Lovers of irony got a double dish this week when the Washington Post mused aloud whether Republicans would accept political outcomes they didn’t like:
.@washingtonpost asking if Republicans can accept political outcomes they don't like is like @BillClinton asking @Mike_Pence if he's learned to accept married fidelity yet.
It takes a lot of damn gall for the Washington Post, one of the Democratic Media Complex’s premier peddlers of the Russian collusion fantasy and the Ukraine impeachment farce, to talk about “accepting the results of an election they don’t like,” since they’re at the tip of a the spear of what Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, neither a conservative nor a fan of President Donald Trump, call a permanent coup:
We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.
My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.
The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.
Snip.
It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.
The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The “intel chiefs” meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked. A sample:
February 14, 2017: “four current and former officials” tell the New York Times the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence.
March 1, 2017: “Justice Department officials” tell the Washington Post Attorney General Jeff Sessions “spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador” and did not disclose the contacts ahead of his confirmation hearing.
March 18, 2017: “people familiar with the matter” tell the Wall Street Journal that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to disclose a “contact” with a Russian at Cambridge University, an episode that “came to the notice of U.S. intelligence.”
April 8, 2017, 2017: “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” tell the Washington Post the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge had ruled there was “probable cause” to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.”
April 13, 2017: a “source close to UK intelligence” tells Luke Harding at The Guardian that the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ, passed knowledge of “suspicious interactions” between “figures connected to Trump and “known or suspected Russian agents” to Americans as part of a “routine exchange of information.”
December 17, 2017: “four current and former American and foreign officials” tell the New York Times that during the 2016 campaign, an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer told “American counterparts” that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos revealed “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
April 13, 2018: “two sources familiar with the matter” tell McClatchy that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has evidence Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016, “confirming part of [Steele] dossier.”
November 27, 2018: a “well-placed source” tells Harding at The Guardian that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
January 19, 2019: “former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation” tell the New York Times the FBI opened an inquiry into the “explosive implications” of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians.
To be sure, “people familiar with the matter” leaked a lot of true stories in the last few years, but many were clearly problematic even at the time of release. Moreover, all took place in the context of constant, hounding pressure from media figures, congressional allies like Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as ex-officials who could make use of their own personal public platforms in addition to being unnamed sources in straight news reports. They used commercial news platforms to argue that Trump had committed treason, needed to be removed from office, and preferably also indicted as soon as possible.
A shocking number of these voices were former intelligence officers who joined Clapper in becoming paid news contributors. Op-ed pages and news networks are packed now with ex-spooks editorializing about stories in which they had personal involvement: Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, Asha Rangappa, and Andrew McCabe among many others, including especially all four of the original “intel chiefs”: Clapper, Rogers, Comey, and MSNBC headliner John Brennan.
Russiagate birthed a whole brand of politics, a government-in-exile, which prosecuted its case against Trump via a constant stream of “approved” leaks, partisans in congress, and an increasingly unified and thematically consistent set of commercial news outlets.
These mechanisms have been transplanted now onto the Ukrainegate drama. It’s the same people beating the public drums, with the messaging run out of the same congressional committees, through the same Nadlers, Schiffs, and Swalwells. The same news outlets are on full alert.
The sidelined “intel chiefs” are once again playing central roles in making the public case. Comey says “we may now be at a point” where impeachment is necessary. Brennan, with unintentional irony, says the United States is “no longer a democracy.” Clapper says the Ukraine whistleblower complaint is “one of the most credible” he’s seen.
As a reporter covering the 2015–2016 presidential race, I thought Trump’s campaign was disturbing on many levels, but logical as a news story. He succeeded for class reasons, because of flaws in the media business that gifted him mass amounts of coverage, and because he took cunning advantage of long-simmering frustrations in the electorate. He also clearly catered to racist fears, and to the collapse in trust in institutions like the news media, the Fed, corporations, NATO, and, yes, the intelligence services. In enormous numbers, voters rejected everything they had ever been told about who was and was not qualified for higher office.
Trump’s campaign antagonism toward the military and intelligence world was at best a millimeter thick. Like almost everything else he said as a candidate, it was a gimmick, designed to get votes. That he was insincere and full of it and irresponsible, at first at least, when he attacked the “deep state” and the “fake news media,” doesn’t change the reality of what’s happened since. Even paranoiacs have enemies, and even Donald “Deep State” Trump is a legitimately elected president whose ouster is being actively sought by the intelligence community.
Snip.
Trump, at least insofar as we know, has not used section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor political rivals. He hasn’t deployed human counterintelligence “informants” to follow the likes of Hunter Biden. He hasn’t maneuvered to secure Special Counsel probes of Democrats.
And while Donald Trump conducting foreign policy based on what he sees on Fox and Friends is troubling, it’s not in the same ballpark as CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times engaging in de facto coverage partnerships with the FBI and CIA to push highly politicized, phony narratives like Russiagate.
Trump’s tinpot Twitter threats and cancellation of White House privileges for dolts like Jim Acosta also don’t begin to compare to the danger posed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter – under pressure from the Senate – organizing with groups like the Atlantic Council to fight “fake news” in the name of preventing the “foment of discord.”
I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.
We’ve long whispered about the Deep State, assuming that the Intelligence Community should have counter-intelligence responsibilities, out of sight, protecting the Executive branch from moles planted by foreign foes, and that our secret agents would, if necessary, quietly dispatch a Manchurian Candidate. But we assume that he deep state are protecting us from foreign foes, and that the less said beyond that, the better. And we assume they operate out of some sub-basement of the CIA in Langley.
