Everyone knows about that big impeachment thing going on in Washington, D.C., but there&#8217;s another presidential impeachment looming at &#8230; the University of Florida?
&#8220;The student body president of the University of Florida is facing impeachment calls for alleged misuse of funds to bring Donald Trump Jr. and presidential campaign adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle to campus last month, according to reports,&#8221; the <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/13/university-of-florida-student-president-faces-impeachment-after-funding-trump-jr-s-visit/">New York Post</a> reports.
The student president, Michael C. Murphy, was served with a formal <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6547791-Michael-Murphy-Impeachment-Resolution.html">impeachment resolution</a> on Tuesday, signed by more than 100 students and alumni. The resolution says that in this year&#8217;s fall session, Murphy &#8220;colluded with Trump Victory National Financial Consultant Caroline Wren to expend $50,000 of mandatory student fees to further enrich Donald Trump, Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle through the ACCENT Speakers Bureau.&#8221;
&#8220;By using student fees to advance his own expressed political beliefs at the expense of the … Student Government writ large, Mr. Murphy not only endangered students marginalized by the speakers’ white nationalist supporters, but also abused his power to advance a particular political party at the expense of the students he should represent,&#8221; the impeachment resolution states.
President Trump&#8217;s oldest son and girlfriend Guilfoyle visited the Gainesville campus on October 10.
&#8220;Questions have been raised about the legality of the visit, as Murphy agreed to pay the pair $50,000 in publicly funded student activity fees and the law says public funds cannot be used to support political campaigns,&#8221; the <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2019/11/12/uf-student-president-faces-impeachment-threat-over-trump-jr-visit/">Tampa Bay Times</a> wrote.
&#8220;[A]n email surfaced, as first reported by UF’s independent student newspaper, The Alligator, showing Murphy worked to set up the event with Caroline Wren, national finance consultant for Trump Victory, a fundraising committee for the president’s campaign,&#8221; the paper wrote.
<blockquote>Wren declined to be interviewed for this story, instead releasing a statement that she met Murphy for the first time in the summer, &#8220;when he expressed interest in bringing Donald Trump Jr. to campus.&#8221;
“I followed up with him via my private email in my personal capacity and mistakenly forgot to remove my Trump Victory signature,” she wrote. “After an initial call to discuss a potential visit, University of Florida representatives were connected to Donald Trump Jr’s office.”</blockquote>
Murphy, though, told the student newspaper that because the visit by Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle was not an official campaign stop, it did not violate university rules.
Henry Fair, head of the ACCENT Speakers Bureau, an arm of the student government, also told <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/florida-students-object-as-trump-jr-speaks-on-campus--for-a-50000-fee/2019/10/10/4a123a88-eb82-11e9-85c0-85a098e47b37_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_15" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Washington Post</a> last month that “this event is a campus speaking engagement, not a campaign event.”
But the Times quoted one student body senator saying the event was political.
<blockquote>“Public records show that Michael Murphy colluded with a member of the Donald Trump campaign,” student senator Ben Lima said during a student government meeting last week. Lima is leading the impeachment charge.
“If this was not a campaign event, then why was the student body president in communication with the Trump campaign to bring these speakers to campus?” he asked.</blockquote>
Student senators will soon vote on his impeachment. &#8220;If at least two-thirds of the group votes in favor,&#8221; The Times wrote, &#8220;Murphy will be immediately suspended. Then the other half of the senate will take a final vote on whether to permanently remove him from office.&#8221;

Trump Jr. Guilfoyle

Student Body President Faces Impeachment For Bringing Trump Jr. To College Campus

Donald Trump Jr.

Florida

Impeachment

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) made a highly suspect claim about the CIA whistleblower on Wednesday during House Democrats&#8217; impeachment inquiry hearing. Schiff asserted that he did not know the identity of the whistleblower.
&#8220;You are the only member [of Congress] who knows who that individual is and your staff is the only staff of any member of Congress that has had that chance to talk with that individual,&#8221; Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said to Schiff. &#8220;We would like opportunity. When might that happen in this proceeding today?&#8221;
&#8220;That&#8217;s a false statement, I do not know the identity of the whistleblower,&#8221; Schiff responded.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Democrat Chairman Adam Schiff: &#8220;I do not know the identity of the whistleblower&#8221;
Schiff has repeatedly falsely claimed that his team has not spoken to the whistleblower
The Washington Post debunked Schiff&#8217;s false claim, giving him &#8220;4 Pinocchios&#8221; for his lie <a href="https://t.co/QWmxblWSxd">pic.twitter.com/QWmxblWSxd</a>
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1194642477174554624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
Schiff&#8217;s claim is questionable given numerous past statements that he has made, news reports, and fact-checks on his past statements.
On September 17, Schiff told MSNBC&#8217;s &#8220;Morning Joe&#8221;: &#8220;We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to.&#8221;
A Washington Post fact-check <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/04/schiffs-false-claim-his-committee-had-not-spoken-whistleblower/">awarded</a> Schiff&#8217;s claim with &#8220;Four Pinocchios,&#8221; the worst possible rating that any claim can be awarded — suggesting that the statement is a blatant lie.
&#8220;This is flat-out false,&#8221; The Post wrote. &#8220;Schiff simply says the committee had not spoken to the whistleblower. Now we know that’s not true.&#8221;
In early October, reports emerged that Schiff had hired two former National Security Council (NSC) aides who previously worked with the whistleblower. The Washington Examiner <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/adam-schiffs-staff-includes-2-aides-who-worked-with-whistleblower-at-white-house">reported</a>:
<blockquote>Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff&#8217;s committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint. &#8230;
&#8230; Grace, 36, was hired to help Schiff’s committee investigate the Trump White House. That month, Trump accused Schiff of &#8220;stealing people who work at White House.&#8221; Grace worked at the NSC from 2016 to 2018 in U.S.-China relations and then briefly at the Center for a New American Security think tank, which was founded by two former senior Obama administration officials. &#8230;
&#8230; Misko, 37, worked in the Obama administration as a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff under deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, who became Hillary Clinton&#8217;s top foreign policy official during her 2016 presidential campaign. In 2015, Misko was the director for the Gulf states at the NSC, remaining there into the Trump administration’s first year.</blockquote>
The Examiner noted that Misko reportedly had problems working in the Trump administration, as a source told the Examiner: &#8220;There were a few times where documents had been signed off for final editing before they go to the national security adviser for signature. And he actually went in and made changes after those changes were already finished. So he basically tried to insert, without his boss&#8217; approval.&#8221;
&#8220;There were meetings in which he protested very heavily, and next thing you know, there&#8217;s an article in the paper about the contents of that meeting,&#8221; the source added.
Schiff&#8217;s credibility was further damaged when he <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-democrat-adam-schiff-makes-up-quotes-from-trumps-ukraine-call">fabricated quotes</a> from Trump&#8217;s phone call during a congressional hearing in October and was later forced to apologize.

