Friday, January 31, 2020

Impeachment Trial Extended Until Wednesday; Murkowski A 'No' Despite NYT's Latest Bolton 'Bombshell'

President Trump's impeachment trial will be extended until Wednesday according to journalist Paul Sperry and confirmed by Fox News.

Despite the pressure campaign to flip undecided Republicans to the Democrats' demand for witnesses, holdout Sen. Lisa Murkowski is now a 'no' on calling witnesses, virtually ensuring President Trump will be acquitted within the next week.

It looks like Hunter Biden can sleep well at night in his $12,000 per month Hollywood home after Politico reports that the GOP has enough Republican Senators to block witnesses in President Trump's impeachment trial.

In a Thursday night Twitter thread, Alexander says "There is no need for more evidence to prove that the president asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter..." and that "The president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens."

Still, Alexander argues that while Trump acted inappropriately, "The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year's ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate." He also reasons that "The framers believed that there should never, ever be a partisan impeachment. That is why the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate for conviction. Yet not one House Republican voted for these articles."

"It would create the weapon of perpetual impeachment to be used against future presidents whenever the House of Representatives is of a different political party."

Susan Collins has taken a ration of flack over social media for essentially virtue signaling to the Democrats when she knew Alexander would be a 'no' - and the battle over Bolton and the Bidens was never going to happen.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/friday-trump-acquittal-eyed-after-lamar-alexander-says-no-witnesses-collins-roasted-over

Omar Paid Additional $215,000 From Campaign Coffers to Alleged Boyfriend's Firm

Rep. Ilhan Omar continues to push campaign cash to a firm run by her alleged boyfriend, filings show.

Omar's new committee filings submitted Friday morning show that between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2019, her committee made $215,000 in additional payments to the E Street Group, a firm run by political consultant Tim Mynett, Omar's alleged boyfriend.

Mynett's group is yet again the highest-paid vendor from Omar's campaign.

Over the first three quarters of 2019, Omar's campaign paid out a total of $310,000 to the E Street Group.

Accounting for the fourth-quarter payments, Mynett's firm collected a total of $525,000 from Omar's campaign in 2019.

Dr. Beth Mynett, Mynett's ex-wife, said in divorce papers filed last year that her husband was having an affair with Omar.

"By way of example, days prior to defendant's devastating and shocking declaration of love for Rep. Omar and admission of their affair, he and Rep. Omar took the parties' son to dinner to formally meet for the first time at the family's favorite neighborhood restaurant while plaintiff was out of town," the papers said.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/omar-paid-additional-215000-from-campaign-coffers-to-alleged-boyfriends-firm/

The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Plan Is a Much-Needed Dose of Reality

The reality is that there will never be a Palestinian "Right of return" to Israel, since such a policy would destroy the Jewish character of the state.

Finally, there is no way that Israel, a liberal democracy responsible for the security of its citizens, can hand over the Jordan Valley - an area with immense strategic importance irrespective of the Palestinian situation - to a newly created state that allies itself with unsavory nations and entertains the idea of entering into a unity government with Hamas, the theocratic terror group.

Trump's plan is the first to offer a map laying out what the final borders of the Palestinian nation might look like.

The U.S. would also infuse $50 billion into the new Palestinian state.

Israel's existence isn't contingent on the creation of a Palestinian state, only on security.

In the past, Palestinian negotiators sat back and rejected one concession after the next.

Trump's plan allows Palestinians to have a state in the world that exists.



https://townhall.com/columnists/davidharsanyi/2020/01/31/the-israelipalestinian-peace-plan-is-a-muchneeded-dose-of-reality-n2560446

Top 8 Reasons Trump Already Won Impeachment

President Donald Trump will not be removed from office following his impeachment by the House of Representatives and a trial in the Senate.

A mini-effort to get impeachment going - on the special counsel's murky near-findings that Trump had objected too strenuously to being falsely accused of treason - also fell apart.

It ended with two articles of impeachment, neither ofor an actual crime, and one a more or less laughable claim that the president can't use courts to defend his rights.

Democrats Failed to Get a Single Republican on Board Their Impeachment Scheme It is nothing short of amazing that not a single Republican member of Congress joined with Democrats in their impeachment effort.

Inexplicable 1-Month Delay In Sending Impeachment to the Senate A main argument in favor of impeaching President Trump was that the situation, whatever it was supposed to be that day, was so dire that it required his immediate removal from office.

The Defense Team Was Amazing Instead of turning things over to the effective Republicans who had handled the impeachment process so well on the House side, President Trump instead opted to put together a powerhouse collection of attorneys uniquely suited to address an audience of senators and the American people.

