Gowdy: FBI ‘Confirmed’ the Most Salacious Part of Dossier Using Clinton ‘Right-Hand’ Sidney Blumenthal - Read More
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My advice: Trump coming through as I expected. OK to dislike him and love his policies and you will be fine. Hate him and his policies and you will miss the essence of who he is and what he is doing that is positive.
Don't get swept up in the mass media garbage and Democrat hatred. They are a misguided, self-righteous bunch of hungry for power hypocrites and look more pathetic with the passing of each day..
Stick with Hillary's deplorables.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Soon, Pious Pelosi and her cronies will give Trump and America's 63 million a Christmas gift. Then The Senate will go through their act. The resulting decision is, basically, a forgone conclusion.
No one knows how The Senate will act. Personally, I hope McConnell will allow a certain level of debate and hopefully a variety of witnesses called including Schiff, Schiff's Whistle Blower, Biden and his son and maybe the Comey crowd. I would also love to see Obama called but that might not play well.
Democrats would also be allowed to call witnesses but I suspect they will not have many. Perhaps they will call Barr in order to rough him up but that would not be wise because Barr is a straight shooter.
This should take us until after Dunham's report is released so the Democrats will be staring at/coping with a lot of rather ominous matters within some 6 months or so of the election.
Meanwhile, Trump will have the new NAFTA and Chinese Phase One trade agreements passed and signed and will be campaigning throughout the country, focusing on swing states. Democrats will probably still be wrestling with whom they want to run against Trump. By then their nomination prize will have diminished in value.
One day, we will look back and realize the entire episode was a battle between Hillary's 'deplorables,' who believed they knew more than the Democrat Establishment, and the Democrat Establishment who believed they were entitled to retain power because they were smarter than the rest of the nation.
To accomplish their goal, Democrats had to find a way to cast doubt on both the 2016 election and the winner who had an unorthodox style of campaigning and governing, an outrageous hair do and a vulgar mouth. So they concocted a scheme to blame him for Russia collusion and constructed and paid for a false dossier and allowed the then top leaders of the FBI to run with the ball and boy did they.
The problem was, the FBI lied about the false dossier, changed the language/facts in an application for a warrant presented to a FISA Curt and eventually ran smack into the wall of lies they created because radicals in their party handcuffed Pious Pelosi into allowing the impeachment of their hated enemy to move forward.
There will be many morals to come from this story. The most important is freedom still allows America to investigate itself even against all odds of resistance by the self righteous who believe they are above the rule of law. In this case, I am referring to rabid Democrats driven by hatred.
The hope is this type of behaviour will never happen again but "man" is flawed and there are those who are driven by the mistaken and unfortunate belief they know better and seek power for the sake of doing good. (See 1,1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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From a dear friend and fellow memo reader. "In my dream, I invited Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to attend a Kentucky basketball game with me and report on his findings and conclusions. The Inspector General reported that I cheered when the Kentucky team came onto the floor at the beginning of the game and following halftime. He observed that I stood and clapped when the band played the Kentucky fight song. On 17 separate occasions, I stood and clapped when a Kentucky player made a basket at a critical point in the game. The Inspector General reported that I expressed concern when the opposing team went ahead temporarily and expressed relief when the final buzzer went off and Kentucky had won the game. Mr. Horowitz concluded, however, that there was no "documentary or testimonial evidence" that I was biased in favor of Kentucky. He said he could not get into "my state of mind" so he couldn't conclude I was biased one way or the other.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++I seem to have dreams like this when I'm falling asleep in my recliner with my foot elevated. "
DORIS
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1)
The Incredible Shrinking Impeachment
The Democratic grounds for ousting Trump are weak—and damaging to constitutional norms.
The Editorial Board
So that’s it? That’s all there is? After all the talk of obstruction of justice, collusion with Russia, bribery, extortion, profiting from the Presidency, and more, House Democrats have reduced their articles of impeachment against President Trump to two: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Honey, we shrunk the impeachment.
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee will vote as early as Thursday on the text of the two articles they unveiled Tuesday, and then they will rush it to the floor next week. It’s enough to suspect that Democrats understand they are offering the weakest case for impeachment since Andrew Johnson, that the public isn’t convinced, and so they simply want to get it over with.