Adam Schiff

WATCH: Adam Schiff Makes Questionable Claim About Ukraine Whistleblower

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) pre-empted Republican statements about the whistleblower who alerted Congressional Democrats to alleged misconduct on the part of President Donald Trump by issuing a statement Tuesday night, warning House Republicans that mention of the whistleblower would result in an immediate complaint to the House Ethics Committee.
Schiff, per an &#8220;impeachment resolution&#8221; passed weeks ago, has the final call on witnesses, and, over the weekend, abjectly denied a Republican request to hear from the whistleblower whose testimony is central to the case for President Trump&#8217;s impeachment.
The GOP was clear, in its request, that cross-examination of whistleblower was paramount to their defense, particularly given that the Democrats&#8217; case for impeachment seems to hinge on the whistleblower&#8217;s claim of having received information about an alleged quid-pro-quo agreement between President Trump and Ukrainian officials, trading foreign aid for assurances that Ukranian prosecutors were looking into whether former Vice President Joe Biden used his clout as part of the Obama Administration to pave the way for his son, Hunter, to do business in-country.
Schiff told Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee that having the whistleblower testify and undergo cross-examination would be &#8220;redundant&#8221; and &#8220;unnecessary&#8221; and that &#8220;the individual&#8217;s appearance before us would only place their personal safety at grave risk.&#8221;
Schiff&#8217;s statement only served to enrage Republicans, so the House Democrat doubled down Tuesday night, all but guaranteeing that any Republican who mentions the whistleblower will face an immediate and unmerciful investigation.
&#8220;The Committee has a long, proud, and bipartisan history of protecting whistleblowers—including from efforts to threaten, intimidate, retaliate against, or undermine the confidentiality of whistleblowers,&#8221; Schiff&#8217;s Tuesday letter to Nunes read.
&#8220;Among other authorities, the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2010 and the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act include procedures for Intelligence Community personnel to make protected disclosures to inspectors general across the Intelligence Community and to the congressional intelligence committees. 16 Among other things, Intelligence Community personnel are shielded from any action constituting reprisal or the threat of reprisal for making disclosures in accordance with these procedures,&#8221; the letter continued.
&#8220;The statutory framework also prevents obstruction of lawful communications by federal employees with Congress, and of congressional proceedings ,&#8221; Schiff concludes. &#8220;And, as mentioned above, the Code of Official Conduct for Members of Congress requires that every Member &#8216;shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.&#8217; The Committee on Ethics has historically viewed this provision as &#8216;encompassing violations of law and abuses of one’s official position.'&#8221;
As if that weren&#8217;t enough, Schiff&#8217;s letter goes on to threaten Republicans who mention Joe Biden or his son Hunter in the context of the impeachment inquiry.
&#8220;[I]t is important to underscore that the House’s impeachment inquiry, and the Committee, will not serve as venues for any Member to further the same sham investigations into the Bidens or into debunked conspiracies about 2016 U.S. election interference that President Trump pressed Ukraine to undertake for his personal political benefit,&#8221; Schiff writes, as though the Democrats are not crafting the impeachment narrative for full political effect.
And to top it off, Schiff wants the President to stay quiet: &#8220;Nor will the Committee facilitate any efforts by President Trump or his allies to threaten, intimidate, or retaliate against the whistleblower who courageously and lawfully raised concerns about the President’s conduct.&#8221;
The last line seems to admit that the whistleblower is central to the case, which draws Schiff&#8217;s efforts to keep the whistleblower from having to answer questions into stark contrast.

Schiff

Adam Schiff Threatens GOP: Talk About The Whistleblower During Impeachment Hearings And Face An Ethics Investigation

Devin Nunes

Donald Trump

On Monday, Republicans circulated an <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6546539/GOP-Memo.pdf">internal memo</a> to Republican members of Congress outlining vital &#8220;pieces of evidence&#8221; they believe are &#8220;fatal&#8221; to the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
Democrats have claimed President Trump engaged in a quid pro quo, of which there is no evidence, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July 25 phone call. The impeachment effort <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/partisan-sham-trump-posts-gops-key-arguments-against-democrats-impeachment-case">centers</a> around a whistleblower complaint about Trump asking Ukraine to &#8220;look into&#8221; corruption allegations concerning former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
But, as outlined by the memo, there are various holes in the allegations, such as Ukraine not even being aware of the supposed conditionality of the aid, which made its way to the nation without any Biden investigation.
Here are all four pieces of evidence outlined in the memo, via <a href="https://www.axios.com/republicans-impeachment-defense-memo-b4f6eeeb-6dab-49ed-a8d2-48eb736cfd8f.html">Axios</a>:
<blockquote>● The July 25 call summary — the best evidence of the conversation — shows no conditionality or evidence of pressure;</blockquote>
<blockquote>● President Zelensky and President Trump have both said there was no pressure on the call;</blockquote>
<blockquote>● The Ukrainian government was not aware of a hold on U.S. security assistance at the time of the July 25 call; and</blockquote>
<blockquote>● President Trump met with President Zelensky and U.S. security assistance flowed to Ukraine in September 2019 — both of which occurred without Ukraine investigating President Trump&#8217;s political rivals.</blockquote>
&#8220;Trump had a deep-seated, genuine and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine and U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid&#8221; due to the nation&#8217;s &#8220;long history of pervasive corruption,&#8221; the &#8220;background&#8221; section of the memo stated, as noted by <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/news/gop-memo-evidence-fatal-to-the-democrats-impeachment-allegations?utm_content=buffer3a146&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=tw-theblaze">The Blaze</a>.
&#8220;Senior Ukrainian government officials interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in opposition to President Trump,&#8221; the memo also highlighted. The Republicans cited an August 2016 report from the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c98078d0-6ae7-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea034f">Financial Times</a>, among other statements, as evidence of the interference:
<blockquote>Though most Ukrainians are disillusioned with the country’s current leadership for stalled reforms and lacklustre anti-corruption efforts, Mr Leshchenko said events of the past two years had locked Ukraine on to a pro-western course. The majority of Ukraine’s politicians, he added, are “on Hillary Clinton’s side”.</blockquote>
The fierce defense against the impeachment inquiry has been coming from President Trump, too, as expected.
&#8220;Leading up to the official public impeachment inquiry, President Trump has been blasting away on Twitter with even more frequency than he’s famous for doing,&#8221; <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/partisan-sham-trump-posts-gops-key-arguments-against-democrats-impeachment-case">The Daily Wire</a> reported Wednesday morning. &#8220;In a series of tweets starting on the eve of the inquiry, which kicks off on Capitol Hill Wednesday, the president highlighted arguments and quotes from various Republicans and political commentators making the case that the Democrats are engaged in a &#8216;partisan sham&#8217; based on an accusation that the evidence shows is &#8216;fraudulent.'&#8221;
One pointed stressed by Trump is &#8220;House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s consultation with the whistleblower before filing the initial complaint,&#8221; The Daily Wire noted. &#8220;Trump pointed to Schiff’s problematic conduct again Tuesday by posting a video put together by the House Oversight Committee Republicans highlighting Schiff’s shady involvement with the whistleblower and his infamous &#8216;summary&#8217; of Trump’s call on the House floor.&#8221;
Watch the video, below:
<div></div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Schiff&#39;s Sham Impeachment. <a href="https://t.co/pmLfx30YZL">pic.twitter.com/pmLfx30YZL</a>
&mdash; Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPoversight/status/1194269692820635648?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<div>Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/partisan-sham-trump-posts-gops-key-arguments-against-democrats-impeachment-case">‘Partisan Sham’: Trump Posts GOP’s Key Arguments Against Democrats’ Impeachment Case</a></div>

