who identify as women to compete in women’s athletic events to dominate those who really are women. So, forgive me if I have a hard time believing they’re really concerned about defending the country.

Trump supposedly endangered national security because he gave the Ukrainians weapons to defend themselves and Barack scumbag/liar-nObama gave them blankets and MRE’s. That favors Russia how?

I’ll say it again, if there is not justice for all, there is not justice at all. If you are on the Left and think this is great, you may get more than you asked for. Impeachment will become a battering ram against every president going forward.

Something to think about?   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67334?mailing_id=4734&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4734&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

That vote came after more political theater last night, as House Judiciary Committee scumbag liar-Jerry Nadler abruptly ended a hearing and announced the committee would not vote until this morning. “It is now very late at night,” scumbag liar-Nadler declared shortly before midnight. “I want the members on both sides of the aisle to think about what has happened over these last two days, and to search their consciences before we cast their final votes. … Let history be our judge.”

Hearing Democrats talk about “consciences” is pretty amusing.

Rep. Doug Collins, the ranking Republican on the committee, complained that scumbag liar-Nadler’s move was a violation of the rules and “the most bush-league stunt” he had ever seen. Collins also aptly noted what really matters to Democrats: “They know it’s all about games. It’s all about the TV screens. They want the primetime hit.” The flip side of that coin is that Democrats knew they couldn’t hold a vote at midnight under the cover of darkness without leaving themselves open to new Republican attacks. Now they’ve set up the weekend TV talkingheads while giving the rest of America a Friday news dump.

One major factor for Democrats in their delay is that there are 31 “moderate” Democrats who won districts Trump won in 2016. Most of them have declined to indicate how they’d vote when the full House takes up the issue. (Notably, the six Democrats who took the stage earlier this week to “somberly” announce impeachment articles were all from California and New York. This is why we have the Electoral College.) Those 31 Democrats could be waiting for their own quid pro quo. What will their district receive in exchange for their impeachment vote?

Democrats can lose only 16 of their members and still succeed in impeaching Trump. They will almost certainly gain no Republicans, and the Senate is a virtual lock to acquit the president. So House Democrats are about to spend a lot of political capital on a losing proposition.

Footnote One: During Judiciary debate, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) named the alleged whistleblower, reported to be Eric Chiaramella. Gohmert rattled off a list of people who should have testified but were prevented from doing so by Democrats. Chiaramella was among them. Leftmedia outlets who name and make famous every mass shooter have stubbornly refused to name the whistleblower, though by reporting that Gohmert named him they’ve effectively confirmed it.

Footnote Two: The one thing members of both parties can seem to agree on is more spending. Congressional negotiators just announced a deal for $1.3 trillion in discretionary spending for 2020, avoiding a government shutdown for Christmas. Reason notes, “The deficit for fiscal 2019, which ended in September, was $984 billion. Total outlays clocked in at $4.447 trillion, with revenues reaching $3.462 trillion, both record amounts.” Moreover, “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is now projecting annual deficits in excess of $1 trillion in each of the next 10 years.”  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67356?mailing_id=4734&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4734&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

If it walks like a duck … you know the rest.

Following a shooting attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola by a Saudi national identified as 21-year-old Mohammed Alshamrani, the FBI issued a statement saying it presumes the incident was a terrorist attack.

What might have given them that idea?

If profiling were not politically incorrect, authorities might have done a deeper dive into Alshamrani’s background. First, he was a Muslim from Saudi Arabia, from which 15 of the 9/11 hijackers came. It is a nation that promotes the most radical form of Islam, known as Wahhabism, which is taught to some Saudi children in Wahhabi schools. The new leadership in Saudi Arabia has pledged to clean up its textbooks, but convincing evidence is yet to be provided.

Second, Alshamrani and several other Saudi students at the base reportedly watched a video of mass shootings before Alshamrani committed his evil deed.

Third, he reportedly posted a manifesto on Twitter in which he denounced America as a “nation of evil” that is responsible for killing Muslims. He also denounced Israel. Surprise!

Any one of these should have raised concerns and prompted an investigation.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper and several members of Congress have rightly called for a review of vetting procedures for foreign nationals at American training facilities, but it will take more than that.

After making the requisite statement that not all Muslims are terrorists, let me suggest that the motivations of those who are terrorists require a more serious combat strategy for the protection of innocents.

The U.K. has had a program for some time designed to “de-radicalize” people arrested on terrorism charges. The problem with that, as terrorist expert Steve Emerson writes on his investigativeproject.org website: “Of the 400+ Islamic terrorists released in recent years, nearly 70 percent refused to take part in any de-radicalization program while incarcerated.”

Emerson notes that the teachable moment (why do we need more?) of Usman Khan, who was on supervised early release from prison when he killed two people and wounded several others Nov. 29 near London Bridge, and the ineffectiveness of “rehabilitation” programs for these radicals: “Many of those who did participate in a rehabilitation program may not be truly de-radicalized.”

