This is a hard to read unsolicited testimony to Blake and Dagny's mother, Abby, from a satisfied customer. Abby, is a Real Estate Broker in the Orlando area and she has received all kind of honors, awards and accolades for her service and sales capabilities.
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From a dear friend and fellow memo reader: "To the Liberals, keep up the harassment and impeachment business. Most everyone hates to see this kind of unfairness because somewhere in their past they can identify with it. rf"
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For reasons that will clarify themselves this is a very random memo. (See below.)
I believe what the Democrat (Impeach Party is doing untold harm to our nation and the office of the president. They seem not to care because they are so hell bent to kill Trump's ability to conduct the necessary affairs only the president is authorized.
Making matters worse they have proceeded outside the parameters of our laws.
We already know Schiff is a liar and now Pelosi's side of The House has gone wild.
When the Atty' General's appointed Assistant (Durham) and the Justice Department's Inspector General (Horowitz)concludes their investigation the entire Russian episode, which apparently has a Ukraine connection and probably was known by Obama, Biden and certainly Hillary, will paint a totally different picture.
I read the entire conversation between Trump and the Ukraine President and found it to be a big stretch to infer any quid pro quo.
Stay tuned.
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Finally, since I have had a lot of time on my hands, I read a book given to me by my tennis buddy and dear friend, Charlie Bourland. "Lone Survivor" is the story of Marcus Luttrell, A Navy SEAL, who lost his three buddies in pursuit of an important Taliban Leader and the additional loss of more SEALS who came to their aid/rescue. The book also describes, in detail, the unbelievably rigorous training SEALS go through and how few become SEALS because of the extraordinary drop out rates.
Luttrell is the personification of what it means to be a SEAL as were his deceased buddies. His description of their heroism is chilling. What I found most discouraging was what he wrote about how hamstrung our military has become because of PC type liberals and lawyers who determine what rules are legally tolerated. I won't even relate his contempt for the mass media. Luttrell concludes if we can only fight with one hand tied behind our backs we should not engage. Particularly is this so if the prospects of winning are bleak and the war's continuous is likely to be un-ending - think Afghanistan etc.
He acknowledges in wars many unplanned things happen and civilians bear the brunt but that is what happens in war and he wrote about several instances when he felt he would be legally tried had he fired his weapon. and thus, jeopardized himself and fellow SEALS.
Luttrelll is a Texan and personifies the best values associated with what what defined The American Character. The Luttrell's are a shrinking component/facet of American Society. They are patriotic to a fault, they are willing to serve and die for their country. They are trained to win and do not understand why politicians throw mud on them and send them out to engage in win-less pursuits for which they are trained. Most politicians do not have the slightest idea the human cost they are imposing on our patriots.
Apparently we learned very little in Viet Nam
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Dick
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No sooner than I had finished my memo entitled "I'm Going To Hell Because I am A Conservative."
I felt peculiar. I could not move my right foot and leg , felt dizzy, modest blurred vision etc. and concluded I was having a stroke. Lynn was not home but returned within 15 minutes of the occurrence. Called our doctor and he said go to the emergency room. By the time we got there I was feeling, more or less, normal.
To make a long story short, I was given a variety of tests, which I passed. No brain bleed, no evidence of tumors or vein blockage. I was also seen by a hospitalist neurologist who confirmed I probably had a TIA,which is a transitory blockage of blood flow through an artery.
I am home with an increase in my cholesterol and back on an aspirin, which I quit taking prior to my hip surgery and which I did not continue.
My own self-diagnosis is, I should have remained on aspirin post the hip replacement. My bad.
In three weeks I will be back to my usual routine and can continue to play tennis.
If God has my number I hope he will let me die on the "courts."
I am posting this because I do not want a whistle blower, Nut Case Democrats and/or the NYT's to send out fake news.
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The rest of this memo is devoted to accumulated items.
1)
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2)
Interesting article concerning Russia policy: https://www.politico.com/
And:
https://nationalpost.com/
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3)
This Whistleblower is Clearly a Coordinated Hit Job
It does not mean the complaint is invalid or inappropriate. But can we please dispense with the idea that this is just one honest public servant out to blow a whistle. The roll out of allegations against the President via the media is coordinated and deeply troubling.