4 Pieces Of Evidence &#8216;Fatal&#8217; To Dems&#8217; Impeachment Push Outlined In Internal GOP Memo

Ukraine

Leading up to the official public impeachment inquiry, President Trump has been blasting away on Twitter with even more frequency than he&#8217;s famous for doing. In a series of tweets starting on the eve of the inquiry, which kicks off on Capitol Hill Wednesday, the president highlighted arguments and quotes from various Republicans and political commentators making the case that the Democrats are engaged in a &#8220;partisan sham&#8221; based on an accusation that the evidence shows is &#8220;fraudulent.&#8221;
The Democrats&#8217; impeachment effort centers around a whistleblower complaint about Trump&#8217;s July 25 call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to &#8220;look into&#8221; the corruption allegations involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The transcript of the call released by the Trump administration shows no &#8220;quid pro quo&#8221; arrangement, as the whistleblower and the Democrats have alleged. Still, the Democrats, led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) maintain that Trump was attempting to force Ukraine to look into his political opponent by withholding U.S. military aide — aide that was ultimately granted without an investigation being conducted.
Trump has repeatedly underscored a key argument made in defense of his handling of Ukraine: the transcript of the call shows no quid pro quo, a point several political commentators have likewise made.
&#8220;This ridiculous Impeachment is a travesty, it’s not an inquiry. Just read the transcript,&#8221; said Fox Business Network&#8217;s Lou Dobbs, a quote Trump tweeted Tuesday.
&#8220;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,&#8221; Trump told Zelensky. &#8220;So whatever you can do 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.&#8221;
Further undermining the &#8220;quid pro quo&#8221; argument is that Ukraine received the $391 million in U.S. military aide early and without conducting any investigation into the Bidens and that Ukraine was not aware that the aide was being withheld or for what reason for weeks after the call.
&#8220;When you hear Schiff use all these words like quid pro quo, it is because they can’t specify that Donald Trump broke any laws or did anything wrong, and they have to move away from quid pro quo because there was no quid, and there was no quo,&#8221; Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, citing Fox &amp; Friends&#8217; Charles Hurt. &#8220;Ukraine got it’s money (3 weeks early), and there was no investigation.&#8221;
Another argument against the impeachment inquiry stressed by Trump and Republicans is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff&#8217;s consultation with the whistleblower before filing the initial complaint. Trump pointed to Schiff&#8217;s problematic conduct again Tuesday by posting a video put together by the House Oversight Committee Republicans highlighting Schiff&#8217;s shady involvement with the whistleblower and his infamous &#8220;summary&#8221; of Trump&#8217;s call on the House floor:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Schiff&#39;s Sham Impeachment. <a href="https://t.co/pmLfx30YZL">pic.twitter.com/pmLfx30YZL</a>
&mdash; Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPoversight/status/1194269692820635648?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&nbsp;
Republicans have also argued that the Democrats have managed to control the narrative on the initial impeachment interviews by selectively releasing only parts of the testimony. &#8220;The Democrats have stacked the deck against President Trump and the Republicans. They have leaked out everything,&#8221; Trump wrote Wednesday morning, citing Fox &amp; Friends&#8217; Steve Doocy.
The public inquiry, Trump&#8217;s favorite Fox News host Sean Hannity argued Tuesday in a quote posted by Trump, will be nothing but a &#8220;phony showtrial&#8221; with &#8220;zero due process,&#8221; based on &#8220;yet another fraudulent hoax conspiracy theory.&#8221;
&#8220;The Left has never accepted the results of the 2016 Election,&#8221; said Hannity.
Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh agrees that the whole thing is a &#8220;sham.&#8221;
&#8220;Millions of Americans will see what a partisan sham this whole thing is,&#8221; said Limbaugh in another quote tweeted out by Trump Wednesday morning.
&#8220;Why is corrupt politician Schiff allowed to hand over cross examination to a high priced outside lawyer,&#8221; Trump asked after quoting Limbaugh. &#8220;Did that lawyer ever work for me, which would be a conflict?&#8221;
&#8220;READ THE TRANSCRIPT!&#8221; Trump tweeted emphatically Wednesday.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrats-shift-trump-impeachment-focus-to-new-potential-offenses">Democrats Shift Trump Impeachment Focus To New Potential Offenses</a>

‘Partisan Sham’: Trump Posts GOP&#8217;s Key Arguments Against Democrats’ Impeachment Case

On Tuesday night, Senator Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News’ Hannity to discuss the impeachment hearings scheduled to begin Wednesday, and snapped that he wasn’t going to watch the hearings because “it’s a threat to the presidency; I don’t want to legitimize it; it’s un-American; it denies the basics of due process.”
Graham asserted, “To every American who’s going to watch tomorrow: this could not happen in your case. This couldn’t happen in a parking ticket case. This couldn’t happen in any civil matter in America because due process requires the ability of every American to call witnesses on their behalf — except for President Trump.”
Hannity started the exchange by noting that Graham had said if there were no due process in the impeachment inquiry, the issue would be dead in the Senate.
Graham answered, “I think there’d be a danger to the presidency in the future for us to legitimize what’s going on in the House. There’s no civil proceeding in America, no criminal proceeding in America that denies a person to tell their side of the story by calling witnesses except in the House. And every American deserves the right to confront their accuser. That’s not being done in this case. So I don’t want to legitimize this because it’s a threat to the presidency.”
He continued, “Then there’s the allegation. The allegation is that Donald J. Trump withheld aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian government investigated Joe Biden and Hunter Biden for corruption. The problem with the allegation is that it’s not true. The aid was delivered to the Ukrainian government and there was no investigation of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.”
Graham snapped, “How long does it take to dispose of that?”
After Hannity noted that Graham had been a part of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, Graham quipped, “I’ve done this before.”
Hannity added, “Every consideration that was given Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton’s lawyers, the minority party, are all denied here because at the end of the paragraph it all says the same thing, it goes, “Yeah, at the discretion of the chairman.” He said he wanted a whistleblower; Republicans gave a list. They said no to every Republican witness and now they’re cherry-picking the two witnesses that they think will be the most favorable to them and ignoring all the ones that destroyed their narrative. Who in the Senate, what committee in the Senate could call witnesses and investigate Hunter and Joe because I identify the laws I believe Joe Biden broke?”
Graham replied, “Well, the allegation against Hunter Biden is that he had a conflict of interest serving on the board and that Joe Biden weighed in to have the prosecutor fired because he’s getting close to his son, Their State Department activity talking about the conflict of interest, and there is a reasonable investigation to be done here. The Foreign Relations committee has jurisdiction over the State Department, but let me get back to the point you just made: What’s happening the the House is basically un-American. No American, including Donald Trump, should be accused of misdeeds without confronting their accuser, which is the whistleblower, and no American should be denied the capacity to tell their side of the story by calling witnesses to explain their defense.”
Graham threw down the gauntlet: “That’s being denied the president of the United States. To every American who’s going to watch tomorrow: this could not happen in your case. This couldn’t happen in a parking ticket case. This couldn’t happen in any civil matter in America because due process requires the ability of every American to call witnesses on their behalf — except for President Trump.”
He concluded, “So why am I not going to watch this hearing tomorrow? Because I think it’s a threat to the presidency; I don’t want to legitimize it; it’s un-American; it denies the basics of due process.”
Video below:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3TeonPkGy4s" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Sen. Lindsey Graham Introduces Senate Resolution Condemning Impeachment Inquiry