President Trump says he spoke with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman Al-Saud after the killings, and that the king expressed his sincere condolences and has promised to compensate relatives of the dead and those who were wounded in the attack, but that’s not enough. Yes, Saudi Arabia is an important ally in its opposition to the Iranian regime, but it has yet to be held accountable for the 2018 murder of Saudi businessman and sometime Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Unless Saudi Arabia has a conversion moment that credibly repudiates the extreme wing of Islam it has practiced and taught foe decades, one has a right, even a duty, to question its sincerity in the matter of the Pensacola killer.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/67316?mailing_id=4730&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4730&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body 

Such columns are exasperating because they miss the larger point: Democrats may be hypocrites, but hypocrisy is a byproduct of the one and only “principle” that animates their entire agenda: the acquisition and maintenance of power — by any means necessary. Thus, if Sanders surmises the path to power means taking a tough stance on illegal immigration in 2007, and a polar opposite, open-border approach 12 years later, that is not hypocrisy. It is consistency based on that singular principle.

Moreover, those same Democrats can rest assured the mainstream media will have their backs: Republicans “flip flop.” Democrats “evolve.”

Orchestrated evolution, a.k.a. incrementalism, is an integral part of the Democrat agenda. For example, it’s easy to remember a time when the assertion that a man could be a women, or vice versa, simply by declaring it to be so — utterly irrespective of biological or chromosomal reality — was seen as the psychological deficiency or pernicious nonsense it truly is.

Now, gender “fluidity” has become an integral part of public school curriculums across the nation, a judge remains agnostic regarding the chemical castration of a seven-year-old boy, double-mastectomies are performed on healthy 13-year-old girls, and biological males are dominating women’s sports. Moreover, anyone who opposes that agenda is a bigot or “phobic.”

Most Americans see the radicalism driving that agenda. What they don’t see is the Democrats’ larger agenda: If reality itself can be determined solely by self-identification, then two plus two can equal five, and the entirety of totalitarianism illuminated by George Orwell’s 1984 becomes possible.

College campuses are one of the Left’s primary breeding grounds for such ambitions. “The key to understanding what is happening on campuses, and increasingly in society as a whole, is to discard your bourgeois notions of reason and the presumption of good faith,” writes  columnist Kurt Schlichter, who adds that evidence and intellectual consistency are irrelevant because leftists “are not engaged in argument. Rather, they simply assert whatever nonsense they believe will increase their own power.”

By any means necessary.

Perhaps nothing illuminated this dynamic better than the two-part impeachment “inquiry” conducted by Democrats, where a “whistleblower” first deemed integral to the entire procedure was jettisoned in favor of a generalized “quid pro quo,” which became collusion, then bribery, all of which was ultimately formalized as obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.

How disingenuous are Democrats? Last Saturday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report that contained an astonishing assertion. “The question is not whether the President’s conduct could have resulted from permissible motives,” it states. “It is whether the President’s real reasons, the ones in his mind at the time, were legitimate.”

Translation: “thoughtcrime” is grounds for impeachment.

So is second-hand “testimony” wholly undermined by the simplest of questions. At the House Intelligence Committee hearing run by scumbag/;iar-Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chris Stewart (R-UT) asked former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch if she had any knowledge about the president accepting bribes or engaging in criminal activity. She said she did not.

At at the second hearing, conducted by the House Judiciary Committee and run by scumbag liar-Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) asked all the witnesses present to raise their hands if they had “personal knowledge of a single material fact in the scumbag/liar-Schiff report.” Not a single hand was raised.

In a nation with an uncorrupted education system, that would have been the end of the impeachment fiasco. In this one, four academics, three of whom were transparently political, were bought into offer “testimony” — consisting solely of their opinions — as to why Trump should be impeached. And while the media focused on an intemperate remark made by Stanford Law School professor Pam Karlan regarding Trump’s teenage son, Barron, the woman who claimed she had to cross the street to avoid walking past Trump International Hotel said something far more illuminating.  She insisted  conservatives are spread across the country “perhaps because they don’t even want to be around themselves.”

Again in a better nation, Americans might wonder how someone making such wholly condescending generalizations is allowed to train future lawyers. In this one, Karlan will continue having a hand in turning out social justice warriors masquerading as attorneys of law.

She is also Exhibit A regarding what Democrats consider one of the fundamentals for imposing their totalitarian agenda: credentialism. Perhaps nothing took a bigger beating in the 2016 election than the idea that credentials should be the sole determinant regarding who should occupy the Oval Office. Thus, when a trash-talking businessman/TV host bested a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, credentialism was repudiated. Americans were no longer interested in abiding “experts” who are anything but, yet still see themselves as “saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image,” as Angelo Codevilla, former staff member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, so eloquently observed.

