House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., questions Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire,as he testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
That's the canonical definition of chutzpah -- shameless effrontery -- and it summarizes the Democratic position on the attempted impeachment of President Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, assembled out of bits handed to ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele from his Russian intelligence sources, and the FBI used this concoction to obtain FISA warrants to bug the Trump presidential campaign. Now, THAT'S foreign interference. And those facts aren't in dispute. When the Trump administration tries to get the truth out of foreign governments about their involvement in nefarious activities in the U.S., the Democrats scream, "Impeachment!"
The Wall Street Journal editors got this exactly right:
Democrats want to impeach Donald Trump for inviting Ukraine to investigate 2020 election rival Joe Biden. But then why are they opposed to investigating whether Democrats used Russian disinformation to get the FBI to investigate Donald Trump in 2016?That’s the double standard now on gaudy public display over multiple news reports that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the origins of the Russian fiasco of 2016 has become a criminal probe. Attorney General William Barr this year appointed Mr. Durham, a highly regarded and veteran prosecutor, to examine this part of the Russia tale that special counsel Robert Mueller chose to ignore.
Nothing less than the American republic is at stake here. It's time for every American patriot to rally around the president. Some of my neo-conservative ex-friends are cheering for the wrong side. Shame on them.
For the record, I don't care whether there was quid pro quo with Ukraine or not. If President Trump used military aid as a bargaining chip to persuade the government of Ukraine to investigate foreign subversion of our political system, he was doing his job as commander-in-chief to protect this country from its external enemies. The parade of striped-pants cookie-pushers from the State Department feeding information to closed-door Democratic Party kangaroo courts in the House of Representatives is irrelevant. Trump is fighting a mutiny by the U.S. intelligence community. If the mutineers succeed, it will be the end of the republic. If a cabal of bureaucrats nestling in the bowls of our $80 billion a year intelligence bureaucracy can bring down an elected president of the United States, the republic is finished.
The impeachment issue is a load of baloney, period. No less a constitutional scholar than Prof. Alan Dershowitz wrote (on the website of the Gatestone Institute):
So, the question remains: did President Trump commit impeachable offenses when he spoke on the phone to the president of Ukraine and/or when he directed members of the Executive Branch to refuse to cooperate, absent a court order, with congressional Democrats who are seeking his impeachment?The answers are plainly no and no. There is a constitutionally significant difference between a political "sin," on the one hand, and a crime or impeachable offenses, on the other.Even taking the worst-case scenario regarding Ukraine -- a quid pro quo exchange of foreign aid for a political favor -- that might be a political sin, but not a crime or impeachable offense.
Dershowitz explained, "The search for the perfect impeachable offense against President Trump is reminiscent of overzealous prosecutors who target the defendant first and then search for the crime with which to charge him. Or to paraphrase the former head of the Soviet secret police to Stalin: show me the man and I will find you the crime."
As David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley write in the Wall Street Journal, this impeachment effort "subverts the Constitution:"
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed committees investigating President Trump to “proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry,” but the House has never authorized such an inquiry. Democrats have been seeking to impeach Mr. Trump since the party took control of the House, though it isn’t clear for what offense. Lawmakers and commentators have suggested various possibilities, but none amount to an impeachable offense. The effort is akin to a constitutionally proscribed bill of attainder—a legislative effort to punish a disfavored person. The Senate should treat it accordingly.
As Rivkin and Foley observe, there's nothing unusual about Trump's alleged delay on aid disbursements to Ukraine, and absolutely nothing criminal about it.
We now know that the FBI set up an ambush for Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, President Trump's first national security adviser, and that FBI lawyers fudged the interview (the Section 302 report) to make it appear that Flynn was lying, as Gateway Pundit reports here.
Every American should read carefully this interview with Prof. Angelo Codevilla, a former top staffer at the Senate Intelligence Committee (the interview was conducted by my friend David Samuels of Tablet Magazine). The power and capacity to abuse the power of America's intelligence services has grown to the point that it endangers our freedoms. Make no mistake: If they can railroad the president of the United States and members of the cabinet, they can do pretty much anything they want to you. Defend your freedoms. Support President Trump.
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