But what we appear to have here is an alternative version in which the Deep State protects the Domestic interests of the Elite — that group of financial powers of whom nobody went to jail for any misdeeds leading to the 2008 crisis, that group which also happen to control the media which control the boundary lines of permissible political discussion, as Matt has documented in his precious book. Let us suppose that the Washington Swamp works for that elite, serve it and profit from it. And let us suppose that the Deep State are not there to protect the constitutionally designated Executive branch, but to guard and protect the Swamp.
And so for a candidate from outside of those boundaries to be elected president, that’s not merely a threat to the power of the institutional media, it’s an existential threat to the security of all the swamp creatures. Alligators are usually solitary and don’t usually work in teams, but we suppose they are wired to respond with the same instincts and to swarm and attack the intruder.
And since you and I understand that the alligators in the moat, or in the swamp, are there to protect against invaders, and we see them attack, we are conditioned to cheer for the alligators. They are doing their job. And if they are promoting the story that they are protecting us from Russians, all the better.
But who do the alligators serve? Who can protect us against them? That’s the context in which Matt has framed the question, which is the worse choice to lead the country, Donald Trump, with all his known flaws and evils? Or the swamp gators? I heard Rudy Giuliani last week say something to the effect that Trump was elected on the promise of draining the swamp, but none of us has a clue how bad the swamp was. Say it ain’t so.
Too extreme? Only if you believe that every CIA operative and MSM reporter are in on the scam. But when you see that vast swathes of our theoretically neutral elites have signed on to undo President Trump election because it hurts the interlocking interests of the permanent ruling class and the Democratic Party, it doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lots of China and technology news this time around.
How much public, firsthand evidence is there of this so-called Ukrainian quid pro quo? Right now, zero: “The problem with this narrative is that all we have to rely on is Mr. [William] Taylor’s opening statement and leaks from Democrats. What we don’t know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions, or what he knew first-hand versus what he concluded on his own, because like all impeachment witnesses he testified in secret. Chairman Adam Schiff, with the approval of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses to release any witness transcripts.”
Let ye who has never brushed a congressional aide’s hair in the nude, taken naked bong hits, gotten an Iron Cross tattoo, and posted wife-sharing pics to a wife-swapping site cast the first stone.
We all know that if she was a Republican, this would dominate news cycles for weeks on end…
Brett Kavanaugh: *has a beer*
Media: TAKE. HIM. DOWN.
Katie Hill: Does drugs, has multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with employees, posts exhibitionist pictures on Reddit, does "wifesharing," etc. etc.
Media: She's living her best life, give her some privacy.
>Parliament flooded with tractors >Doors rammed >Army deployed >Angry politicians
This has had little to no traction outside the Dutch sphere, so Ive decided to make an English thread detailing the events on the 3 major protests pic.twitter.com/u7W3RWWPdz
This is a bad look: “Apple CEO becomes chairman of China university board.” What’s a little widespread rape and torture next to the almighty buck? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say.” An elegant, worm ouroboros structure which answers many questions, but since it’s from vice Motherboard, a salt shaker is probably in order.
Today, the vegetarian ideology is not a stand-alone philosophy. It is tied inexorably to other ideologies such as socialism, globalism and extremist forms of environmentalism. There are very few vegetarian promoters that are not politically motivated. This has caused a rash of propaganda, attempting to rewrite the history of the human diet to fit their bizarre narrative.
Even though human beings have been omnivores for millions of years, the anti-meat campaign claims that humans were actually long time vegetarians. They do this by comparing humans to our closest evolutionary relatives, like chimpanzees and gorillas, and arguing that these animals have a strict vegetable diet (which is not exactly true).
Of course, Native American tribes, living closest to how our prehistoric ancestors lived long ago, had meat heavy diets, but don’t expect the environmentalists to accept this reality. What they conveniently do not mention is that over 2 million years ago human ancestors broke from their vegetable diet and began eating meat. Not only this, but the diet changed our very physical makeup. We grew far stronger, and smarter.
Yes, that’s right, the rise of meat in the human diet tracks almost exactly with the rise of human intelligence and advances in tools and technology.
My theory is that “ethical humanism” among our chattering classes is a low-calorie substitute for traditional religion, and forgoing meat is our punishment for environmental sins. Either way, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it. Speaking of spinach…
Russian fighter with freakishly large biceps nicknamed Popeye gets clock cleaned by guy 20 years older. You’ve seen those “Skipped Leg Day” memes? This guy looks like he skipped everything but biceps day for five years.
I regard GNU Foundation head Richard Stallman as a fanatic who’s just a few steps shy of being a complete lunatic. But he’s right to defy Social Justice Warrior-types who want him removed for objecting to the lynch mob regarding the late Marvin Minsky’s minimal ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Lebanon is burning over the ruling coalition’s decision to impose higher taxes.
Nationwide protests paralyzed Lebanon on Friday as demonstrators blocked major roads in a second day of rallies against the government’s handling of a severe economic crisis and the entire country’s political class.
The protests were the largest since 2015, and could further destabilize a country already on the verge of collapse and with one of the highest debt loads in the world.
The protests could plunge Lebanon into a political crisis with unpredictable repercussions for the economy, which has been in steady decline for the past few years. Some of the protesters said they would stay in the streets until the government resigns.
Time and again, the protesters shouted “Revolution!” and “The people want to bring down the regime,” echoing a refrain chanted by demonstrators during Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region in 2011.
“We are here today to ask for our rights. The country is corrupt, the garbage is all over the streets and we are fed up with all this,” said Loris Obeid, a protester in downtown Beirut.
Entire Des Moines Register-sponsored charity bike rideresigns over their handling of Carson King story. That’s the “hey, this guy just raised millions for charity, let’s destroy his life over an eight year old Tweet because we can, then refuse to admit we did anything wrong” story.