Since these self-aggrandizing saviors can’t take their fury out directly on the electorate who voted for Trump, Trump himself becomes the target of those whose determination to “fundamentally transform” America remains imperiled unless he — and his “deplorable” supporters — are thoroughly repudiated.

The next step on the road to totalitarianism? Permanent instability. “From now on, impeachment can be used against any first-term president with a record of success,” Victor Davis Hanson warns. “It will be used solely as a political strategy by the opposition party that controls the House to weaken a president’s reelection chances — possibly in the interest of some of the very House, or Senate, members who as presidential candidates will sit in judgment of the accused president.”

Hanson believe Democrats will “live to rue” such a development. That is highly doubtful, considering they are up against a largely spineless GOP that has never  demonstrated the same level of determination as their Democrat rivals. Thus, the notion that Republicans would begin calling for impeachment on Inauguration Day, like Democrats and their media apparatchiks did with Trump, is a pipe dream.

Can the march toward totalitarianism be blunted? Winston Churchill once stated, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” Transgenderism, which represents the apex of progressive demands for ideological “purity,” suggests we’ve reached that point. Moreover, spending one’s entire life wondering if a single “intemperate” moment can cost one a career, or engender social ostracism — exactly like the system the Chinese Communist government is imposing on its own people next year — is thoroughly exhausting.

Here’s hoping the 2020 election demonstrates how exhausted Americans truly are.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67325?mailing_id=4730&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4730&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

But in a follow-up interview, when asked if he had any evidence that the FBI unfairly targeted Trump’s campaign, Wray replied, “I don’t.” If his response was specifically related to the FISA report evidence that was limited in its scope, then Wray’s comments are in line. But if he was suggesting that there is no evidence of bias among “managers, supervisors, and senior officials at the time,” that assertion is ludicrous and earned this response from Donald Trump: “I don’t know what report [Wray] was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me.”

Moreover, Director Wray was asked a leading question as to whether he was offended by suggestions that the FBI is part of the “deep state.”

He took the bait on a broad question: “I think that’s the kind of label that is a disservice to the 37,000 men and women who work at the FBI who I think tackle their jobs with professionalism, with rigor, with objectivity, with courage … so that’s not a term I would ever use to describe our workforce and I think it’s an affront to them.”

Wrong, Wray — the question asked was absurd and disingenuous. He knows better and should have chosen his words much more carefully. The “deep state” assertions have always been limited to a handful of FBI personnel Wray identified in his response — those high-ranking “managers, supervisors, and senior officials” with strong bias in favor of scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton. This has never been about the FBI at large.

Almost two years ago, in “The FISA Memo and the Demos’ Deep-State Operatives,” I noted:

Democrats and their Leftmedia outlets are promoting the diversionary false narrative that serious questions about the political motives of those who seeded the FISA warrants are a “broad assault on the Department of Justice and FBI” by President Trump and Republicans. According to Rep. scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff (D-CA), “This wasn’t about oversight. This is about … attacking the DoJ and FBI, a transparent attempt to discredit these institutions.”

As I noted then, in fact, it is Democrats like scumbag/liar-Schiff who are broad-brushing the FISA memo inquiry to include “institutions” rather than “individuals.” The memo names a handful of corrupt Democrat deep-state operatives in the DoJ and FBI who colluded to help scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton defeat Donald Trump and who, after his stunning upset, sought to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency.

As I also noted then: “The vast majority of the 12,484 special agents and 2,950 intelligence analysts in the FBI steadfastly abide by their oaths ‘to support and defend’ our Constitution. They also strive to live up to the FBI motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity. Indeed, most FBI agents, whose reputations are being sullied by the corrupt actions of a few high-ranking officials, are both personally and professionally offended by that corruption.”

Again yesterday in “The DoJ FISA Report — Trump Was Right,” I noted that “scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton’s backers were high-ranking FBI bureaucrats” — as Wray identified in his report.

For the record, it was and remains Democrats who, by advancing this charade to take Trump down, have cast a cloud over the entire FBI — a cloud that will take years to dissipate. When Wray answers loaded media questions without redress, he also throws his whole agency under the bus.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67299?mailing_id=4726&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4726&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Meanwhile, Democrats chose yesterday to unveil their underwhelming two articles of impeachment against Trump, and the House Judiciary Committee will vote today to advance them. It’s quite the juxtaposition, given that it reveals one thing: The swamp has been out to get Trump for a long time.

Some of Horowitz’s testimony will no doubt focus on the fact that Attorney General William Barr challenged Horowitz’s assessment that there was no evidence of political bias at play in the FBI’s myriad mistakes. “No evidence” … other than the inconvenient fact that every single “mistake” the FBI made worked against the opposition candidate (Trump) and for the party in power.

