House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff,
D-Calif.,
talks to reporters about the release by the White House of a transcript of a call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelenskiy,
in which Trump is said to have pushed for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his family,
at the Capitol in Washington,
Wednesday,
Sept. 25,
2019.
In December 2018,
the soon-to-be Speaker of the House,
Nancy Pelosi,
was busy making changes in the House rules for the incoming 116th Congress.
At the time,
The Conservative Treehouse's "
Sundance"
wrote, "
Remember when we warned that a convergence of left-wing groups,
activists,
DNC donors and specifically the Lawfare team,
would align with incoming Democrat leadership to construct a road-map for the"resistance"
priorities?
Well,
exactly that planned and coordinated outcome is visible as incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi presents her new rules for the 116th congress.
It appears there was one House rule Pelosi forgot to change and it may come back to bite them.
In a letter to Rep. Adam Schiff,
signed by the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee,
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy informs the chairman they are exercising their right to "
Convene a hearing with witnesses selected by the Minority to testify in the Democrats'"impeachment inquiry.
House Rule XI,
Clause 1(a)(1)(A)
states that "
the Rules of the House are the rules of its committees and subcommittees so far as applicable.
" House Rule XI,
Clause 2(j)(1)
provides that "
the minority members of the committee shall be entitled,
upon request to the chair by a majority of them before the completion of the hearing,
to call witnesses selected by the minority to testify"
Notably,
this rule was not displaced by H. Res.
https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-vaughn/2019/11/22/rush-impeachment-pelosi-schiff-overlooked-one-little-thing-mccarthy-found/
As impeachment hearings draw to a close,
witnesses have failed to produce hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of President Donald Trump.
Even if you assume what Democrats are claiming is true,
and they haven't proven it,
all you have is a president being concerned about corruption inside a foreign country-some of which may have involved a former vice president of the United States and his son,
who were obviously self-dealing in the business over there-and being concerned about corruption when we are providing that country with foreign aid.
Von Spakovsky:
Remember that the Democrats are now using the term "
Bribery."
Right?
OK. If you look at the discussions at the Constitutional Convention about the impeachment clause,
and specifically you look at what they meant by bribery back then,
bribery would be if the president of Ukraine sent a personal cash payment to the president in order to get aid.
Asking the president of Ukraine to take a look into possible corruption,
that is not bribery.
If that's the way Democrats continue to do this,
and they don't actually establish any real evidence of an impeachable offense,
which is serious misconduct by a president,
I think they're going to reap the political whirlwinds,
and they're going to find that they are greatly critiqued by the American people and they may suffer the consequences of that at the ballot box,
as Republicans did after they impeached Bill Clinton.
Von Spakovsky:
Oh,
I think it's pretty likely that the House will vote to approve articles of impeachment because they've been wanting to do that since the first week the president was inaugurated.
One of the paragraphs in the articles of impeachment of Johnson even complained about the president saying nasty things about Congress.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/11/22/impeachment-evidence-not-even-close-to-bribery-says-heritage-expert/
The worst individual malefactor also happened to own the company that paid Hunter Biden millions to sit on its corporate board.
Two years later,
a prosecutor investigating Burisma lost his job after pressure from Hunter Biden's father.
In the bestselling Secret Empires:
How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,
Peter Schweizer notes the observation of Foreign Affairs that "
No one in the United States government has wielded more power over Ukraine than Vice President Joe Biden"
Biden made regular calls to the country's president and took five trips to Ukraine between 2014 and 2017.
"
Four days before Biden arrived,"
Schweizer writes, "
Burisma made a dramatic announcement:
the Ukrainian criminal investigations into the company and its founder had been ended by Ukrainian government prosecutors."
Even if political motives nudged Trump's interest in an investigation,
corrupt conduct characterized Joe Biden's glaring conflict of interest in Ukraine.
During the impeachment hearings,
witnesses carefully insisted Hunter Biden's strange emergence as a Ukrainian corporate overlord for a corrupt energy company merely risked appearing as a conflict of interest given his father's power over the country.
Witnesses who rushed to decipher Donald Trump's use of "
Burisma"
as code for "
The Bidens"
saw nothing impure in the actions of Hunter Biden,
a man best known for a Naval discharge for popping positive for cocaine and for cheating on his brother's widow by impregnating a twenty-something Arkansas woman.
https://spectator.org/unheard-at-the-impeachment-hearings/
It must have really pained the folks over at CNN,
but they just were forced to admit the the entire Russian collusion investigation may have been predicated on an FBI agent illegally altering FISA documents that implicated Trump aide Carter Page.
Watch this stunning admission,
from CNN:. Amazing!
"
PEREZ:"This is an investigation that began and found as part of the probe being done by Michael Horowitz,
the inspector general for the Justice Department.
What he found was there was an employee at the FBI who altered a document that was used in the preparation for one of the FISA warrants,
surveillance warrants that was done against Carter Page,
the Trump campaign aide.