Kavanaugh Smear Operations No Longer Work Along with the delay of the articles of impeachment, the House managers deployed a slow drip of supposedly damaging information.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/30/top-8-reasons-trump-already-won-impeachment/

The News They Won't Report

Wednesday afternoon, Tapper tweeted, "A Trump campaign official just RTed a tweet containing the name of the alleged whistleblower." Tapper's third-grade tattletale behavior was in response to Trump campaign deputy communications director Matt Wolking retweeting investigative journalist Paul Sperry, with a photo showing Ciaramella meeting with Ukrainian officials in 2015.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts refused to admit Paul's question in the trial, but why was Tapper playing Twitter tattletale against a Trump campaign staffer in an apparent effort to suppress the name Eric Ciaramella? As Professor Glenn Reynolds has often said, the media in general have become "Democratic Party operatives with bylines." Their coverage is organized on the basis of what will help Democrats win elections and advance the party's agenda, and anything contrary to that organizing principle, they consider not newsworthy.

The bias was so obvious during the Democratic primaries that supporters of Hillary's rival Bernie Sanders dubbed CNN the "Clinton News Network." Why did CNN treat Sanders so unfairly? Wasn't it because they viewed Clinton as the more "Electable" candidate in the general election? That confidence in Clinton's electability, widely shared in the so-called "Mainstream" media, arguably fed into the over-confidence within the Clinton campaign, which clearly underestimated Trump's appeal to blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The benefit of having a majority of the new media acting as Democratic propaganda operatives is diminished if Democrats make the mistake of believing their own publicity, or the public becomes aware of the unbalanced nature of what is being presented as "News." In 2016, biased coverage led Democrats to underestimate the appeal of Trump's populist message, and Trump made it a habit to call attention to how biased the media really is.

What did Tapper imagine would be the effect of his tattling on Matt Wolking? Did he suppose the Trump campaign would fire Wolking? Or did he hope that perhaps Twitter's own censorship squads would suppress Wolking's Twitter account?

The massive crowds turn out for Trump's rallies cheer when he criticizes the "Fake news" media.

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics noted this week, "Trump's job approval is now the highest it has been in our average since Feb. 5, 2017." Does anyone think this trend will be reversed if, somehow, Democrats can get enough GOP senators to cross the aisle and vote to drag out the impeachment trial beyond this weekend? Maybe Jake Tapper thinks so, but he seems to believe his job is to report only what Democrats want to hear - and the most important news, he never reports at all.

https://spectator.org/the-news-they-wont-report/

Why Wasn't Spygate Impeachable?

Didn't the Democrats tell us in the aftermath of Spygate that a president has an obligation to use allies to investigate potential corruption, even if that involves a political rival?

In truth, Joe Biden stands at the center of a family of crooks who have spent decades trading on his last name.

In Peter Schweizer's new book, Profiles in Corruption, he writes that the family's wealth "Depends on Joe Biden's political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe's son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie."

His sister, for example, has headed up a political messaging firm, to which "Two and a half million dollars flowed from Citizens for Biden and Biden for President Inc. during the 2008 presidential bid alone," Schweizer writes.

Biden's brothers have capitalized on his last name through a variety of lobbying gigs and sketchy businesses.

Just as Hunter Biden got a $1 million job on the board of a natural gas firm without a lick of experience in that field, so Biden's brother James became an executive at a construction firm even though he had little to no experience in construction, according to Schweizer: "James Biden was joining Hillstone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq.".

Had Ukraine investigated the Bidens, it would have found plenty of corruption.


https://spectator.org/why-wasnt-spygate-impeachable/

The Pot-Kettle-Black Impeachment

Rep. Adam Schiff said that if Barack Obama encouraged a foreign power to investigate a political opponent, then the last president would have committed an impeachable offense.

"Under no circumstances do you go outside of your own legitimate law enforcement process to ask a foreign power to investigate your rival, whether you think there's cause or you don't think there's cause," Schiff explained during the impeachment trial.

Not only did the Obama administration link arms with foreigners to take down a political rival, but Schiff also ran interference for that propaganda effort by falsely claiming to know of "More than circumstantial evidence" that the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, a charge invalidated by the Mueller Report and much else.

A joint operation of the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and, ultimately, the Obama Justice Department, Christopher Steele's opposition research - euphemistically rechristened an "Intelligence dossier" in the press - peddled false information obtained by a bought foreign agent utilizing bought sources in a foreign country, i.e., Russia, to smear the Republican presidential nominee.

In Steele's so-called dossier, he describes Source A as "a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure," Source B as "a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin," and Source C as "a senior Russian financial official."

Did Barack Obama sic the Justice Department on those using foreigners to derail an ostensibly free and fair American presidential election?

Sen. Richard Burr grasped the hypocrisy in asking during the impeachment trial whether or not the House managers considered the Steele dossier foreign interference.

https://spectator.org/the-pot-kettle-black-impeachment/