WATCH: Graham: I’m Not Watching Impeachment Hearings. ‘This Couldn’t Happen In A Parking Ticket Case.’

Lindsey Graham

In an interview on the eve of the first day of the official impeachment inquiry, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff — the California congressman who is heading up the Democrats&#8217; impeachment effort — shifted the focus of the discussion to what he suggested are potentially several more impeachable offenses by President Trump. During the interview, Schiff notably largely avoided using the term &#8220;quid pro quo,&#8221; which Republicans say the evidence undermines.
Schiff told NPR&#8217;s &#8220;Morning Edition&#8221; Tuesday that he believes the Democrats will be able to make the case that Trump committed several impeachable crimes, particularly &#8220;bribery&#8221; and &#8220;high crimes and misdemeanors,&#8221; which <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/12/778380499/rep-adam-schiff-trumps-potentially-impeachable-offenses-include-bribery">NPR</a> notes are &#8220;both explicitly outlined in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.&#8221;
In making the case for alleged &#8220;bribery&#8221; by Trump, Schiff first argued for the Constitution&#8217;s &#8220;broader&#8221; definition of the term.
&#8220;Bribery, first of all, as the founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader,&#8221; he said, as reported by NPR. &#8220;It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you&#8217;re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation&#8217;s interest.&#8221;
All the Democrats need to do to make the case for bribery, Schiff claimed, is to show that Trump was &#8220;soliciting something of value,&#8221; a broad definition indeed. Multiple witnesses who have spoken with the committee behind closed doors, Schiff told NPR&#8217;s Steve Inskeep, have presented evidence that Trump was trying to &#8220;solicit something of value.&#8221;
That Trump failed to do so, Schiff maintained, is beside the point. Trump&#8217;s request for Ukraine to &#8220;look into&#8221; the corruption allegations agains the Bidens, the subsequent actions of officials working on Trump&#8217;s behalf to try to make sure the investigation was conducted, and the temporary withholding of $391 in U.S. military aide is enough to impeach the president, he suggested.
That the military aide was given to Ukraine without the country ever conducting an investigation into the Bidens is neither here nor there, Schiff argued.
&#8220;I mean, when you consider the serious terms of whether the president has committed an impeachable offense, the fact that the scheme was discovered, the fact that the scheme was unsuccessful, doesn&#8217;t make it any less odious or any less impeachable,&#8221; said the Democratic congressman. &#8220;If the president solicited for help in the U.S. election, if the president conditioned official acts on the performance of these political favors, whether Ukraine ever had to go through with it really doesn&#8217;t matter. What matters is: Did the president attempt to commit acts that ought to result in his removal from office?&#8221;
While Schiff acknowledged that it was unlikely that the Senate would impeach Trump, as it requires a two-thirds majority vote, he defended the House Democrats&#8217; resolve to see the process through. Impeachment, he argued, is &#8220;the most powerful sanction the House has,&#8221; and if it &#8220;deters further presidential misconduct, then it may provide some remedy even in the absence of a conviction in the Senate.&#8221;
Schiff&#8217;s role in what prompted the impeachment inquiry has come under increased scrutiny. After maintaining that he had no contact with the whistleblower who filed the complaint about Trump&#8217;s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/us/politics/adam-schiff-whistleblower.html">The New York Times</a> revealed in an Oct. 2 report that the whistleblower consulted with Schiff&#8217;s office prior to filing the complaint, sparking allegations of a Democratic setup by Republicans.
“The Democratic head of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, learned about the outlines of a C.I.A. officer’s concerns that President Trump had abused his power days before the officer filed a whistle-blower complaint, according to a spokesman and current and former American officials,” the Times reported on Oct. 2, exposing Schiff’s misleading past statements about his contact with the whistleblower.
“The C.I.A. officer approached a House Intelligence Committee aide with his concerns about Mr. Trump only after he had had a colleague first convey them to the C.I.A.’s top lawyer,” the report continued. “Concerned about how that initial avenue for airing his allegations through the C.I.A. was unfolding, the officer then approached the House aide. In both cases, the original accusation was vague. The House staff member, following the committee’s procedures, suggested the officer find a lawyer to advise him and meet with an inspector general, with whom he could file a whistle-blower complaint.”
The Times made clear that Schiff himself was made aware of the complaint. “The aide shared some of what the officer conveyed to Mr. Schiff,” the Times reported, adding that the aide “did not share the whistle-blower’s identity with Mr. Schiff,” according to one official.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-another-whistleblower-comes-forward-files-complaint-against-ukraine-whistleblower-for-soliciting-illicit-donations-report-suggests">Another Whistleblower Comes Forward, Files Complaint Against Ukraine Whistleblower For Soliciting Illicit Donations, Report Suggests</a>