This document,
whatever changes were made was substantive enough to change the meaning of the document.
We don't know without this change if FISA would have been approved or not but it is a substantial change made to this document.
"
Michael Horowitz confronted this FBI employee during one of the interviews done as part of this review and that person admitted to making that change."
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/doj-inspector-general-discovers-fbi-agent-altered-document-used-fisa-warrant-trump-aide
Three years after outsider Donald Trump blew up the political world with his implausible victory over the consummate insider,
Hillary Clinton,
many establishment Republicans still don't get it.
The grande dame of the disgruntled NeverTrump Republicans has been the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan,
whose columns on Trump usually sound like a mash-up of the prescriptions of Emily Post and a snobbery redolent of Lady Violet Crawley from Downton Abbey.
As typical of a Noonan column,
she starts with some sly preening of her insider-status as a wise political guru: "
A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn't feel like Watergate."
Unlike hoi polloi,
Noonan knows "
Foreign-affairs professionals,"
and they seek her out for her wisdom.
Noonan goes on to expand on her elevation of "
Professionalism"
by giving us the res gestae of acting ambassador William Taylor,
consisting mainly of his military record.
What infuriates them about Trump,
aside from his affrontery of getting elected over the highly credentialed Hillary Clinton,
is that though lacking such credentials,
and contemptuous of the political decorum of the ruling caste and their advice,
he has been remarkably successful both at home and abroad. Moreover,
the government agencies Noonan extolls are large,
hierarchically organized,
public-funded bureaucracies.
Finally,
like most NeverTrumpers,
Noonan seems to think she can read Trump's mind and discover his unsavory motives: "
They know what this story is,
and I believe they absolutely know the president muscled an ally,
holding public money over its head to get a personal political favor."
Talk about a big begged question to go along with her other fallacies like the false analogy and argument from authority.
It's hard to believe Trump "
Muscled"
or "
Extorted"
or "
Bribed"
the Ukrainians when they didn't even know the aid Trump allegedly withheld had been delayed.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/peggy-noonan-reminds-us-why-trump-won-bruce-thornton/
Last month,
German baritone Christian Gerhaher's recital of Mahler songs at Lincoln Center seemed no less momentous.
Mahler's songs cap one of the richest traditions of Western art:
the German art song,
or Lied.
To be present at this recital was to witness a profound act of communion-between Mahler and his musical forebears and between Mahler and his interpreters,
all engaged in that dialogue across time and space that constitutes what Robert Maynard Hutchins called the Great Conversation.
Gerhaher himself sounds defensive about the original piano settings,
which he calls,
in the liner notes for his first recording of Mahler songs, "
More than just fair-copy short scores whose essence lies in their orchestration."
Rather,
they are "
Works with an artistic integrity and significance all their own,"
he writes.
It is the piano versions that are superior,
since they reveal the structural essence of a song and make tangible the dialogue between interpreter and composer that the Gerhaher recital embodied.
Gerhaher began the song with a flat,
emotionless tone.
In a world dominated by identity-based narcissism,
when individuals obsess over ever more arcane aspects of their allegedly victimized selves,
to witness Gerhaher and Huber's all-consuming commitment to a mind outside of themselves reaffirmed our common humanity and inducted the audience into a higher realm.
https://www.city-journal.org/christian-gerhaher-mahler-recital
The same way he read "
The Transcript"
Trump released,
on which Nancy Pelosi decided to launch the impeachment.
The impeachment circus is meant to head off the chopping off of many heads,
Adam Schiff's included - because he was in the loop.
One of the chief miscreants happens to be the Chair of the Impeachment Committee,
Adam Schiff,
D-CA,
who insisted several times during the hearings that the story of Ukraine helping Hillary,
and not Trump,
has been debunked.
The astonishing Schiff fairy tales were backed by even more astonishing media efforts from main - ie "
Legitimate"
- sources that now came up with a new conspiracy theory to add to the impeachment conspiracy theories:
Trump is being impeached because he's helping Russia by putting more economic sanctions on Russia,
by denying travel to Russians,
by crushing their oil revenues and restricting their trade and goods imported and exported,
by locking down Russian banks from operating,
and by selling state-of-the-art American weaponry to Ukraine that will defeat Russia.
Every day Trump's offenses change from quid pro quo,
to bribery,
to obstruction,
back to quid pro quo,
as the Democrats flounder about like "
Fishes"
out of water,
trying to pin self-dealing on Trump,
while covering up their own - the documented self dealing of the Bidens under Obama's watch selling out the office of the Vice President for millions to Biden's and Kerry's sons.
That's the crime folks!
The impeachment hearings are meant to deflect,
distract,
and redirect from the Democrat's crimes,
the crimes of the Deep State players and the other Deep State players you see at the Schiff Show.
Actually Schiff got caught twisting the statements of the witnesses to his own malevolent ends in his REVENGE impeachment.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-wrap-up-unpacking-the-impeachment