Chinese develop helicopter flying saucer? Color me skeptical that it actually works. And if it does work, it’s less a helicopter than a flying turbofan.
If you think Wayne Messam’s longshot presidential campaign is embarrassing, it’s a veritable juggernaut next to Republican congressman Mark Sanford’s longshot presidential campaign launch. One person showed up: the story’s reporter. And if Sanford’s name rings a faint bell: “It’s been more a decade since Sanford, now 59, faced potential impeachment, was censured by his own legislature, and got slapped with dozens of ethics violations after that infamous rendezvous in Buenos Aires. While the then-married governor was out of the office, his staff initially said he was just out ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail,’ a phrase that became the 2009 version of a meme and was used as a euphemism for anything related to politics and sexual escapades.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
The Blaze has released an audio recording that they recently obtained that appears to show Artem Sytnyk, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, admitting that he tried to boost the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton by sabotaging then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.
The connection between the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Ukrainian government was veteran Democratic operative Alexandra Chalupa, “who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration” and then “went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee,” Politico reported.
There’s Alexandra Chalupa again. Funny how often Democratic administrations tend to send bagmen on “diplomatic” missions… (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
Corruption in modern D.C. is shaped like a triangle. A person or entity seeking a favor doesn’t hand the money directly to the politician or public official. Instead, the money goes to a trusted family relation under a vague “consulting” or “speaking” arrangement. This golden triangle of corruption appears over and over again in the Russia collusion hoax.
The Clinton email scandal and the Biden/Ukraine scandal have a lot in common. Both originated with snooping into high-level triangle schemes but morphed into a counter-scandal against Trump. In Clinton’s case, she deleted 30,000 emails that likely contained more evidence of favors to donors and friends. The process was so formalized that one Clinton Foundation official actually wrote a memo bragging about how the foundation work led to lavish speaking fees for Bill Clinton. As an example, he obtained speaking fees for Clinton from UBS in the amount of $900,000, $750,000 from Ericson “plus $400,000 for a private plane.” The memo author bragged that he negotiated a $1,000,000 fee for a one-hour Bill Clinton speech in China. When Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, she no longer had influence to sell and the donations to the “charitable” foundation dried up.
But there have been several other triangle arrangements. Consider the Ohrs. Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Burce Ohr, a very senior attorney in the Justice Department, lent his credibility to Hillary Clinton’s opposition research contractor by sponsoring it to the FBI. The same contractor, Fusion GPS, paid Bruce Ohr’s wife tens of thousands of dollars to work on the same project.
Then there are the McCabes. On July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not refer Clinton for prosecution for the email scandal. In this announcement, he said, “I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.”
But in May of 2016, Director Comey initiated a string of emails to his Deputy Andrew McCabe (among others) titled, “midyear exam.” The FBI titled the release “Drafts of Director Comey’s July 5, 2016 Statement Regarding Email Server Investigation.” Thus, McCabe was involved in the early version of the statement exonerating Clinton (even though Comey said he didn’t coordinate his comments with anyone in government). This brought to close the FBI’s investigation which formally began in July of 2015.
But Clinton’s “oh shit!” moment came in March of 2015 when she realized she might face criminal charges. Coincidentally—ha!—close Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe approached McCabe’s wife to run for office in March of 2015. He then steered $675,000 into her campaign coffers.
Then there are the corrupt but yet unidentified reporters. In November of 2017, court documents revealed that Fusion GPS made payments to three journalists between June 2016 and February 2017. This period overlaps with the Clinton campaign utilizing campaign funds to secretly pay Fusion GPS to help promote the Russia collusion hoax. Thus campaign money was potentially used to influence journalists. If you look in the FEC’s cold storage bin, you might find the campaign finance violation complaint about campaign money secretly making its way from Clinton’s attorney to Fusion GPS.
Then there are the WilmerHale alumni that came home after working on the Mueller team. We just learned that the Justice Department waived a conflict of interest triggered by Robert Mueller’s work with WilmerHale. WilmerHale took money from Clinton to do legal work on some of the very same email scandals that involved the State Department/Clinton Foundation shenanigans. At the time Mueller’s team was gearing up, we were told that Mueller and several of his team members “gave up million-dollar jobs to work on special counsel investigation.” But did they? We’ve recently learned some of these WilmerHale alums have returned which raises concerns that these attorneys had informal outside agreements at the same time they’re supposed to be independently serving a special counsel investigating Clinton’s political opponent.
It’s 2019, and I’m still tagging things with “Hillary Clinton Scandals.”
The SuperGeniuses running California these days are cutting off power to large portions of the state because they refuse to let utilities trim trees near powerlines, which means lots of fires in high wind situations. Way to go, California Democratic Party!
Carl Icahn, one of America’s most well-known investors, has summoned the movers, joining what, in an average year, adds up to almost a half-million New Yorkers looking for a better place to live. As with the largest share of former Empire Staters, Icahn is moving to Florida, a state with no personal income tax.
Icahn isn’t just moving to Florida alone; he’s also offering each of his staff $50,000 in relocation benefits to move with him.
Icahn, 83, has been paying New York’s top 8.82 percent tax on income for his entire storied career. Why move now?
President Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act limited state and local tax (SALT) deductions to $10,000 per filing household. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that Icahn earned $500 million in a year. The new $10,000 SALT deduction cap means that he’d not be able to take a deduction on about $44 million in state and local income taxes—not including additional property taxes. As a result, his federal tax liability would about $16.3 million greater—just for living in New York.
While most taxpayers in New York—and every other state—saw their overall taxes decline as a result of the 2017 tax cut, some wealthy taxpayers in high tax states like New York and California saw a far smaller tax cut or, in a few cases, a tax increase. That’s because the federal tax code no longer provides a generous subsidy—through an unlimited SALT deduction—for steep state and local taxes.