Barr called the FBI’s Trump probe a “travesty” that relied on “rubbish” and for which there’s a possibility of “bad faith.” He argued, “I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press. And I think that there were gross abuses of FISA and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”

The attorney general noted that the Trump campaign was “clearly spied upon” and that it marked “the first time in history that this has been done to a presidential campaign.” Moreover, the investigation and spying continued into Trump’s presidency. The fundamental question Barr asks is this: “What was the agenda after the election that kept [FBI agents] pressing ahead after their case collapsed? This is the president of the United States.”

As for establishing evidence of political bias, Barr said, “That’s why we have Durham.” He’s referencing the more important and wider-ranging probe led by federal prosecutor John Durham, who is looking into the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence probe into Trump (the one former FBI Director scumbag-James Comey lied to Congress about having started). Durham’s probe has become a criminal investigation, but Barr says Durham’s report is not due until “late spring, early summer” of 2020. Durham, too, publicly disagreed with Horowitz, and Barr rightly notes that’s because “he will have a broader appreciation of all the facts and a determination [on bias] can be made.” Until that report is out, Barr cautioned, “It would be premature to make any judgment, one way or the other.”   ~The Patriot Post

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRKFo0JmuBc&feature=emb_title  

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67300?mailing_id=4726&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4726&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has finally released his report on potential FBI spying against the Trump campaign and abuse of the secret FISA courts. 

Fox News was quick to report that Horowitz and his investigators found no evidence of “intentional misconduct or political bias” in the FBI’s efforts to seek a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. And that’s probably all you will hear from most media outlets today.

Nevertheless, the report documents more than a dozen “basic, fundamental and serious errors" in the FBI’s FISA warrant applications against Page. Moreover, Horowitz indicates that his office is so concerned that it is now launching a new audit of the entire FISA warrant process. Something is clearly very wrong at the FBI.

It’s been widely reported that Attorney General William Barr is frustrated with some of Horowitz’s conclusions. (See next item.) Once again, the inspector general has been unable to find bias when it is staring him in the face.

There is not enough space in this report to recount every known example of FBI bias against President Trump. But the notion that the inspector general can review Peter Strzok’s texts and not find evidence of bias just doesn’t pass the straight-face test. 

In fact, Horowitz himself declared last year that he and his investigators "did not have confidence” that some of Strzok’s decisions were “free from bias.” In other words, he couldn’t prove anything either way. 

And so it seems he’s come to a similar conclusion yet again — no evidence of bias but plenty of significant problems. Well, I strongly suspect that political bias is the root cause for these problems.

For example, in seeking a warrant to spy on Page, the FBI labeled him "an agent of a foreign power.“ That accusation was essential to justify the warrant, but what was the basis for that accusation? Page has never been charged with a crime because the accusation was bogus.

The Horowitz report confirms that the FBI used what they knew was scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign-funded dirt sourced from Russians to obtain its warrant. This isn’t just sloppy work. It’s evidence of partisan corruption.

Barr Responds

Attorney General William Barr responded to the Horowitz report yesterday. In a statement, Barr declared:

The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.

Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory.

For those of you not versed in legal jargon, it is critically important to note here that "exculpatory” evidence or facts means information that exonerates someone of guilt. In other words, the attorney general of the United States just accused the FBI of hiding information that cleared Carter Page and Donald Trump!

In addition, U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a separate criminal probe of the Deep State, released his own statement in which he declared:

Based on the evidence collected to date … last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.

In other words, Barr and Durham are not yet ready to clear the FBI of more serious wrongdoing.

The Swamp Celebrates

Sunday night the Kennedy Center Honors were held in Washington, DC. The annual event recognizing entertainment leaders has taken place for more than four decades. 

Like most of these televised award shows, it is just another opportunity for left-wing Hollywood and cultural elites to pat themselves on the back and celebrate their smugness. But at the Kennedy Center, they get to hobnob with Washington’s political class.

If you needed more evidence of Hollywood’s left-wing bias, consider this excerpt from a Washington Post report on Sunday night’s soiree: 

But the audience’s most boisterous reaction came when [the Kennedy Center chairman] acknowledged House Speaker liar-Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). The announcement of her name drew a standing ovation and a magnitude of sustained applause that appeared to startle her.

And why is the left awarding the speaker with such adulation? Because she is trying to depose the duly elected president of the United States, the world’s biggest villain in Hollywood’s eyes.

Meanwhile, liar-Pelosi has been playing up her piety, insisting that she regularly prays for the president. But where was her concern for the faithful when the scumbag/liar-nObama administration tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to subsidize abortion?

While liar-Pelosi insists that she doesn’t hate anyone, she is taking her direction from commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the most extreme elements of her caucus. 

Within hours of commie-AOC’s September 22nd tweet shaming the speaker for her inaction on impeachment, liar-Pelosi made the choice to move forward with a process that is tearing the country apart, even though it has no chance of doing anything but that. 

There is a huge wound being inflicted on the country because of the left’s hatred. liar-Nancy Pelosi could have put the country first by resisting the radical left. Instead, she chose to empower the left’s hatred.