Bribery

Democrats Shift Trump Impeachment Focus To New Potential Offenses

Here is everything you need to know, to-date.
<ul>
<li>April 2014: Hunter Biden <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/timeline-trump-giuliani-bidens-and-ukrainegate/">joined</a> Ukrainian energy company Burisma.</li>
<li>August 2014: Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarema <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/timeline-trump-giuliani-bidens-and-ukrainegate/">opened</a> a corruption investigation about Burisma.</li>
<li>Fall 2015/Winter 2015–2016: Then-Vice President Joe Biden first <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/timeline-trump-giuliani-bidens-and-ukrainegate/">made a public issue</a> out of alleged prosecutor-related corruption in Ukraine.</li>
<li>February 2016: Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which had Hunter Biden as a board member at the time, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-hammer-on-tipping-point-with-liz-wheeler-the-hunter-biden-foia-bombshell">sought to utilize</a> Biden&#8217;s stature as a means to secure a U.S. State Department meeting.</li>
<li>March 2016: Then-Vice President Joe Biden <a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/hunter-bidens-ukraine-gas-firm-lobbied-state-department-to-end-corruption-allegations-emails-show_3137480.html">pressured Ukraine</a> to fire the prosecutor involved with investigating Burisma.</li>
<li>June 2017: Rudy Giuliani <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair/">visited Ukraine</a> and met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.</li>
<li>January 2018: Joe Biden was <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/09/27/flashback_2018_joe_biden_brags_at_cfr_meeting_about_withholding_aid_to_ukraine_to_force_firing_of_prosecutor.html">filmed bragging about</a> how he forced the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor he did not like by threatening to withhold foreign aid to Ukraine.</li>
<li>August 2018: Giuliani was <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair/">hired</a> by a company run by Ukrainian business tycoon Lev Parnas.</li>
<li>Later 2018: Giuliani pressured Lutsenko to open corruption-related investigations about the Bidens and Burisma.</li>
<li>January 2019: Giuliani met multiple times with Lutsenko and, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html?module=inline">The New York Times</a>, allegedly pushed Lutsenko on the Bidens, Burisma, and then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.</li>
<li>March 2019: Lutsenko <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair/">opened two investigations</a> — one on the Bidens and one on Burisma. The Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html?module=inline">alleged</a> that Lutsenko also accused Yovanovitch of corruption.</li>
<li>April 2019: Trump <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair/">reportedly told</a> Fox News host Sean Hannity that Attorney General William Barr might investigate allegations about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election.</li>
<li>May 2019: Yovanovitch resigned as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.</li>
<li>May 2019: The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/politics/giuliani-ukraine-trump.html">reported</a> on an upcoming Rudy Giuliani trip to Ukraine.</li>
<li>May 2019: Giuliani <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair/">expressed</a> his belief in the theory that Ukraine actively assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election.</li>
<li>June 2019: Giuliani <a href="https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1142085975230898176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed&amp;ref_url=safari-reader%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2F2019%2F10%2Fthe-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair%2F">tweeted</a> that Ukraine was &#8220;abused by Hillary and Obama people.&#8221;</li>
<li>July 25, 2019: Now-infamous <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Unclassified09.2019.pdf">phone call</a> took place between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.</li>
<li>September 24, 2019: <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Unclassified09.2019.pdf">Transcript</a> of phone call released between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.</li>
<li>September 24, 2019: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/democrats-impeachment-trump.html">announced</a> that House Democrats would seek to open an impeachment inquiry against President Trump.</li>
<li>September 26, 2019: Whistleblower complaint about the Trump-Zelensky phone call <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/26/us/politics/whistle-blower-complaint.html">revealed</a>.</li>
<li>October 2, 2019: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/us/politics/adam-schiff-whistleblower.html">Revelation</a> that Rep. Adam Schiff&#8217;s (D-CA) office had been in contact with the whistleblower.</li>
<li>October 17, 2019: <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/10/17/770714277/read-gordon-sondlands-opening-statement-to-congress">Written testimony</a> of U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland includes: &#8220;President Trump was skeptical that Ukraine was serious about reforms and anti-corruption, and he directed those of us present at the meeting to talk to Mr. Giuliani, his personal attorney, about his concerns. It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the President’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani.&#8221;</li>
<li>October 22, 2019: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/22/us/politics/william-taylor-ukraine-testimony.html">Written testimony</a> of top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine Bill Taylor notes: By mid-July, it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelenskyy wanted was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. It was also clear that this condition was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by Mr. Giuliani.&#8221;</li>
<li>October 29, 2019: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who serves on the U.S. National Security Council, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/08/777514772/read-testimony-of-alexander-vindman-the-white-houses-ukraine-specialist">testified</a> that the White House&#8217;s released transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call had <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/politics/alexander-vindman-testimony-white-house-transcript/index.html">crucial omissions</a> with respect to the Bidens.</li>
<li>October 31, 2019: House <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/31/us/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry-house-vote.html">voted</a> to establish the procedural rules governing the impeachment of President Trump.</li>
</ul>