The whistleblower prepared a detailed complaint and it leaked. Democrats clearly had knowledge of it. There was clearly buzz building with reporters briefed on the President's conversations with Ukraine's President. Well before the whistleblower complaint leaked, reporters were beginning to say things like "sources tell us there is a call between the President of the United States and President of Ukraine."
The post This Whistleblower is Clearly a Coordinated Hit Job appeared first on The Resurgent.
Read in browser »
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4)
Mukasey: John Durham’s Ukrainian Leads
It looks almost like a real trial. Yet despite the legal trappings, the underlying standard, if applied to a criminal statute, would be vulnerable to attack as void for vagueness: “The president . . . shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Treason and bribery have specific and recognized meanings, but what about “other high crimes and misdemeanors”?
In Federalist No. 66, Alexander Hamilton defended the Senate as the tribunal for trying impeachments in part by saying that impeachable offenses come from “the abuse or violation of some public trust” and “are of a nature which may . . . be denominatedpolitical.”
Tellingly, during President Clinton’s impeachment trial, Chief Justice William Rehnquist was asked to instruct senators, as judges uniformly instruct jurors, that in reaching a verdict they must consider only the evidence presented during the trial. He refused; senators were free to consider whatever they wished. In fact, they were free to consider nothing; the Constitution imposes on the Senate no obligation to hold a trial at all. President Andrew Johnson was impeached on 11 charges, but tried on only three. As for the House, the only governing principle there is that the majority rules.
So are we now not a nation of laws but a nation of politics? Not entirely.
True, much media and political effort has gone into sometimes close and often willful parsing of President Trump’s July 25 conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky —ironic when you consider Mr. Trump’s well-known linguistic promiscuity—not to mention the celebrated whistleblower complaint, which contains no firsthand information. Little notice has been given, however, to another document lying in plain sight: a Justice Department press release issued the day the conversation transcript became public.
That Justice Department statement makes explicit that the president never spoke with Attorney General William Barr “about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to former Vice President Biden or his son” or asked him to contact Ukraine “on this or any other matter,” and that the attorney general has not communicated at all with Ukraine. It also contains the following morsel: “A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating.”
The definitive answer to the obvious question—what’s that about?—is known only to Mr. Durham and his colleagues. But publicly available reports, including by Andrew McCarthy in his new book, “Ball of Collusion,” suggest that during the 2016 campaign the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to get evidence from Ukrainian government officials against Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to pressure him into cooperating against Mr. Trump. When you grope through the miasma of Slavic names and follow the daisy chain of related people and entities, it appears that Ukrainian officials who backed the Clinton campaign provided information that generated the investigation of Mr. Manafort—acts that one Ukrainian court has said violated Ukrainian law and “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”
Whether Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Zelensky constitutes “high crimes” or “misdemeanors” depends at least in part on what he was getting at when he raised the subject of a “favor.” He asked not about the Bidens but rather about CrowdStrike, a private company hired by the Democratic National Committee to conduct a forensic examination of the DNC server. The FBI took its word, instead of conducting its own examination, for the conclusion that the Russians had hacked the DNC.
Neither the House in framing charges nor the Senate in considering them will be prevented from subjecting excerpts of the conversation to more analysis than they will stand. Nor does anything stop lawmakers from considering the word of an anonymous whistleblower that consists entirely of secondhand reports and conjecture not subject to easy refutation, save for occasional whoppers like the suggestion that placement of the Zelensky conversation on a closed system not vulnerable to penetration was somehow unlawful or evidence of a guilty conscience.
The House and Senate, by design of the Founders, are unconstrained by any considerations save political ones. But as they labor, and occasionally preen in the limelight, Mr. Durham works quietly to determine whether highly specific criminal laws were violated, and if so by whom. He is an experienced and principled prosecutor who has earned the confidence of attorneys general of both parties, including me. Stay tuned.
Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and a U.S. district judge (1988-2006)
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5 and 5a )
Impeachment Is an Act of Desperation
Impeachment proceedings will very likely be so good for President Trump and so bad for Democrats that they might have to report them as an in-kind donation to his campaign.
Perhaps the Democratic leadership thinks that this is a good way to raise money and to keep the base energized for next year’s election. Maybe they’re addicted to the intoxicating high of moral outrage. Or maybe they really believe that an impeachment just before a general election is the right thing to do both morally and politically. Regardless, the Democrats pushing impeachment, now joined by the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, are doing everything they can to ensure the president’s re-election.