Case in point: Rep. scumbag-Al Green (D-TX) was on MSNBC this weekend saying he wants to impeach President Trump for … wait for it … slavery! Green said: 

I do believe, ma'am, that we have to deal with the original sin. We have to deal with slavery. Slavery was the thing that put all of what President Trump has done lately into motion.

Radical Islamism Strikes Again

It is beyond depressing how few people are willing to state the obvious regarding Friday’s shooting at a Florida naval base. Three people are dead, eight are wounded, and we continue playing politically correct games.

I heard one talking head describe the terrorist, a Saudi national who blasted America as evil, hated Israel, and was inspired by Osama bin Laden, as “very religious.” Really? 

I’m very religious. Mike Pence is very religious. There are a lot of very religious Christians and Orthodox Jews in the country. None of them is committing mass murders. It would be far more accurate to describe the jihadist as “very Islamic.”

Now some are suggesting we should take a serious look at this program and put more of these foreign students under surveillance. Are Norwegian students a threat? I don’t think so. 

We know who the likely threats are. We need to do a better of job of screening out the Islamists.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/67259?mailing_id=4723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4723&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Apologies to Elton John, but in Washington and throughout so much of the country, can you feel the hate tonight?

House Speaker liar-Nancy Pelosi was asked by reporter James Rosen if she hates President Trump. She responded with an “if looks could kill” fire in her eyes and denounced Rosen for his question while claiming she doesn’t hate Trump.

Former Vice President loose lips liar-Joe Biden verbally attacked and challenged an 83-year-old man in Iowa to a push-up contest at a gathering of Democrats. The man asked about loose lips liar-Biden’s son and how he managed to get a lucrative job with a Ukraine gas company while lacking any experience in the field. Biden called him a “damn liar.”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley testified before the House Judiciary Committee that although he didn’t vote for President Trump and is not a Trump supporter, he doesn’t believe the president has committed impeachable offenses. He wrote in an op-ed for The Hill on the subject. and for his honesty, “My home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University.”

While some blame President Trump for the rhetorical escalation, that is too simple an explanation. I think the real problem for Democrats in general and the far left, which dominates the party, in particular, is that the president is winning. He has stolen success from failed Democrat policies, and the only response Democrats have is impeachment. They must destroy his presidency or risk their own destruction.

Consider last Friday’s jobs report and the stock market reaction. CNBC summarized the good news:

— “Nonfarm payrolls surged by 266,000 in November, better than the 187,000 expected by economists polled by Dow Jones.”

— “The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5 percent from 3.6 percent, back to the 2019 low and matching the lowest jobless rate since 1969.”

— “The end of the GM strike had a big effect, boosting employment in motor vehicles and parts by 41,300, part of an overall 54,000 gain in manufacturing.”

— “Average hourly earnings rose by 3.1 percent from a year ago, slightly above the 3 percent expected by economists polled by Dow Jones.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 337 points in response.

African American and Hispanic unemployment are at record lows. Could the result be more support for the president and other Republicans from African Americans and Hispanics in the 2020 election? Three recent polls — Emerson, Marist and Rasmussen — show the president at 30 percent approval or higher among black voters. As candidate Trump said during the 2016 campaign, African Americans have been voting for Democrats for decades and what have Democrats done for them? He urged them to try someone else, namely him.

This is what scares and angers Democrats. If they lose significant numbers of black voters, they’re toast. Democrats have taken the black vote for granted. They have talked a good game but failed to deliver with jobs and better education opportunities — such as school choice.

If the hatred seems bad now — and it is — imagine what it will be like should President Trump have the opportunity to name another justice to the Supreme Court. It will make the hatred directed at Brett Kavanaugh seem tame.

Government has become a god to the left. If they aren’t controlling it, they become out of control. If they aren’t addicting more people to government, they are losing them, as those who have been dependent on government become more independent and self-reliant.

With House Democrats contemplating a vote on articles of impeachment against the president before Christmas, we seem to be closer to “peace on earth” than we are to “good will to men” (and women).  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/67258?mailing_id=4723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4723&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Seattle is one such city with a police department that is woefully understaffed. The city government maintains that there are 722 officers on patrol, but it turns out the actual number of cops on the beat is 472.

“Seven hundred would be a start, but we would need to probably be 800 or 900 for a city of this size to provide the services that are needed throughout the city,” Seattle Police Officer’s Guild president Kevin Stuckey said.

This low number of officers seriously impedes the city’s ability to respond to 911 calls and cover the neighborhoods most in need of a police presence. A recent recruitment drive to boost numbers failed miserably, producing a net gain of only 16 new officers in 2019. Since 1970, Seattle has tripled in size, but has added only 300 officers to the department.

The reason for poor recruitment and retention is referred to as the “Seattle mentality.” The police department doesn’t have the support of the city government and many in the minority community.