Map of Ukraine

The Complete Timeline Of The Trump-Ukraine Story

Hunter Biden

Joe Biden

Rudy Giuliani

Volodymyr Zelensky

Overall, last week was a quieter week in the unfolding impeachment saga.
Earlier last week, Trump administration officials continued the ongoing habit of defying House Democrats’ impeachment-related subpoenas. As Fox News <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W66Yc9M66hdk3W3XxYpT2NH8vQ0/5/f18dQhb0SfHn9c-h9gW80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5Vj1Qt2G2VLDpF18CSvhfW8CZrMG8m7vgGW8B-9dc8yVPQ_N3HtdkMVbDp_W3Htl0P3N0TRKW67jVlh5wL6c-VTH5T364Qd0yW8zvHql5_Vt-mF8m81QV25l2W55fLnq8WmgDpW5n6V1k8VCv8JW2MznrN5nbq6BVGXpVf3ZQWFgW5nyN8z2z95WfW2yscgj7nlhG4W5ZpycS57-ZBTW83C5JP6rY-3sW2KQ2YY1Gk5dXN2Hj7tS8JHM_W8c3wwh3X0g0yN6bp1cMbq5fxW4TKc2l5vJbBHN7fdQ4vP_8XWW5kNW6S8LkXJBW9jJxZh8d9s4gW50XBc38Sh4LLW4F2q0N7lCx_cW1pgv5Z8L1RcHW7YGRT28rg-P2W51m0wR3ghHDsW4Vyr8l8qCrzkW9jBRnz3zJsY2W7d0nLw5bW-L4W1bBvW33_5XgcW6hz0s82bzNQYW5ZS0xn6yzFt5W4cyCw230Pjz7W1CV8c97G7bpYN4QDgwJWW9M5W5RRkPs6zX_YLW5_5dnz7SJ7wCW4zBVJp2-BmhdVTr0CC1yf53YvVL6QTbLkf68sTPS02" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W66Yc9M66hdk3W3XxYpT2NH8vQ0/5/f18dQhb0SfHn9c-h9gW80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5Vj1Qt2G2VLDpF18CSvhfW8CZrMG8m7vgGW8B-9dc8yVPQ_N3HtdkMVbDp_W3Htl0P3N0TRKW67jVlh5wL6c-VTH5T364Qd0yW8zvHql5_Vt-mF8m81QV25l2W55fLnq8WmgDpW5n6V1k8VCv8JW2MznrN5nbq6BVGXpVf3ZQWFgW5nyN8z2z95WfW2yscgj7nlhG4W5ZpycS57-ZBTW83C5JP6rY-3sW2KQ2YY1Gk5dXN2Hj7tS8JHM_W8c3wwh3X0g0yN6bp1cMbq5fxW4TKc2l5vJbBHN7fdQ4vP_8XWW5kNW6S8LkXJBW9jJxZh8d9s4gW50XBc38Sh4LLW4F2q0N7lCx_cW1pgv5Z8L1RcHW7YGRT28rg-P2W51m0wR3ghHDsW4Vyr8l8qCrzkW9jBRnz3zJsY2W7d0nLw5bW-L4W1bBvW33_5XgcW6hz0s82bzNQYW5ZS0xn6yzFt5W4cyCw230Pjz7W1CV8c97G7bpYN4QDgwJWW9M5W5RRkPs6zX_YLW5_5dnz7SJ7wCW4zBVJp2-BmhdVTr0CC1yf53YvVL6QTbLkf68sTPS02&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322538000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHfzSxml8H1uB5yNuwuigeuqaTJEQ">reported</a>, a lead National Security Council attorney, a top aide to Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and an additional Office of Management and Budget aide all failed to show up for their scheduled depositions on Capitol Hill. Otherwise, U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W4tGyMg8VHFFjW65NlCc5Kwsbs0/5/f18dQhb0Sq5G8Y9-RWW80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5Tq1Vq7GqVLDpF18CSvhfW8DrSws3J4F4KW8B-9dc8yX6RjW3knCMv8yXl2gW5x625k8mFVfxW3GCvtS3Q020dW1pgMhv65jGWdN5v6x90SbM5KW8mFFZS5wL96LW1sL3M03MybvyW6RNDcs5xKvMBW69GbGF3NpJSjW4KQJk12N33B5W3_t0gL32Gf2QW4dnWJc69NG1wW6PqSg98mQMWvW5Vb2cd5w8WykMMNBCZMMQxXW80gSRf97rB1bW8xqZLV24H1v5W2756LD93S-6cW8tdfY73N8_sZW3PgfgR4p3W3cW653Nh163tMgzW2xrxt664Ls7qW66YDzg6SLQd9W6Rbygg6QhWvKN3lll5mVxnMPN5J1scwhMG-KW23y2NH5C2CLWVSRWT_27s9J8W7wV0lj1xfQR4W3ygvH88c3fNTVJ5v6n7v4WNLW49vfHg6sFhDKMN-wDG42c_8W3nh5k98qNPfnW3FXFhk4BKzChW6QJtpH81-l8QW11PGlS1BzGN8W5YZ_DT73yKD2W70RWLy5bkc53111" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W4tGyMg8VHFFjW65NlCc5Kwsbs0/5/f18dQhb0Sq5G8Y9-RWW80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5Tq1Vq7GqVLDpF18CSvhfW8DrSws3J4F4KW8B-9dc8yX6RjW3knCMv8yXl2gW5x625k8mFVfxW3GCvtS3Q020dW1pgMhv65jGWdN5v6x90SbM5KW8mFFZS5wL96LW1sL3M03MybvyW6RNDcs5xKvMBW69GbGF3NpJSjW4KQJk12N33B5W3_t0gL32Gf2QW4dnWJc69NG1wW6PqSg98mQMWvW5Vb2cd5w8WykMMNBCZMMQxXW80gSRf97rB1bW8xqZLV24H1v5W2756LD93S-6cW8tdfY73N8_sZW3PgfgR4p3W3cW653Nh163tMgzW2xrxt664Ls7qW66YDzg6SLQd9W6Rbygg6QhWvKN3lll5mVxnMPN5J1scwhMG-KW23y2NH5C2CLWVSRWT_27s9J8W7wV0lj1xfQR4W3ygvH88c3fNTVJ5v6n7v4WNLW49vfHg6sFhDKMN-wDG42c_8W3nh5k98qNPfnW3FXFhk4BKzChW6QJtpH81-l8QW11PGlS1BzGN8W5YZ_DT73yKD2W70RWLy5bkc53111&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322538000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG2N_u7lof0SETcF-Mvxtr0JqxbtQ">updated</a> his recent testimony in a way that could further hurt the Trump team’s efforts to rebut Democrats’ charge that Trump engaged in a nefarious “quid pro quo” in last summer’s now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump has been <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W3qSM5D31MlCFW4FjM1117Mbmx0/5/f18dQhb0Sq5z8Y9YsWW80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5R21Nvw7TVLDpF18CSv07W5w5R8T8x14cSW8yVJcM8rdDcDN1nPcdCMDj_jW8tYz--5w5BNDV_tKSx5C3LsHN5F294hXy7VSVY0M9Y5y5jh-W1rfXlz1kRpb7W7ZClNK1q7NGsW8t4BPX4Sf1kGW6dqF0Z8W2c9WW32CQ2l8jxMNSW1Vx27W6Pkt_VN62_rT82FpQ3W9dH8_66V4mcJW86KnNH7P1-wWN33FK-yqPkxDVnjZC81Hfvb0W59lgPN1y_PrlW1gtmV585y-CwW9djGw_77c_9bVKJRZ98ksL8qW9d6gxl5n3MwtW2Rw5ft82_d7wW6xcPLZ7ws4HJVJC88f6zyWGlVp-_rh7x3yGJW9g4bml77nXYRW52Ym4r14HD_cW2p8_TT7-cq2QW3d0zvx4p7yDTW2zz89m3M1RxqW8r4Pxt5_BMMVW3fKSXy5Zl4SZVd8y6q1QNZ5kW2gzfh33MP03dW2B62ny6lgqdyW95ccVC5_6SwhW1KSCLB36sLG2w1NsfDKpw5f2Hnn1w02" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W3qSM5D31MlCFW4FjM1117Mbmx0/5/f18dQhb0Sq5z8Y9YsWW80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5R21Nvw7TVLDpF18CSv07W5w5R8T8x14cSW8yVJcM8rdDcDN1nPcdCMDj_jW8tYz--5w5BNDV_tKSx5C3LsHN5F294hXy7VSVY0M9Y5y5jh-W1rfXlz1kRpb7W7ZClNK1q7NGsW8t4BPX4Sf1kGW6dqF0Z8W2c9WW32CQ2l8jxMNSW1Vx27W6Pkt_VN62_rT82FpQ3W9dH8_66V4mcJW86KnNH7P1-wWN33FK-yqPkxDVnjZC81Hfvb0W59lgPN1y_PrlW1gtmV585y-CwW9djGw_77c_9bVKJRZ98ksL8qW9d6gxl5n3MwtW2Rw5ft82_d7wW6xcPLZ7ws4HJVJC88f6zyWGlVp-_rh7x3yGJW9g4bml77nXYRW52Ym4r14HD_cW2p8_TT7-cq2QW3d0zvx4p7yDTW2zz89m3M1RxqW8r4Pxt5_BMMVW3fKSXy5Zl4SZVd8y6q1QNZ5kW2gzfh33MP03dW2B62ny6lgqdyW95ccVC5_6SwhW1KSCLB36sLG2w1NsfDKpw5f2Hnn1w02&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322538000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFOMhLg0w9RtoEqGXB9qMbywrUpsQ">tweeting</a> a lot recently to encourage Americans to actually read the underlying transcript of the Zelensky phone call, which potentially bodes well in terms of the Trump team realizing that it needs to advance a substantive — instead of merely a procedural — argument that expressly argues that the totality of what substantively transpired between Trump and Zelensky does not even come close to meeting the “high crimes and misdemeanors” criterion that the Constitution prescribes as its impeachment standard. As I have explained in previous Election Wires, Alexander Hamilton <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W6jrZP49glTwtVQXTVh83DLRD0/5/f18dQhb0SbTP8YHrXgN8HWm5lHyjJqW8q-jQ-4XyTvPW3hHh8X2P7_nXVcnTGj98kNPXW26n-yd25xxTKW5t2x5c4v13hrN98jppGZbhHpW4r1N_c5tXDYXW1wJ6H251RS_HW61SSZm7mG7sDW51vX4y6HrZgDW7lVtgt4s2-MqW8f6L0f3VpzgTW9dSlS635rgClW94-4T07sLptqW41TlcR3TwTqCW4KbJZx2kGg8MW6sCkcN4YFc44W57-WqM3H_PtyW2DzCtR1yBNY7W1kBBQz2Gm3GzVqYwFH8FCZrbW7nGzDf8Gd1wNVkDZvr7FhCnlW5SSSCD6qSd4CW82-KL08jhTv1W4b5wR-2r7NVtW2G-ftt4nmPn4V7r66n4GtrHrN8gGSMWBnDH8W1sl9sW9kFWZfW32k78t6Pc2NRN7PwBwrVzQv-VVn7DD12G_sLW1RP_SX32Sff8N4JWF2MhL_4cW24Zwh22nRzM3W5701m62WqWb0W3gtYvZ2_yD7XW8DnzGX2hj86VW1vhHFD54NZMCMNDyx-rTzpYV10v2z2KMnWW103" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W6jrZP49glTwtVQXTVh83DLRD0/5/f18dQhb0SbTP8YHrXgN8HWm5lHyjJqW8q-jQ-4XyTvPW3hHh8X2P7_nXVcnTGj98kNPXW26n-yd25xxTKW5t2x5c4v13hrN98jppGZbhHpW4r1N_c5tXDYXW1wJ6H251RS_HW61SSZm7mG7sDW51vX4y6HrZgDW7lVtgt4s2-MqW8f6L0f3VpzgTW9dSlS635rgClW94-4T07sLptqW41TlcR3TwTqCW4KbJZx2kGg8MW6sCkcN4YFc44W57-WqM3H_PtyW2DzCtR1yBNY7W1kBBQz2Gm3GzVqYwFH8FCZrbW7nGzDf8Gd1wNVkDZvr7FhCnlW5SSSCD6qSd4CW82-KL08jhTv1W4b5wR-2r7NVtW2G-ftt4nmPn4V7r66n4GtrHrN8gGSMWBnDH8W1sl9sW9kFWZfW32k78t6Pc2NRN7PwBwrVzQv-VVn7DD12G_sLW1RP_SX32Sff8N4JWF2MhL_4cW24Zwh22nRzM3W5701m62WqWb0W3gtYvZ2_yD7XW8DnzGX2hj86VW1vhHFD54NZMCMNDyx-rTzpYV10v2z2KMnWW103&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322538000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE1AffeFK5cSCOpT2MgXlzcjpLYCw">explained</a> in The Federalist No. 65 that the impeachment of a president may be properly considered for all “offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
Accordingly, Trump’s impeachment defense must be centered around substantively arguing that the Zelensky phone call did not “abuse or violat[e] … some public trust.” This should not be particularly difficult, and the White House should consider hiring a <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W4Fc5RG6l41mxW3_0SfX5CPqKQ0/5/f18dQhb0S2C728_sBBVMvn3M1b7DcSN2xHp4pDHJ4kW1q92vL54Rt0YW2wjy_W47QqJ6W4lbFp33MvbCdW2CYkfh1KTHDsW4VJy_Z19zfMlW1gMDxd1v2NSTW1qM8X183Y1KQW22rH4F9g6_SwW5zQJWQ3JR16lW52zsJc51CmnTW6PNRz95jffL2W6gP_kl1p6wj_Mr6nn9-nDwzW8s13Dv6HDfN2W2KFwBv4vJQwPW8c8qlR826XdzVVCy5B155FnWVs5ySm8_nzKFW4Xs1Gv2YvvGqW8-pqRl4P47H0W6CPTrn2zBQTHVFWlfK4W7pFVV622bD93_c68N40ZDz6tT08JW435ZY65jY-YHW68BbGd4qRRHvW3DqYXW1fPFpGVXY-vN3-tmwkW2Vwy9x86TCbgW8n-ZzZ2RDT7pW40B3Pk3gsnxDW1mDSY91J8w2jW6xyVCF3M7Y9BW8m6g-k2HHttGW6MQQqS3gcvNJW3Kr-Fn7b8kx3W7rn_rY5GJ7sgW33-3gL7HTkg0Vr85Hc5D0l0gW4LCWXN3FmmKJW6HCFvV7cjdDFW5F2PS24F1QhjW6WGKZx6mBz8LW7rD5qB7hvX58W1SC1Xh4Fzzd3W761s0r23_rQTf5N2-BB11" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W4Fc5RG6l41mxW3_0SfX5CPqKQ0/5/f18dQhb0S2C728_sBBVMvn3M1b7DcSN2xHp4pDHJ4kW1q92vL54Rt0YW2wjy_W47QqJ6W4lbFp33MvbCdW2CYkfh1KTHDsW4VJy_Z19zfMlW1gMDxd1v2NSTW1qM8X183Y1KQW22rH4F9g6_SwW5zQJWQ3JR16lW52zsJc51CmnTW6PNRz95jffL2W6gP_kl1p6wj_Mr6nn9-nDwzW8s13Dv6HDfN2W2KFwBv4vJQwPW8c8qlR826XdzVVCy5B155FnWVs5ySm8_nzKFW4Xs1Gv2YvvGqW8-pqRl4P47H0W6CPTrn2zBQTHVFWlfK4W7pFVV622bD93_c68N40ZDz6tT08JW435ZY65jY-YHW68BbGd4qRRHvW3DqYXW1fPFpGVXY-vN3-tmwkW2Vwy9x86TCbgW8n-ZzZ2RDT7pW40B3Pk3gsnxDW1mDSY91J8w2jW6xyVCF3M7Y9BW8m6g-k2HHttGW6MQQqS3gcvNJW3Kr-Fn7b8kx3W7rn_rY5GJ7sgW33-3gL7HTkg0Vr85Hc5D0l0gW4LCWXN3FmmKJW6HCFvV7cjdDFW5F2PS24F1QhjW6WGKZx6mBz8LW7rD5qB7hvX58W1SC1Xh4Fzzd3W761s0r23_rQTf5N2-BB11&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322539000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFaoX3W5izx0HAP-yge7DG7VQV-sA">chief