This led New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to complain via Twitter that “The elimination of the #SALT deduction (state and local tax) was an economic attack on Democratic states.”
Of course, he could also ask the New York legislature to cut taxes. But he won’t. As a result, wealthier New York taxpayers have likely shelled out an additional $38 billion in federal taxes over the past seven quarters as a result of changes to the tax code.
In California, the state with the highest marginal personal income tax rate in the nation at 13.3 percent higher-end taxpayers have probably seen their federal tax liabilities increase by about $45 billion over what their peers in the lower-taxed states like Florida and Texas would be paying.
Limiting the federal tax deductibility of high state and local taxes in late 2017 had the same economic effect as passing 50 state tax law changes at once.
Since the tax law’s enactment, private-sector job growth in the 27 low-tax states with average 2016 SALT deductions of under $10,000 has run at more than double the rate of those 23 states with average SALT deductions above $10,000, adding 3.7 percent more jobs compared to only 1. 8 percent. The gap in manufacturing jobs is even greater: 3.4 percent job growth in the low-tax states vs. 0.8 percent in the high-tax states from December 2017 to July 2019. New York saw its manufacturing jobs shrink by -0.4 percent.
Democrats want racial quotas even after voters eliminated it. Asians oppose them, because they know they will be the ones disadvantaged. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
CNN reporter shut down in NBA press conference when she tries to ask about China.
Phising attempts are getting more competent. Never assume a phone call from your bank is actually a phone call from your bank. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“I Am Godzilla, King of Monsters, and I Too Was Contacted By the Trump Administration to Investigate Hunter Biden.”
I am informing the council of this with no agenda; as a non-citizen of the United States I cannot vote. Even if I could, none of the candidates from either side have any policies that are of interest to me. I am, as mentioned before, a lizard who lives just off the coast of Japan. I breathe fire. Most of my needs are sudden, violent, and cannot be met through typical democratic legislation. In that sense, a two-party system is not practical to me.
The events of this week reveal the new standard. Like sharks to a whale carcass, our elites routinely feast upon precarious situations in other nations: The Podesta Group, Hunter Biden, and others were content to make a buck off the tensions in Ukraine along with Paul Manafort, just as the Clintons and others were happy to take tens of millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs. We all know that Manafort would be sitting in a house in Malibu right now with the same immunity deal the likes of Podesta, Biden, and the Clintons apparently possess if only he had never decided to work for Donald Trump.
Recall that the supposed original sin of the entire Russian-collusion gambit was that when approached (apparently mostly by agents of the United States government working for President Obama and friends) then-candidate Trump or his team were interested in recovering the emails that Hilary Clinton unwisely and illegally sent and then deleted from her private server so that no one could read them. There would be plenty of reasons for Americans and the U.S. government itself to seek out these emails, of course, if only to determine to what extent they threatened national security—never mind the power and wealth of the foundation engaged in international money collection that her husband ran while she was Secretary of State.
But while the supposed reasons for it change every week, the Ukraine fiasco reveals the real underlying cause of the Left’s outrageously hypocritical march towards impeachment. The ruling class is now effectively saying to President Trump: “We know that domestically we have nothing to fear from the media and the law—so how dare you ask other countries about us! You must be impeached for this crime and this crime alone—asking other countries about our wrongdoing! Only an insane or evil person would do this!”
“Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam pleads guilty to stealing $87K from youth basketball nonprofit he founded.” Hey, which political party do you think Mr. Gilliam is a member of? Let’s start scanning the article and see if we can guess. Headline? No. First paragraph? No. Second paragraph? No. Look, I’ll save you the suspense: You have to go all the way down to the eleventh paragraph to learn what you already assumed: Mr. Gilliam is a Democrat.
The whole “white nationalist” charge against President Donald Trump and his supporters was always garbage.
Saying goodbye to the extremely consequential GOP class of 1994, the first Republican House majority in 40 years, the one that ran on the Contract With America and passed welfare reform.
A very malevolent incarnation of Florida Woman: Rich Democrat wife files police report over man using a meme on Facebook. “Beth Jaffe, who is the wife of city commissioner Bryon Jaffe, felt that the meme was threatening her life. Ms. Jaffe contacted the district office of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and asked for them to investigate Van Antwerpen.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Ahem! I said I can’t possibly imagine how Sports Illustrated might have alienated their core—
The Guardian: “Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever – and they’re all closing down.” There’s this thing called “causality.” Maybe publishers should look into it while they still can… (Hat tip: Aceof Spades HQ.)
The real cause of these abuses is failure of university trustees to meet their fiduciary obligations, which in the case of public schools is to taxpayers. Weak boards allow university administrators to limit oversight of admissions. The administrators are allowed to see admissions criteria, but not the trustees who are supposed to be in charge. Board members who want admission favors for their own children or their friends go along, while others turn their heads to avoid the wrath of powerful alumni and politicians who benefit from the workarounds.
I witnessed this while serving as a member of the University of Texas System Board of Regents. My actions to expose the admissions scandal at UT-Austin, our flagship campus, resulted in impeachment hearings against me by the state legislature and even efforts to convince a grand jury to indict me. While neither worked, the university continues to hide all of the documents that would have exposed the scandal. Even the FBI knows only a fraction of the real corruption.
Details of the larger problem at the Austin campus were uncovered in a private investigation commissioned by our then-Chancellor and a minority of Board members. The problem is, our university president teamed up with a new Chancellor and the state’s most powerful elected officials to keep the findings sealed. The un-redacted report, which explains how hundreds of unqualified students manage to occupy spots in UT programs—including our law school—is locked in a courtroom after my lawsuit to make it public was challenged by the university. Every one of those students owes his or her presence on campus to a politician who controls state spending at the university, or to a well-connected donor or faculty member.