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At least Johnson was impeached for violating a specific statute, the Tenure of Office Act, by firing Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War. There was wide agreement that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton violated criminal statutes. In this case Democrats don’t even try to allege a criminal act.Whatever happened to bribery and extortion? Democrats spent weeks talking them up as the crimes of Mr. Trump’s Ukraine interventions. They had turned to those words after focus groups with voters found them more compelling than “quid pro quo.” Yet suddenly they’re gone. Have Democrats concluded that Mr. Trump’s actions aren’t illegal under statutes that have specific meaning?
Democrats have retreated instead to charge “abuse of power,” a phrase general enough for anything Congress wants to stuff into it. They don’t even pretend any more to prove a quid pro quo. Instead they assert that Mr. Trump, in his phone call with Ukraine’s president, “solicited the interference of a foreign government” in the 2020 election “in pursuit of personal political benefit.” They also assert that this “compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process.”
We don’t condone Mr. Trump’s mention of Joe Biden in his call to Ukraine’s President, which was far from perfect and reflects his often bad judgment. But “abuse of power” on this evidence is a new and low standard for impeachment that will come back to haunt future Presidents of all parties.
As for corrupting the 2020 election, even if Ukraine had announced an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, Mr. Trump couldn’t know how effective it would be, how long it would take, or whether it might even exonerate them. The election is still a year away. If the mere announcement of a foreign government’s investigation into corruption can poison a U.S. election, then American democracy must be weaker than even its enemies think.
The second Democratic article is weaker in that it amounts to impeaching Mr. Trump because he is resisting their subpoenas. “Without lawful cause or excuse, President Trump directed Executive Branch agencies, offices and officials not to comply with those subpoenas,” the article charges.
His lawful cause is defending his presidential powers under the Constitution. Every modern President has to some extent or another resisted Congressional or special-counsel subpoenas. Nixon and Mr. Clinton did until they lost at the Supreme Court. House Democrats are refusing even to fight in court, claiming impeachment gives them plenary power to see all documents and any witnesses they want.
This ignores that the Constitution stipulates co-equal branches that each have the right to defend their powers. If Democrats are right in their claim, then every President essentially works for Congress. We should skip elections and let Congress choose the President.
Democrats also claim the emergency of time, and as usual Rep. Adam Schiff puts this case in the least credible way. “The argument ‘why don’t you just wait?’ amounts to this: Why don’t you just let [Mr. Trump] cheat in one more election? Why not let him cheat just one more time?,” Mr. Schiff told the press as the articles were unveiled.
But Mr. Trump didn’t cheat to win in 2016, as Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion investigation demonstrated after two years of looking. As for 2020, the Constitution includes no clause for pre-emptive impeachment to prevent acts that a President might commit.
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Democrats wrap these charges in high-toned rhetoric about “this solemn day” and quotes from Benjamin Franklin. But they are essentially impeaching Mr. Trump because they despise him and the way he governs.
This is the classic standard of “maladministration,” which the Founders explicitly considered but excluded from the Constitution as grounds for impeachment. They did so because they feared that partisan Congresses would too easily impeach Presidents of the opposite political faction on this subjective basis, rather than for serious offenses.
In their wisdom, the American people seem to have figured all this out. Despite one-sided lobbying by the impeachment press, the polls show that a majority opposes removing Mr. Trump from office. This may be the real explanation behind the Democratic move to shrink impeachment. Democrats now want a fast and furious vote to satisfy their most anti-Trump partisans, dump the mess on the Senate, and campaign on something else.
They shouldn’t get off that easy. By defining impeachment down, they are turning what should be a rare and extraordinary constitutional remedy into a routine tool of partisan warfare. They are harming constitutional norms, as the liberals like to say.
Americans will decide in 11 months whether Mr. Trump deserves to remain in office. But they should also keep the impeachment vote very much in mind when they decide whether Democrats deserve to keep the House.
1a) What Horowitz Actually Debunked
The report refers 19 times to Crossfire Hurricane’s threat to ‘constitutionally protected activity,’ including the First Amendment.