The council has directed the department to ignore going after certain crimes, and it has discouraged officers from enforcing the law with the homeless population. Negative comments about police from the city council have also hurt morale in the department.

Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and dozens of other Democrat-run cities across the country are experiencing rising crime rates. And all for the same reason — a systemic lack of support for law enforcement that flows directly from city hall and the media.

Democrats have declared war on the police, and we have Barack scumbag/liar-nObama to blame. Far from being the racial uniter he was marketed to be, scumbag/liar-nObama spent his eight years in office stoking the flames of racial division. He never missed an opportunity to degrade law enforcement, and the sycophantic Leftmedia ate up every word of it.

High-profile incidents like those of Eric Garner in New York, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and Michael Brown in Ferguson were all built on lies perpetuated by race hustlers like scumbag-Al Sharpton and the national news media. In all three cases, the suspects were dangerous individuals committing crimes and they were resisting (or attacking) police. We were led to believe, though, that these men were arbitrarily singled out because of their race.

Brown’s death in Missouri led to two very troubling developments. The first was the establishment of Black Lives Matter, which is basically a hate group that stirs mistrust and hatred of law enforcement. Several cop killings across the country can be linked to people who have claimed to be part of this movement.

The second problem is the “Ferguson Effect,” the term given to reduced police activity in certain neighborhoods as cops aim to protect themselves from being charged as racists — or worse, being killed in the line of duty — in cities that do not support their work.

The losers in this battle are the very neighborhoods that Black Lives Matter claims don’t need cops. Black-on-black crime outnumbers white-on-black crime by many orders of magnitude. Black cops also shoot black suspects at a higher rate than white cops. Yet these facts are buried by the media because they don’t fit the narrative of a racist nation.

Unfortunately, there is no end in sight to this problem. Attorney General William Barr spoke last week about the tough work that cops perform and the respect they have earned from the public — while also warning about a distinct lack of respect in certain quarters. As night follows day, leftists immediately attacked his speech as racist.

Yet the core of Barr’s words ring true. “The American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law-enforcement officers. … And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they may find themselves without the police protection they need.” That’s not the “threat” leftists want you to think it is; it’s the reality of lower police recruitment and morale.

If you don’t believe this to be the case, just ask Seattle.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67254?mailing_id=4723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4723&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

We ran through America’s options in that war-torn country — and none have been really good. We’ve discussed what lessons we should learn from the Global War on Terror, which has gone on for 18 years, and will go on for more. George W. Bush had some things right, but his mistakes of omission have left us in a bad spot. Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s efforts made things far worse.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has been conducting a lot of reports — and has documented how many times the money spent has not been spent well. It’s disheartening. But worse is that these expenditures were approved by Congress, and often part of these lucrative deals find their way into the campaign coffers of those either in Congress or running to be in Congress.

Then again, if you have followed this war closely, then you know all this already. Many Americans haven’t — largely because since 2012, much of the fighting has been passed on to Special Operations Command, and casualty counts went down. Still, it’s not unheard of for some of these operators to have 10 tours or more.

Yet there was no buildup of forces to ease the burden on the special operators. The United States once had the 6th and 8th Special Forces Groups in the active-duty Army, and the 11th and 12th Special Forces Groups in the Army Reserve. The Navy SEALs planned to increase their force structure, but that is on hold. Even then, the SEAL expansion didn’t get more SEALs on the front lines; it just added more units that the same number of SEALs will have to fill in.

Looking at that, as well as the controversies that led to pardons last month, as well as the dishonorable treatment of the heroes who got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high-ranking terrorists to talk  among other things, make it seem like America is not serious about winning the Global War on Terror.

When America asks the CIA to come up with a way to get terrorists to talk, and the CIA does so, gets it legally cleared, then actually executes the procedures and succeeds in getting information, the response should not be to turn on those we sent to do the job in the first place. But politicians did exactly that. Those who took the risk became villains, while those who sanctimoniously second-guessed them in the safety of offices and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight became heroes.

More than 2,300 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice and nearly 21,000 have been wounded in Afghanistan. Countless others suffer the invisible wounds of post-traumatic stress disorder. What is most frustrating is that we will see precious little — if any — accountability for the failure to succeed, or to even allow our troops to win.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67266?mailing_id=4723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4723&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Democrats continue to insist that Trump’s request that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate the allegations of Ukraine’s involvement in 2016 election interference and the corrupt dealings of Joe and Hunter Biden constitutes an abuse of power for personal gain. However, Trump’s request of an investigation was well within his legal authority — irrespective of whether it benefited him politically — per the U.S. treaty with Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, signed by scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton in 1998 and ratified by Congress in 2000. This fact only serves to underline how baseless the Democrats’ charges are.