Why green-light the Full Monty impeachment farce three days later, when it was clear as day that this “bombshell” was already fizzling, just like all the other “bombshells”?
The answer is simple: the absence of impeachable offenses makes no difference whatsoever, because the outcome is pre-determined, and Pelosi’s options are stark: start the impeachment now, and retain control of the narrative, or start a month or two from now, and lose control completely, with the impeachment hearings dragging on into the primary season.
Pelosi understands perfectly that an election where the Democratic Party is framed as a single-issue party, whose sole concern is an impeaching a president over two casual sentences in a phone call, will be catastrophic. But she has run out of rope.
Impeachment proceedings are a given, because her caucus now almost unanimously demands it, and her caucus demands it because the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the Resistance crazies and the hard left. Pelosi has also run out of cute euphemisms for impeachment—the usual Pelosi mumbo-jumbo, like “inquiry,” “investigation,” and “official inquiry,” no longer work without giving the crazies the real deal.
Pelosi had to get ahead of the tidal wave before it drowned her. As Spartan women used to say to their men, “Return with the shield, or on it.” Pelosi, who generally does not lack in political courage, would rather return with the shield this time, and live to fight another day. So she chose the better of two bad options.
Snip.
With the House vote done by December, Pelosi can congratulate the troops, and move on, regardless of the result (not that it’s in any doubt). She can then proudly proclaim that the House Democrats have been diligent in saving the republic, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and those nasty obstructionist unpatriotic Republicans in the Senate refuse to see the light.
With a straight face, she can tell the lunatics and the impeachment fanatics that she has given them exactly what they asked for, and that it is up to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer now. Then she can privately breathe a sigh of relief.
Pelosi can then spend 2020 working to retain her House majority, while hoping Republican voters lose their energy by next November. Democratic candidates can spend the next year talking about something else, anything else, and at least have a chance of defeating Trump.
Pelosi knows that if impeachment is on the voters’ minds next year, Trump will be reelected in a tsunami. Her majority and speakership will go the way of the Dodo bird. The only way to change that narrative is to do the impeachment show now, and forget all about it next year.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) However, his idea that the Senate can have a quick up-and-down vote on impeachment simply won’t happen. Article I, Section 3, Paragraph 6 of the United States Constitution states:
The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
That means a real trial, presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts. That also means that President Trump’s defense team will probably be able to compel witnesses to testify, and given the Constitutional nature of the proceedings, it is entirely possible that witnesses will not be able to plead Fifth Amendment rights and refuse such testimony. Let the Senate call James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Rep. Adam Schiff, Hunter Biden, Andrew McCabe, Bruce and Nellie Ohr and every Fusion GPS and CrowStrike employee involved in both the Russian collusion hoax and Hunter Biden’s crooked dealings in the Ukraine.
The Clinton impeachment lasted a month, had thirteen House members stating the case for the prosecution, and dealt with a much narrower case and criteria. There’s no reason a Trump impeachment wouldn’t take three to six times as long for a much more complex and sprawling case.
If Democrats want an impeachment, let’s give them an impeachment, good and hard.
The Biden clan gets rich, Klobuchar kills a duck, O’Rourke threatens a kitten and calls Journey punk rock, while Yang channels The Dead Kennedys and the Q3 fundraising deadline looms. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Too damn many polls this time around…
CNN (Nevada): Biden 22, Sanders 22, Warren 18, Harris 5, Buttigieg 4, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1. 4% is as high as we’ve seen Steyer in any poll. Is his airdropping money on his campaign finally moving the needle?
CNN (South Carolina): Biden 17, Warren 16, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 4, Harris 3, Steyer 3, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1. These numbers are from the RealClearPolitics summary, as they’ve double-linked the Nevada poll on their source link.
Harvard/Harris: Biden 28, Warren 17, Sanders 16, Harris 6, O’Rourke 3, Buttigieg 3, Yang 3, Castro 2, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Klobuchar 1, Gabbard 1. be prepared to click the zoom button a lot…
Landmark Communications (Georgia): Biden 41.4, Warren 17.4, Sanders 8.1, Harris 5.6, Buttigieg 4.9, Booker 2.0, Yang 1.9, O’Rourke 1.4, Klobuchar 1.1, Gabbard 0.8, Bennett(sic) 0.1, Steyer 0.1, Castro 0.0. While I should theoretically appreciate the greater precision, I don’t understand how you get a 0.1 out of a sample of 500. Doesn’t that work out to half a person?
Emerson Biden 26, Warren 23, Sanders 22, Yang 8, Buttigieg 6, Harris 4, Booker 2, Castro 2, O’Rourke 1, Ryan 1, Gabbard 1, Sestak 1, Williamson 1. Small sample size of 462, but 8 is a new high for Yang. A couple more points and he’s in Ron Paul territory…
The other candidates have not yet started seriously spending on TV. To date, most candidates have been committed more resources to Facebook and Google ads than to television ads (Pete Buttigieg, for example, has spent $5.3 million on digital vs. just $302,200 on TV). After Steyer, the active candidate who has spent the most on TV is Joe Biden, who has aired 882 spots for an estimated $384,220, almost all of it in Iowa.
Evidently Saturday Night Live is still on, and they had a DNC Town Hall skit Saturday:
If you think this section is light this week, you’re right: I think the impeachment nothingburger has sucked a lot of the air out of the room for the 2020 race. One way or another, Trump always manages to do that…
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he’s staying in the race until New Hampshire. Gets a Politico interview, says he’s not on the impeachment train. Also says far left candidates hurt Democratic chances of beating Trump. He’s the third richest Democrat running, behind Steyer and Delaney. “Within days of the appointment [to the senate in 2009], Bennet sold off at least $2 million worth of stock, in companies like Philip Morris, Eli Lilly and Chevron, according to federal filings.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Wherever Joe Biden went, son Hunter cashed in.”