By Daniel Heninger
The battles between President Trump, the Democrats and the media have begun to dispirit a populace that thinks the Trump Wars have little to do with them or the country’s real needs. The public is right—but the war won’t stop.
This week, on the edge of Mr. Trump’s fourth year in office, House Democrats filed articles of impeachment, and we got the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Crossfire Hurricane, an FBI investigation of the Trump presidential campaign that began in July 2016. The Horowitz report matters more, by a mile.
Within minutes of the 434-page report’s release Monday, the generic media headline was that it “debunks” the idea that the FBI was guilty of political bias against Mr. Trump, as well as conservative “conspiracy theories” that there was a deep-state effort to get Mr. Trump.
Before considering what the report says, let us ask: What exactly would describe what was going on in this country’s political life during the more than two years from Mr. Trump’s inauguration through completion of the Mueller investigation? Hard to believe, but Donald Trump himself didn’t create the long Russia collusion narrative, notwithstanding his obeisances to Vladimir Putin during and after the presidential campaign. Dictator fawning is nauseating, but not impeachable.
Thousands of news stories appeared through this period suggesting myriad, concrete Trump campaign linkages to Russia. It is more than a little insulting to the intelligence of the average person to straight-facedly write now that this massive media output based on Beltway leaks was not for a moment about trying to damage the Trump presidency. But let us agree: If something is running off the front pages virtually every day of the week, it’s not a conspiracy.
Whatever the Horowitz review of four FBI Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications and its Crossfire Hurricane investigation did or did not “debunk,” the report is mind-boggling, shocking and damning. It is page after page—indeed, paragraph after paragrap—detailing gross errors of judgment and violations of FBI investigation protocols. Everyone who purports to have an opinion about what has been going on in the U.S. the past 3½ years should at least read the report’s detailed executive summary and draw their own conclusions.
One example, regarding the FBI’s applications to the FISA court. The report notes that besides the seven significant errors in the first October 2016 application, the three renewals in 2017 had “10 additional significant errors,” including this: “that (1) Steele’s reporting was going to Clinton’s presidential campaign and others, (2) Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was ‘desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being U.S. president.’ ”
Christopher Steele’s primary FBI handler even told the Horowitz investigators “it was obvious to him”—as early as July 2016—that the producer of the famous anti-Trump dossiers “was politically motivated.”
True, Mr. Horowitz asserted no “documentary or testimonial evidence” of anti-Trump bias inside the borders of this investigation. But one has to be obtuse to read this report and not see its authors are incredulous at the idea that the only explanation possible is incompetence and misjudgment on an unimaginable scale by trained FBI professionals. As Mr. Horowitz puts it with almost bemused understatement, “We did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems we identified.”
From reading this report, it is clear that what has had the attorney general in a seething white heat has little to do with defending Donald J. Trump and a lot to do with protecting John Q. Public.
The abuses identified in the Horowitz report—by the Crossfire Hurricane team and others at FBI headquarters—are a potential threat to the civil liberties of any American who becomes a target. In a better world than we’ve got now, the press—or some of it—would step back from the Trump-Barr obsessions and revisit its historic role of protecting individual freedoms from such raw, unaccountable government power. The Horowitz report contains at least 19 references to the status quo’s threat to “constitutionally protected activity,” notably the “First Amendment.”
The report has several references to the Justice Department’s “low threshold” for commencing inquiries. Surely that low threshold was intended to give agents the room to get to the bottom of important investigations. This report makes clear that under its recent leadership, the bureau lost the ability to exercise prudential judgment or prosecutorial discretion. The consequence going forward is likely to be an even more bureaucratized FBI.
What we’ve had for more than three years is the Washington establishment gone wild. For that, the country will pay a high price for very long time.
1b) He is very serious…
1b) He is very serious…
Mitch McConnell has vowed to acquit President Trump instead of dismissing the articles of impeachment if Trump ends up being impeached.
"Republicans want to have a vote on acquittal -- to clear the President of the charges against him -- not simply rely on a 51-vote threshold procedural motion to dismiss the hotly disputed case."