Of course, that’s not what Democrats think. They think that now, finally, in the president’s call to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, they have Mr. Trump right where they want him. But we’ve all been down this road before. The Russia probe was supposed to end in impeachment. It didn’t. Claims made in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” were supposed to end the Trump presidency. They didn’t, either. Neither did the salacious stories of Stormy Daniels or the testimony of Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen. Neither did a litany of other allegations, slanders and stories, some true, some not.
This time is no different, and I think Democrats like Nancy Pelosi know it. She’s been pressed hard to pursue impeachment by her younger, more radical colleagues — in and out of “the squad” — along with their activist supporters and many of the party’s presidential candidates. She resisted until now. So Ms. Pelosi’s decision to change course and proceed with impeachment is more likely the result of the combination of that pressure and the cumulative effect of frustration that none of the prior predictions came true.
None of the fuss did any lasting damage to Mr. Trump. His approval ratings have bounced around in more or less the same range since he took office. But frustration and anger lead to bad decisions and those decisions are likely to cost Democrats dearly.
Joe Biden bears the most political risk. Democrats are focused on the part of the phone call where Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky discuss a number of things, including the potential sale of Javelin missiles to Ukraine and the location of servers examined by the American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. (Mr. Trump is interested in the servers because he believes they could shed new light on the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers in 2016.) Mr. Trump also brings up Joe Biden, saying, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”
In that and other statements, Democrats see an impeachable offense. A lot of other people see one head of state asking another for an investigation into potential corruption involving the Bidens. Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, a gigantic natural gas company in Ukraine, earning as much as $50,000 a month. Why was he there? At the same time, his father was overseeing American policy in Ukraine and later bragged about how he had pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor there.
Regardless of one’s view, there is no way to look into the rectitude of Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Zelensky without also asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine during Barack Obama’s second term and Joe Biden’s actions while vice president. Those threads could lead to a review of Hunter’s dealings with China and the role his father might have played there. That’s all bad for Mr. Biden and his campaign, regardless of what’s found (or not found). Democrats want an investigation, they want hearings and they will get them. But the Bidens will be scrutinized.
Maybe Democrats have secretly given up on Mr. Biden and see impeachment as a way to satisfy the demands of the activist base and at the same time get rid of him and ease the path for another candidate. I suspect that a lot of Democrats in the superdelegate and donor class have concluded that Mr. Biden is not capable of reassembling the Obama coalition that won the White House twice, and are also increasingly uncomfortable over Mr. Biden’s ability to withstand the rigors of a campaign against Mr. Trump.
Still, this remains dangerous political ground. Impeachment is a matter of the utmost national importance, and its success requires broad public support. The vote in the House to open impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon was 410-4; against Bill Clinton it was 258-176. The actual impeachment votes against Mr. Clinton in 1998 were 228 to 206 on perjury and 221 to 212 on obstruction of justice. He was not convicted of either charge in the Senate trial.
Now, compare the political outcomes. The broad, bipartisan vote against Nixon led over time to a series of events in which conservatives, including the Republican candidate who preceded Nixon, Senator Barry Goldwater, abandoned the president, who ultimately resigned. The narrow, partisan votes against Mr. Clinton led to his acquittal. Al Gore narrowly lost the next presidential election while Democrats picked up a seat in the House. Hillary Clinton went on to become a senator, secretary of State and presidential nominee. In other words, when Republicans allowed their animus against Mr. Clinton to override their political instincts, they were hurt, but the Clintons were not.
Surely Ms. Pelosi must know that there are not 67 votes in the Senate to convict President Trump of anything relating to his phone call with President Zelensky. So it’s just political theater. The problem is that as it plays out over the next year, everyone will get the joke: The House is just going through the motions to stoke its own base before the election, just as Newt Gingrich’s majority did in 1998. That, in turn, will energize Republicans to support the president. But there is another danger for Democrats lurking here: that they will ultimately demoralize their most loyal voters when they realize the joke’s on them. There will be no resignation, there will be no conviction in the Senate.
But there will be an election. And by focusing on their obsession with the person of Donald Trump, Democrats are giving up the opportunity to talk about wages, employment, the shrinking middle class or any of the other things that motivate normal voters. After two and a half years of hearing about Russia, Russia, Russia, there are vanishingly few swing voters who want to spend the next 14 months hearing about Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.