Biden has been leading the Democratic field. The central case for his candidacy rests on the supposedly exemplary work he did as a senior member of Team Obama. Well, in 2016, acting as the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine, the vice president — unlike Trump — openly threatened to withhold $1 billion in American loan guarantees if the embattled nation didn’t fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.
As Biden later bragged, “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.’ ”
Most of the media assure us that, though by the Democrats’ new standards this kind of intimidation constitutes a flagrant abuse of power, Biden’s reasons for threatening Ukraine were chaste.
But simply repeating this talking point doesn’t make it true. Granted, Shokin was a shady character. Yet at some point he had been investigating Burisma, the largest gas company in Ukraine, which also happened to be paying Hunter Biden a $50,000 monthly salary as a board member.
By coincidence, Hunter had landed this cushy gig in a foreign country only a few months after the Obama administration began dispatching his father, Joe, to the very same foreign country on a regular basis.
There was, of course, absolutely nothing in Hunter’s résumé to indicate that he would be a valuable addition to foreign energy interest. He didn’t speak the language, and he had no particular expertise in the energy industry. Oh, he did have one thing, though: his last name.
I suppose, that isn’t entirely fair. Hunter once ran a hedge fund with his dad’s brother, James Biden, and associated with a notorious Ponzi schemer. James would go on to snag a job as executive vice president of a construction company in 2010, despite having virtually no experience in the field. And only a few months into his tenure, the company would win one of its biggest contracts in its history, a $1.5 billion deal to build affordable homes in Iraq.
By pure happenstance, Joe was also the Obama administration’s point man in Iraq at the time. Funny how these things work out.
Liberal reporters, who are framing Trump’s conversation with Zelensky as the most perilous threat in the republic’s history, have shown little curiosity about Biden’s dealings with the Ukrainian government. Many media personalities, in fact, have rallied to Biden’s defense, calling any intimation of wrongdoing a smear.
NBC’s Chuck Todd dismissed any Biden talk as a mere distraction. CNN called questions into the former vice president’s actions “baseless.” Other liberals now argue that the Biden firing of Shokin actually worked against the interests of Hunter.
We have no way of knowing if this is true, either. According to The New York Times, Hunter’s work for Burisma had “prompted concerns” among Obama administration State Department officials, because it undermined diplomacy in Ukraine. Was Biden really the only person available to pressure Ukrainian officials while his son was raking in the cash? Does anyone really believe Biden’s claims that he never once spoke to his 49-year-old son about business in the two years they spent working in the same country?
Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.
The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:
According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.
Joe Biden’s brother told executives at a healthcare firm that the former vice president’s cancer initiative would promote their business, according to a participant in the conversation, who said the promise came as part of a pitch on behalf of potential investors in the firm.
The allegation is the latest of many times Biden’s relatives have invoked the former vice president and his political clout to further their private business dealings. It is the first that involves the Biden Cancer Initiative, a project Joe Biden made the centerpiece of his post-White House life following the death of his son Beau.
Biden’s brother, James, made the promise to executives at Florida-based Integrate Oral Care during a phone call on or around November 8, 2018, according to Michael Frey, CEO of Diverse Medical Management, a health-care firm that is suing James Biden. At the time, James Biden’s business partners were pursuing a potential investment in Integrate, according to Frey and court records. Frey, who had a business relationship with James Biden and his associates, had introduced the group to Integrate.
James Biden told the Integrate executives that he would get the Biden Cancer Initiative to promote an oral rinse made by the firm and used by cancer patients, Frey, who said he participated in the call, told POLITICO. He added that James Biden directly invoked the former vice president on the call. “He said his brother would be very excited about this product,” Frey said.
Make no mistake: This is a risky game the Democrats are playing. On the one hand, their most energetic voters practically demand Trump’s immediate removal. On the other hand, most voters are apathetic at best to the idea of impeachment, and will probably turn against it quite sharply if yet another investigation fails to reveal enough dirt on Trump. But as I wrote at Instapundit earlier today, maybe the only thing worse to the Democrats’ kamikaze wing than not going ahead with an impeachment inquiry would be an unsuccessful one.
But for some Democrats, that might be a risk worth taking. So let’s go back to our earlier thought, courtesy of GMU law prof David Bernstein.
My conspiracy theory of the day is opening an impeachment inquiry over Ukraine is less about Trump, and more about some very powerful Democrats wanting to get Biden out of the way early. https://t.co/3Mcg7Dpt3Z
The payoff here for “some very powerful Democrats” — and it wouldn’t be prudent to point fingers at anyone in particular — might be well worth the risk. Weaken Trump and force Biden out of the race, probably before Iowa? You can picture a particular presidential candidate or three saying “Deeeeeeliiiiiicious” in their best Dr. Evil voice.
In order to win the nomination in a crowded race, Biden needs to cultivate support across demographic groups, to at least feint at his ability to win back the Obama coalition in the general election. His bedrock of support is black voters. Black voters made up around one-quarter of the 2016 Democratic primary electorate and are a crucial demographic group for any candidate. According to Gallup, 63 percent of non-Hispanic black Democratic voters self-identify as moderate or conservative. This, even as the Democratic Party overall has gotten more liberal — 2018 was the first year that over half of Democrats (51 percent) identified as liberal (in 1994, that number was only 25 percent.)