So if the impeachment does end up in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and all Republicans will make sure the impeachment circus will end there.
McConnells final words about the matter was: "It could go down the path of calling witnesses and basically having another trial or it could decide -- and again, 51 members could make that decision -- that they've heard enough and believe they know what would happen and could move to vote on the two articles of impeachment. Those are the options."
Read the rest of the story here.
1c) How Should the Senate Deal with an Unconstitutional Impeachment by the House?
If the House of Representatives were to impeach President Trump on the two grounds now before it, the senate would be presented with a constitutional dilemma. These two grounds— abuse of power and obstruction of Congress— are not among the criteria specified for impeachment. Neither one is a high crime and misdemeanor. Neither is mentioned in the constitution. Both are the sort of vague, open-ended criteria rejected by the framers. They were rejected precisely to avoid the situation in which our nation currently finds itself. Abuse of power can be charged against virtually every controversial president by the opposing party. And obstruction of Congress — whatever else it may mean — cannot extend to a president invoking privileges and then leave it to the courts to referee conflicts between the legislative and executive branches.
Hamilton feared that vague criteria would allow a majority of the House to impeach a president from the opposing party just because they had more votes than the president's party. He called that "the greatest danger." Madison worried that open-ended criteria, such as "maladministration" would give Congress too much discretion and power, and turn our republic into a parliamentary democracy in which the chief executive serves at the will of the legislature. To prevent these dangers, the framers settled on criteria with well-established meanings: treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The House Democrats are simply ignoring these words and this history, because they have the votes to do so. They are following the absurd notion put forth by congresswoman Maxine Waters that when it comes to impeachment "there is no law," and the criteria are anything a majority of the House wants it be, regardless of what the constitution mandates. This lawless view confuses what a majority of congress can get away with (absent judicial review) with what the constitution requires. It places Congress above the supreme law of the land, namely the constitution.
Were Congress to vote to impeach President Trump on the two proposed grounds, its action would be unconstitutional. According to Hamilton in Federalist 78, any act of Congress that does not comport with the Constitution is "void." This view was confirmed by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison and is now the law of the land.
So, what options would the Senate have if the House voted to impeach on two unconstitutional grounds? Would it be required to conduct a trial based on "void" articles of impeachment? Could it simply refuse to consider unconstitutional articles? Could the president's lawyer make a motion to the Chief Justice — who presides over the trial of an impeached president — to dismiss the articles of impeachment on constitutional grounds?
This is uncharted territory with little guidance from the Constitution or history. There are imperfect analogies that may be informative. If this were an ordinary criminal case, and a grand jury had indicted a defendant for a non-crime (say, having gay sex) or an unconstitutional crime, the trial judge would be obliged to dismiss the indictment and not subject the defendant to an unconstitutional trial. Impeachment, however, is not an ordinary criminal proceeding. So, the analogy is not directly on point. But impeachment by the House is similar in many ways to indictment by a grand jury, and a removal trial by the Senate is similar to a criminal trial, including being presided over by a judge. It is entirely possible that the president's lawyers may file a motion seeking dismissal of the impeachment as unconstitutional. It is impossible to predict whether such a motion would be entertained and if so, how it would be decided.
Another option would be for the president's lawyer to seek judicial review of the House's unconstitutional action. Despite the fact that the Constitution says that the House shall be the "sole" judge of impeachment, two former justices have opined that there might be a judicial role in extreme cases.
The most likely option for the president — and the one hinted at by White House sources — is for the Senate to conduct a scaled down trial focusing on the constitutional defects in the articles of impeachment. No fact witnesses would be called: that would turn the proceeding into a he said/she said conflict with no clear resolution. Only legal arguments — neater and quicker — would be presented before a vote was taken.
Whichever option is pursued, the ultimate outcome seems clear: the Senate will vote to acquit President Trump. Regardless of the outcome, the damage will have been done by the House majority that will have abused its power by weaponizing the House's authority over impeachment for partisan purposes — exactly as Hamilton feared.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and author of The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019, and Guilt by Accusation, Skyhorse publishing, 2019.
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