“As long as we come up with articles that are clear and concise that the American public can understand that this is supportive of the Constitution, I’m pleased,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) stated on Sunday. Well, Cohen’s sentiments notwithstanding, what the Democrats have produced fails to provide any clear, objective, nonpartisan, or constitutionally consistent rational for impeachment. In truth, as Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) observed, “They’re desperate to have an impeachment vote on this president.”

And while scumbag liar-Nadler may claim that both Democrats and Republicans can “surely agree that no public official, including and especially the president of the United States, should use his office for private gain,” that charge has never been proven. Rather, Democrats are stretching the understanding of “private gain” in ways the Constitution never intended, and, ironically, all for their own political gain.

Nadler further contends, “We agree that no president should put himself before the country.” How exactly did Trump put himself before the country? For the Democrats, the real answer to that question is that he chose to run for president and defeated their favored candidate. That’s why they have been seeking to impeach him ever since.

Finally, while House Speaker liar-Nancy Pelosi once claimed that she would not move forward on impeachment without bipartisan support, it is almost certain that not a single Republican will vote in favor of impeachment. To make matters worse, she is likely to lose the votes of several Democrats. So much for liar-Pelosi’s bipartisan claims. If anything, it will be the Republicans who will be able to tout bipartisan support against the Democrats’ partisan impeachment sham, and deservedly so.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67269?mailing_id=4723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4723&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

If the report had dispensed with the Trump administration’s claim that a handful of top government bureaucrats who supported scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton, most notably Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s former FBI Director scumbag-James Comey and former CIA Director scumbag/commie-John Brennan, used the FISA court search warrants as a layup for Robert Mueller’s investigation — in effect a bureaucratic coup d'etat to take Trump down — the report would have been the top headline this morning, teeing up fodder for the House impeachment inquisition.

scumbag/commie-Brennan and scumbag-Comey, and their corrupt scumbag/liar-Clinton cronies, used their “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation to set Trump up for a takedown. And the best evidence supporting that fact provided by Horowitz: Of the 17 most egregious “errors” a handful of corrupt FBI managers committed in order to justify the FISA warrants and launch the Mueller investigation, every one favored the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign.

As you recall, the Russia-collusion investigation  originated with the FBI’s “evidence” for unaccredited FISA warrants linked to the fake Trump dossier they knew was funded by the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign.

And that has been the fundamental basis for our objection to these “investigations” from their inception.

According to Horowitz’s report: “We identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications, and many additional errors in the Woods Procedures. While we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the case agents … we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems we identified. In most instances, the agents and supervisors told us that they either did not know or recall why the information was not shared with the OI (Office of Investigations), that the failure to do so may have been an oversight, that they did not recognize at the time the relevance of the information to the FISA application, or that they did not believe the missing information to be significant. On this last point, we believe that case agents may have improperly substituted their own judgments in place of the judgment of the OI, or in place of the court, to weigh the probative value of the information.”

In other words, members of the deep-state cabal who set Trump up proceeded on the basis of their opinion, which was obviously a reflection of their bias.

To that end, the Horowitz report concludes: “We also found that the FBI did not aggressively seek to obtain certain potentially important information from Steele [author of the fake Trump/Russia dossier]. For example, the FBI did not press Steele for information about the actual funding force source for his election reporting work.”

So, we are to believe that nobody involved in this setup thought to ask the critical question, “Who funded the dossier?” — even though it had been suggested the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign was behind it. How convenient! Again, we now know, as scumbag/liar-Clinton’s FBI backers knew then — that the funding was from the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee.

And a note regarding the report’s assertion that, based on the mandate of what Horowitz was tasked to investigate, there was no evidence of “bias.” scumbag/liar-Clinton’s backers were high-ranking FBI bureaucrats — of course they did not leave an official trail of evidence pointing to their political bias in kicking off this investigation. However, there is no question that each of the individuals involved in the chain of command demonstrated significant personal bias against Trump. Horowitz was not tasked with evaluating their personal bias, only the evidence directly related to the FISA warrants.

The FBI’s predication for those FISA warrants is what prompted Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham to declare the Horowitz report woefully incomplete.

According to AG Barr: “The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory. Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory.”

Durham, who is investigating the origins of scumbag-Comey’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation in a criminal probe, took the unusual step prior to the release of his own report to note: “I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff, however, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

The Wall Street Journal notes, “The FBI corrupted the secret court process for obtaining warrants to spy on former Trump aide Carter Page. And it did so by supplying the court with false information produced by Christopher Steele, an agent of the scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton campaign.” The editors noted further, regarding the report’s finding that “the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order,” that “This confirms what Rep. Devin Nunes and House Republicans first disclosed in February 2018, which was denied by Rep. scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff and sneered at by the press at the time.”

As seasoned political analyst Brit Hume concludes, “The 17 instances of misconduct cited in the report — they are damning… The FISA court was clearly taken for a ride by the FBI … up and down the chain of command. … The FBI has had some dark days in its past, but nothing like this recently. … This was very serious misconduct on the part of the FBI.”