But while black voters have remained more moderate or conservative, white voters have become increasingly likely to identify as liberal — 65 percent of non-Hispanic white Democrats called themselves liberal and have become rapidly more liberal on issues of race over the past 10 years. With white liberals comprising a key demographic not just in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, but also in the media, it’s no wonder that Biden’s campaign has felt the pile-on of Twitter chatter.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Swears he’s not going to run for the senate even if he drops the presidential run. Which is understandable, since (like O’Rourke) he would lose either. “Julián Castro’s campaign manager says fundraising email not ‘a threat to quit.'” Like I said last week about Booker, it’s the standard campaign solicitation shuck.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Iowa State Director Monica Biddix left the campaign to “pursue other opportunities,” which is hardly reassuring for Delaney’s longshot hopes. “His campaign announced later Friday that it had named Brent Roske the new Iowa state director. Roske earlier served as Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson’s Iowa state director.” I’m guessing this is a step up in neither prestige nor likelihood of success, but probably a much stronger chance of receiving additional paychecks until the caucuses. BEEEEEFCAAAAKE!
Some big bank executives and hedge fund managers have been stunned by Warren’s ascent, and they are primed to resist her.
“They will not support her. It would be like shutting down their industry,” an executive at one of the nation’s largest banks told CNBC, also speaking on condition of anonymity. This person said Warren’s policies could be worse for Wall Street than those of President Barack Obama, who signed the Dodd-Frank bank regulation bill in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.
She’s all about leading the charge…except when it comes to fulfilling her actual senate voting duties:
$5 for anyone who can find a video of him doing a karaoke cover of “Holiday in Cambodia.” Gets a BBC profile. He proposed a VAT, which a New York Times writer says will raise more money than Warren’s wealth tax. In truth, both will earn exactly the same amount: zero, since neither has a hope in hell of passing.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
What’s really going on here? Why have the Democrats, to put it bluntly, gone berserk? Why are they risking a backlash of cosmic proportions (other than appeasing their psychotically-inflamed base, of course)?
One, distraction. They live in absolute fear of the coming revelations about the Russia probe, from Inspector General Horowitz but even more from the DOJ’s John Durham, who can actually put people in jail. The Dems know — if they have a brain (and a few do) — these revelations are likely to point up the line at the leaders of the Democratic Party all the way to President Obama. They were all involved to one degree or another with illegally spying on or undermining Trump and his administration and supporters before and after the election. The extent of this we are only beginning to understand.
To put it mildly, not good. Whether you call this treason is up to you, but you can be sure Middle America (i. e. those elusive independent voters) will not appreciate it.
But there’s something worse — and Pelosi’s knows it. The only hope for Democrats to defeat Trump is, remote and quixotic as it may be, impeachment. In the midst of the current brouhaha, Joe Biden — their great (alas white male) hope — is being exposed as not just a senile plagiarist, but a senile, corrupt plagiarist with a freaky family out of a Southern gothic novel with tentacles reaching into China and Ukraine. Again, not good.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Dems have tacked so far to the left that they wouldn’t be able to win an election in Shenyang. Sanders, speaking of senility, is almost risible. He wants to restrict population for reasons of “climate change” when every one of the myriad social programs he so vehemently urges depends on strong continued population growth for economic survival, irrespective of taxes. (Is he that stupid? I don’t think so. He’s just a liar.)
As for his somewhat subtle clone, Ms. Warren, her proposals are if anything more extreme because she fails to acknowledge (though Colbert did his best to encourage her) that they are going to cost a ton of taxpayer money that approaches national bankruptcy. Even taxing the rich at one hundred percent won’t come near supporting her ideas. Wait until Trump gets ahold of that.
What’s the magic word that made Democrats go extra apeshit over the Ukraine meeting? Crowdstrike:
To understand how important this is, we must remember the foundation for the entire Russian election interference narrative, ‘Muh Russia – writ large, is built on the claim Russians hacked the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently released damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.
Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ and FBI previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server or cloud-based network. Instead the original claim was that the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.
According to the original FBI statements made by James Comey: Crowdstrike did the captured imaging of the DNC network (servers/cloud), then conducted analysis, then provided a report to the DNC with their findings; and that report was given to the FBI. At least that was the original 2017 claim. However, during court filings in the case against Roger Stone, the DOJ/FBI later admitted they never even saw the Crowstrike final report.
Lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack. When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission. Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server or cloud data, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the final Crowdstrike report.
The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked. Crowdstrike was a private contractor holding a strong conflict of interest over Clinton and DNC interests. With this FBI court admission the scale of sketchy increased exponentially.
There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence the DNC was “hacked” (WikiLeaks claims the information was an inside job of “leaking”), and even John Podesta admitted himself he was a victim of an ordinary “phishing” password change scam.
This admission meant the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.
If politics were regulated the way that consumer goods are, Nancy Pelosi might be charged by the FTC with deceptive packaging for her ridiculous announcement yesterday that an “official” impeachment inquiry is underway. It is pure theater, designed to appease the radicals like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who two days ago denounced the failure to impeach as worse than Trump’s “crimes.” With radical primary challengers and a San Francisco constituency given to backing lunatic schemes and politicians, she fears for her political career.
The only way that impeachment begins is with a floor vote of the House, after which time subpoenas can be issued and the facts assembled for Articles of Impeachment to be presented to the House, and, if voted by a majority, submitted to the Senate for trial, which requires a two-thirds majority for conviction. What Pelosi offered was deceptively packaged oversight hearings by six committees. All she is doing is adding five more committees to the hearings already underway by Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee.
The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro’s campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.
But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.
Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.
Further, Trump really did something never done before — spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing?
Man starts a program to help other men get off heroin. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him a white supremacist. Now he’s suing their ass for $4.8 million, and a district judge just gave the green light to start discovery.
“What’s Wrong With Chinese GDP Data?” “Since 2013, GDP figures look suspiciously smooth.”