For the Democrats, the political problem is that this is just more Washington psychodrama. And as engaging as that it is for people in politics, for the journalists who cover it and for people who are deeply ideological, it is uncharismatic and irrelevant to many voters who, rightly, just want to know what Washington is going to do for them.
In reality, everyone knows that Ms. Pelosi’s pursuit of impeachment will not result in a conviction in the Senate and the removal of Mr. Trump from office. So it’s hard to see this as anything other than desperation — an acknowledgment that there is no Democratic candidate likely to beat Mr. Trump head-to-head on issues like China’s mercantilist trade policy, stagnating wages, the shrinking middle class and immigration. By choosing impeachment, Democrats are choosing the ground on which they want to fight the election. But the ground they have chosen is shaky. It imperils their current front-runner, and it avoids the very issues that motivate voters in must-win states.
That doesn’t sound like winning to me.
5a)
Pelosi’s Bad Impeachment Call
Once upon a time, prominent Democrats call
That conservative was Brett Kavanaugh, and the time was two weeks ago. How well did that work out for liberals?
Now prominent Democrats have begun an impeachment process against Donald Trump, based on information that, while potentially devastating, remains arguable and even more incomplete. They do so because they appear to be certain that the full set of facts will vindicate their belief that the president is manifestly guilty of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
But what if the facts don’t vindicate that belief?
That’s a thought that should have at least delayed Nancy Pelosi from announcing the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after Trump promised to release the unredacted transcript of a July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
The call was one basis (though apparently not the only basis) for Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, to tell a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee about a whistle-blower complaint on an “urgent matter,” without sharing the substance of the complaint. The complaint was bottled up by Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, on the grounds that it didn’t meet the statutory requirement for reporting to Congress.
Maguire, a retired Navy vice admiral, is scheduled to testify to Congress this Thursday morning, and Senate Republicans have joined Democrats in calling for the release of the whistle-blower complaint. Maybe Maguire’s testimony will be disastrous for the president. And maybe the whistle-blower complaint will be every bit as damningly dispositive about Trump’s conduct as his detractors expect.
But right now we have no way of knowing. As for the phone call, the document released on Wednesday shows that Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to help “find out about” Joe Biden’s alleged role in stopping a “prosecution” of a company on whose board Hunter Biden served, which had already been widely reported and is rightly regarded as another Trumpian disgrace.
What it does not show, however, is Trump tying his request to the release of U.S. military aid in the manner of a quid pro quo. And the matter of the Bidens’ involvements in Ukraine has been public controversy for years, as when The Times’s editorial board scolded the senior Biden in December 2015 for his son’s profitable connection with a Ukrainian oligarch “under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine” for “corrupt practices.”
The upshot is that Democrats have fired a salvo — their largest and potentially their last — in the near-dark, in an uncertain hope that it will find its target.
There’s room for doubt. Barring the most sensational disclosures, impeachment in the House will never lead to conviction, unless at least 20 Republicans join Democrats to reach the required two-thirds majority in the Senate. That could still help Democrats, if a majority of Americans conclude that Trump is clearly guilty of serious crimes and that impeachment is the only viable recourse.
But that doesn’t seem to be happening — at least not yet. As of Wednesday, a Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans oppose impeachment, against 37 percent who support it. That means that a significant bloc of voters who otherwise disapprove of Trump nonetheless oppose impeaching him. If this is the risk Pelosi wants to take with swing voters, Republicans will be happy to let her take it.
Those numbers could always change, depending on what we learn about the facts, as well as on how we understand the law. In a remarkable column in Politico Magazine, the former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti makes the case that even if Trump had offered an explicit quid pro quo to the Ukrainian president, it would not violate federal bribery statutes or any other existing criminal statute.
Mariotti nonetheless argues that what Trump is alleged to have done is so bad that it merits impeachment as a breach “of the president’s duty to not use the powers of the presidency to benefit himself,” in this case politically. Come again? That’s what presidents do all the time, only Trump does it more flagrantly.
A stronger argument is that no president should use the power of his office to try to dig up dirt on a political opponent — as, for instance, Lyndon Johnson did, abusively and persistently, to Barry Goldwater in 1964. That’s absolutely true.
But disgraceful behavior is not the same thing as criminal behavior. Democrats may now find themselves in the curious position of trying to convince the country that Trump should be booted from the office to which he was lawfully elected for behavior that, whatever else might be said about it, was not unlawful. That will be a tough sell.