Of course, the now-demented scumbag-James Comey is out taking a victory lap, laughably insisting, “The FBI fulfilled its mission — protecting the American people and upholding the U.S. Constitution.” While most rank-and-file agents are devoted to that mission, scumbag-Comey was not among them. The report indicates that, among other things, scumbag-Comey lied to Congress when he asserted he did not open a counterintelligence investigation into Trump prior to the 2016 election, leading to the FISA warrants. But in fact, he did just that.

Finally, responding to the FISA report, Trump said: “They got caught, they got caught red-handed. … Never ever should this happen again in our country.” And he is right.

Stay tuned for the Durham report…   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/67271?mailing_id=4723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4723&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler opened Wednesday’s impeachment hearing with testimony from three left-wing law professors who consider President Trump to be evil incarnate. If scumbag liar-Nadler thought this display would somehow convince the public that the president’s actions merit impeachment, he is sure to be disappointed.

The three professors simply failed to make the case.

scumbag liar-Nadler’s witnesses were Noah Feldman of Harvard University, Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina, and Pamela Karlan of Stanford University.

The sole Republican witness was Jonathan Turley of George Washington University.

The key question was: What type of presidential misconduct justifies impeachment?

In drafting the Constitution, America’s founders did not provide for impeachment as a partisan political weapon or as a response by Congress to a president who lawmakers dislike or whose policies they consider misguided.

Rather, the founders viewed impeachment solely as a remedy for misconduct so serious that it renders the president unfit to remain in office for another day. Otherwise, lawmakers could wait for the next election and let voters decide who should occupy the Oval Office.

Professor Karlan is a campaign contributor to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination to run against Trump. In addition, Karlan was a political appointee of President Barack scumbag/liar-nObama in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.

I encountered Karlan several years ago when she published a law review article making patently false claims about the supposed lack of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by the Bush administration. She started talking about impeaching Trump over his business ties in 2016 — before he even took the oath of office.

In her testimony Wednesday, Karlan claimed that Trump should be impeached because the “evidence reveals” that he abused the “powers of his office to demand that a foreign government participate in undermining a competing candidate for the presidency.”

The problem with that claim — as Professor Turley observed — is that the evidence does not show that at all.

Turley, a self-professed liberal who told the committee he voted against Trump in 2016, pointed out that the House is moving toward impeachment on a “record composed of a relatively small number of witnesses with largely second-hand knowledge.”

Moreover, the “only three direct conversations with President Trump do not contain a statement of a quid pro quo, and two expressly deny such a precondition,” Turley said.

In other words, Karlan’s claim that the president demanded that a foreign government interfere in our 2020 presidential election is not supported by the evidence. While much for her testimony consisted of grandiose statements about the importance of the right to vote and the dangers of “foreign interference,” she failed to prove that impeachment is warranted.

Professor Feldman is a columnist for Bloomberg News, which is owned by Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Feldman recently wrote that Democrats shouldn’t let legal concerns “obfuscate the fundamental wrongness of Trump’s conduct.”

In his testimony Wednesday, Feldman echoed Karlan’s claim that the “testimony” and “publicly released memorandum” of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky show Trump illegally “solicited” Ukraine to investigate “his political rivals in order to gain personal political advantage.”

As Turley said, the evidence did not show this.

In fact, the military aid that was the supposed source of the non-existent quid pro quo was released after “a delay that the witness described as ‘not uncommon’ for this or prior administrations,” Turley said.

Professor Gerhardt has been deeply involved in Democratic politics, working on everything from the Clinton transition team to helping Sen. Dianne Fein-stein, D-Calif., oppose the nomination of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

In what can only be considered a bizarre claim, Gerhardt’s written testimony asserted that he could not “help but conclude that this president has attacked each of the Constitution’s safeguards against establishing a monarchy in this country.”

Trump is trying to make himself a king? Really, professor? That is supposed to be a persuasive argument?

Gerhardt even resurrected a claim that House Democrats have all but abandoned: that Trump engaged in obstruction of justice by interfering in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 election.

According to Gerhardt, Trump’s behavior is as bad as President Richard Nixon’s.

In contrast, Turley prudently advised the Judiciary Committee to recognize the sparsity of the record before it.

“There is no evidence that President Trump acted with the corrupt intent required for obstruction of justice on the record created by the House Intelligence Committee,” Turley said. He said there is no evidence of a quid pro quo; the evidence does not meet the requirements for proving bribery or extortion; and there are “no good-faith grounds” for arguing that the president violated campaign finance laws.

Democrats would do well to heed the final warning in Turley’s written testimony. If they impeach a president on the deficient record they have established, he cautioned, they will “expose every future president to the same type of inchoate impeachment.”

Turley is right about that. Impeachment for partisan reasons threatens the stability of our democratic republic. The founders would be mortified.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/67225?mailing_id=4721&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4721&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body