If proven, this deserves serious prison time: “California Sheriff Under Investigation For ‘Pay To Play’ Concealed Carry Permits.” Namely to campaign donors. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
“Some 600,000 vacationers were stranded when Thomas Cook, a travel company that has been in business for 178 years, collapsed on Sunday.”
Shortly after House Democrats launched an unofficial official impeachment inquiry for the now-laughable “whistleblower” scandal, President Donald Trump released the transcript of the conversation at the heart of the non-scandal showing there was no talk of freezing Ukraine aid or of any “quid pro quo.”
2)As to call transcript itself: Trump’s actual “favor” is that Ukraine look backward, to what happened in the 2016 election. This is a legitimate ask, since election meddling looks to have come from both Russia and Ukraine.
4)It is actually Zelensky who brings up Rudy Giuliani—saying they can’t wait to “meet him.” And it is Zelensky who references “that investigation,” as he goes on to promise that “all investigations will be done openly and candidly.”
6)Trump's several references to Giuliani are mostly to say what a great guy he is. He says he will have Giuliani and AG Barr call. He asks Zelensky to speak/work with both.
8)Meanwhile, the IG back in August referred this to DOJ as potential violation of campaign finance law, based on whistleblower complaint. Criminal Division evaluated and determined no violation: “All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion.”
The irony is that Democrats actually did what they laughable accused President Trump of doing:
Democrat Senator Chris Murphy gave a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, earlier this month: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats' support for future U.S. aid to Kievhttps://t.co/IqUo6ZruZN
WIll this cause Democrats to close their impeachment proceedings and apologize? Of course not. They’ll keep it humming along until their extensions in the media can gin up another fake scandal for them to hype until that nothingburger explodes in their face as well. Repeat until November 2020.
It’s nothingburgers all the way down, forever and ever amen.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted her plans to put a resolution on the House floor Wednesday to investigate President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, a process that will likely grow into an impeachment inquiry as Democrat demands for impeachment grow ever more insistent.
“Confirmed: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planning to put a resolution on the House floor tomorrow to address the Ukraine issue as there are increasing calls by Democrats to start the impeachment process for President Trump,” PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor tweeted.
In an interview with CNN Monday night, Pelosi declined to say whether or not she would fully endorse an impeachment inquiry, but she suggested a move toward impeachment proceedings was certain. “We will have no choice,” she said.
The renewed push for impeachment gained steam following reports that President Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter in cooperation with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would release the full transcript of the call, during which he reportedly pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden no fewer than eight times.
Hunter Biden was a board member of Ukrainian firm Burisma Group when Joe Biden served as secretary of State. During his tenure, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
Yes, a scandal where a sitting Democratic Vice President withheld aid from a foreign country unless they stopped investigating his crooked son’s crooked deals is somehow Trump’s fault. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democrat party is covering up a pattern of corruption involving high level members of the Obama cabinet. The multi-million and billion dollar pay-for-play is mind boggling. Biden Family sale of office to Ukraine was not the only one or the most egregious. Slimy Joe is not alone.
Let this sink in , The democrats want to impeach our President for exposing the crimes that they have committed . SMH Joe Biden needs to be impeached .#Trump2020LandslideVictory
Democrats want to impeach a president with a 53% approval rating based on a whistleblower with ZERO firsthand knowledge of the Trump-Ukraine phone call
It’s ironic that this so-called whistleblower scandal is going to be the thing that kicks off an actual impeachment inquiry, since it looks like just another nothingburger in a long line of nothingburgers:
The democrats in the House of Representatives are at it again. Is this their third or fourth call for impeachment of the president? Each week it seems media bring us a new sensational story of theft and intrigue, that then very quietly falls by the wayside once the facts emerge.
This time the controversy centers around business dealings that former Vice President Biden’s son had in the Ukraine. Allegedly, Biden’s son was on the board of a company that bribed Ukrainian officials to end a corruption investigation into it. Democrats now allege that the President threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine should it not reopen the investigation into Biden’s son. The President denies this claim, and intends to release the transcript of the phone call in question. Currently Speaker Pelosi and her cohorts are planning impeachment, before any real evidence of misconduct has come to light.
The way the House is going about sounds less like an impeachment proceeding than a clown show:
BREAKING: Speaker Pelosi was shot down by her caucus in her bid to form one impeachment committee, similar to the Hyde Committee or the Rodino Committee, and capitulated to no fewer than 6 committee chairs to jointly "lead" the investigation, including volatile Rep. Maxine Waters
Perhaps because it’s obvious that the entire thing is politically motivated by Democrats’ irrational hatred of President Trump:
Nancy Pelosi suggests that Democrats have to impeach Trump because they desperately want to prevent him from getting re-elected: "He can't win, that is very serious" pic.twitter.com/JTS2mYIm1u
Democrats seem not to have noticed that Trump thrives in environments of opposition and chaos. There are a lot of people (not just among Republicans) who believe that actual impeachment is several bridges too far, that Br’er Trump is going to thrive in the impeachment brier patch, and that instead of derailing President Trump’s reelection, it’s going to ensure it.
So, you guys are just going to feed another roll of quarters into the dick punching machine on this impeachment thing, eh?
Lefties are tweeting about impeachment but have no idea what impeachment means. If they think that the 2/3 of the Senate would vote out Trump, they’re crazy. & if they do sincerely believe that, I hope they’re ready for President Pence, because we all know how much they love him
But it’s also possible that this is just a mime show for the hard left rubes, that Pelosi has no intention of allowing an actual a vote on impeachment:
Pelosi did not and has not promised a floor vote on impeachment. This is just the launch of an "inquiry." I'm told she deflected on the question of a floor vote in caucus today.