No wonder Trump seems to be spoiling for this fight. With an eye on Bill Clinton’s presidency, he may even relish a lengthy impeachment battle that uncovers no crime while showing that congressional Democrats are more intent on pursuing a vendetta against a president than helping the people they’re elected to serve.
I write all this as someone who thinks that Trump disgraces the office of the presidency every day he occupies it, and did so again with his call to the Ukrainian president. The best way to end this administration — and the only realistic way — is for him to be convincingly turned out by a vote of the American people next year. Impeachment risks putting that goal much further out of reach.
5b) The whistle blower complaint doesn’t do Democrats any favors
By Henry Olsen
The whistle blower’s complaint that launched the current impeachment controversy has now been released. It offers little new information not already in the public domain. Furthermore, if it continues to be relied upon as evidence justifying impeachment, Democrats will have to make some hard choices about how to proceed.
The complaint is broken into four parts. The first describes the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The second alleges that White House officials improperly placed records of the call in an “electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.” The third recounts a series of “ongoing concerns” that relate to meetings between Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and Zelensky aides and other meetings involving U.S. and Ukrainian diplomats to discuss how to proceed or “navigate” the president’s requests. The fourth recounts a series of news stories and tweets regarding the president’s actions and thoughts regarding Ukraine.
Aside from the second allegation, there is nothing new we have learned from the complaint. A rough transcript of the July 25 phone call was released Wednesday for all to read. The information in the third section is either standard operating procedure in this White House (Trump’s unpredictability regularly leads foreign governments to seek guidance from administration officials on how to proceed) or reflects what we already know, that Giuliani plays an unusual and disturbing role in this matter. The fourth is simply recitation of matter already in the public domain.
As a result, Democrats now have a difficult choice to make. The wisest course of action would probably be to drop the complaint as a significant piece of evidence, since it raises almost nothing new. That would be politically embarrassing since they have made so much of it, but they could claim that the whistle blower’s job has been done since it unearthed the alleged wrongdoing and placed it in the public domain.
The alternative course sets the Democrats on a dangerous path. If the whistle blower’s complaint is probative of impeachment, then the whistle blower must testify to find out who gave the person the information that is described. That cannot be done without Republicans present and likely means the whistle blower’s identity must be disclosed. It is one thing to keep that person’s identity secret when the matter is largely handled internally; it is quite another when it is being used to try to remove the democratically elected leader of our nation. The accused must have a chance to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against him, and that right applies as much to Trump as it does to anyone accused of wrongdoing.
Investigation of the whistle blower’s allegations also inserts the House Democrats into the deepest workings of the administration, such as the alleged discussions among White House officials to “lock down” records of the phone call. The president would be remiss if he did not assert executive privilege over these discussions. That will inevitably present Democrats with a Hobson’s choice: Either delay the impeachment hearings to fight such assertions of privilege in court or drop the matter to proceed to a vote without having all the evidence before it. Neither will help them achieve their likely aim: the swift resolution to impeach the president before the election year starts in earnest.
Republicans will surely want to probe the whistle blower’s connection to his or her lead attorney, Andrew Bakaj, if the complaint remains relevant. Bakaj has worked for three Democratic senators and, curiously, once served at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. The complaint is dated Aug. 12 and alleges that the whistle blower has received facts from “more than half a dozen U.S. officials” relating to the president’s purported misdeeds “over the past four months,” i.e., since sometime in April. Bakaj donated to Democratic campaigns through Act Blue on April 26; the Washington Free Beacon reports one donation was earmarked for — you guessed it — Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. These facts could be coincidental, but don’t expect Republicans and the conservative media to let them go unnoticed.
Republicans would also be wise to read the complaint carefully. The author distinguished between “White House officials” and “U.S. officials.” The former group are clearly political appointees, but the latter group could include career government employees. The complainant only identifies “White House officials” as sources of his information in connection with the July 25 call and subsequent alleged use of the alternate storage system. All other information the person recounts, including the “facts” that started the complainant’s concerns, come from “U.S. officials.” Expect Republicans to try to uncover who these people are, and expect the president’s media defenders to allege this is further proof of the “deep-state conspiracy” against Trump.
The fire this whistle blower sparked is now raging throughout the capital. In fanning those flames, the Democrats might find they can neither control the conflagration’s course nor prevent the whistle blower from getting burned.
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