strategist</a> to lead the effort — one possible name that comes to mind is <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W25ysKm8yt6j7N2N7qC0QXDx30/5/f18dQhb0Sjvm6BHC8SW62tQd64T_wDdW5w02yj5w05lbVscWqS1VbPj2W53DQ4N33FVCTW1W0s6730rr3SW8_gQtC8ZCH4KN7X_pnlRbnvcW1lQNDF5w5C_HW5y5jh-1rfXlzW1kRpb77ZClNKW1q7NGs8t4BPXW4Sf1kG6dqF0ZW8W2c9W32CQ2lW8jxMNS1VwV0kW3HbhT65tNvm-W52mV-88tzC3FW8q-1tC6H4mrRW55T8N87w3wPSW1NC3Kc1F6KTtW8Y0h_b2T-f0qW2GttMf7v5xChVzZmCx2266yKW92pY_C4dZGZtW1KT2mr7MctF-Vy90MB1wgXPmN7Tzp61wZk9_W92rRtX1Xv_n0W7nZfGg58677kW20S-qb7CkfkRW2MVMJp2VPGKHW8XRjSq7ZjRCNW1BxxJm819pLQW73R1h2224kXkW1WYmHy20ZdMCW1c8vq-7ps3S_N8Yztwfb2_nMW6PxM7x7vs64-W7fTjHB97sBJnW4jfDlp6KRQscW25yrLf397kxjW2vSzV74Q-5SVW4HzlZ64mb2rj111" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*W25ysKm8yt6j7N2N7qC0QXDx30/5/f18dQhb0Sjvm6BHC8SW62tQd64T_wDdW5w02yj5w05lbVscWqS1VbPj2W53DQ4N33FVCTW1W0s6730rr3SW8_gQtC8ZCH4KN7X_pnlRbnvcW1lQNDF5w5C_HW5y5jh-1rfXlzW1kRpb77ZClNKW1q7NGs8t4BPXW4Sf1kG6dqF0ZW8W2c9W32CQ2lW8jxMNS1VwV0kW3HbhT65tNvm-W52mV-88tzC3FW8q-1tC6H4mrRW55T8N87w3wPSW1NC3Kc1F6KTtW8Y0h_b2T-f0qW2GttMf7v5xChVzZmCx2266yKW92pY_C4dZGZtW1KT2mr7MctF-Vy90MB1wgXPmN7Tzp61wZk9_W92rRtX1Xv_n0W7nZfGg58677kW20S-qb7CkfkRW2MVMJp2VPGKHW8XRjSq7ZjRCNW1BxxJm819pLQW73R1h2224kXkW1WYmHy20ZdMCW1c8vq-7ps3S_N8Yztwfb2_nMW6PxM7x7vs64-W7fTjHB97sBJnW4jfDlp6KRQscW25yrLf397kxjW2vSzV74Q-5SVW4HzlZ64mb2rj111&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322539000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEkHYtQGNJnUgVekOAXvHBD3KQ8eQ">Mark Paoletta</a>. The Trump team should stop focusing on loudly denying that a “quid pro quo” transpired and instead defend the notion that quid pro quos and the process of attaching strings to foreign aid recipients is <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*N3c1jhC4ZhWgN6rBZ-4YF-cd0/5/f18dQhb0S1Xm7w2QxfSmM12K3Q-HW68S6q64L28KfW3cdmVv2Jn1FXW18qSz31J8h02W8LnY5s7x1q7mW6STH7-1bp9m9W8wpfBS8XtdxFN8wq4xmF1bLxW9lTT6l9cDS-QW6pNSgD4mFYXjW2HSGbL7mGP1-W3zVgJT3yL6j-N8NwdnyHWJZyMB7fMXJGYFfN75Nwr-zsQ-BW7j1dg516K1vjW5gV2yf5gQxCcW1_hG_C5nXjzNTh4fP4zR4TSN7PJ6y79bxwLW77nMT856H4GwW95ZhXW17lqjXW1FbWlF75SM7MW5BQQDK3RcXGVW6CsNd55bs4Y6W7XYbBK8ynYp2VXqQhY47C4vDW5y8VSl6NMk7NW6FV12Y41T4sqW6l0q6b1nKfB7W7JZPgs15Cc9xN5Qcq2T-_c4XW1nd44N4M0l8FW4czpW7330DHvW5GrLjj3VjQcCW6tctB76kzZLxW4Y74pp1thsyMW1LjKTn4rGl2xVp_zGp8lhY4-W3Xkt3827BFppVYJm-q1qgt-rW77Tm9c5ym3_xW9bpbdl6-lsLTW4syWxg7bgtSJN8DC3d8j8RbyW27Yv1r2G8ZN-111" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*N3c1jhC4ZhWgN6rBZ-4YF-cd0/5/f18dQhb0S1Xm7w2QxfSmM12K3Q-HW68S6q64L28KfW3cdmVv2Jn1FXW18qSz31J8h02W8LnY5s7x1q7mW6STH7-1bp9m9W8wpfBS8XtdxFN8wq4xmF1bLxW9lTT6l9cDS-QW6pNSgD4mFYXjW2HSGbL7mGP1-W3zVgJT3yL6j-N8NwdnyHWJZyMB7fMXJGYFfN75Nwr-zsQ-BW7j1dg516K1vjW5gV2yf5gQxCcW1_hG_C5nXjzNTh4fP4zR4TSN7PJ6y79bxwLW77nMT856H4GwW95ZhXW17lqjXW1FbWlF75SM7MW5BQQDK3RcXGVW6CsNd55bs4Y6W7XYbBK8ynYp2VXqQhY47C4vDW5y8VSl6NMk7NW6FV12Y41T4sqW6l0q6b1nKfB7W7JZPgs15Cc9xN5Qcq2T-_c4XW1nd44N4M0l8FW4czpW7330DHvW5GrLjj3VjQcCW6tctB76kzZLxW4Y74pp1thsyMW1LjKTn4rGl2xVp_zGp8lhY4-W3Xkt3827BFppVYJm-q1qgt-rW77Tm9c5ym3_xW9bpbdl6-lsLTW4syWxg7bgtSJN8DC3d8j8RbyW27Yv1r2G8ZN-111&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322539000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHEw9E7rY4Yf2KZyP460NghspYTSg">inherent in the very foreign aid enterprise</a> itself. Think about it logically: Why shouldn’t Americans want more conditions imposed on foreign countries in order to receive the beneficence of our U.S. taxpayer dollars? There is ample room here for Trump to tap into widespread, populist-infused opposition to mass foreign aid itself.
National polling remains narrowly in favor of impeachment. As of November 7, 2019, <a href="https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*N9g4SqVFBFCcW95frjl3yBbvc0/5/f18dQhb0SbTX8Y9Wm6W80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5Rq5Cgxh0VnQ9Qq8ZvGN0W6yR8-3549KcjW7r98KK1SLhGnW328XxL2LWcZ_N4dPVJtql99tW1Vws8c2KWLmnW4cPwbS8HbRxPN8k1dMQpSBF3W8WhTQ14JftKGW8W5ZBz759s5xW7PNfvy96zRPSW6bT6L38RRjRDW5CktzD83KHrFN7J39rl1g4hYW4Dk-X22PGBDHW7lRZ4W8gjY6LW8WBKbV56sy_8W2NhXFJ6Y23ZhW5njKYK5lqJMTW6zzJtZ774x7FW59BDvc2dDPmkW5MhB-77ryzGvN4gl57p6Qr93W2L52jd4jqztHW4Pz5934zXcZfVwm8sc6wjgmDW1k0MNr7wyGhBW4cntCV310tMKW33KGSm6XvYPyN4lBZ6Fnpt4xW6GTq088Ph58-W594SN87x2btgW7w46LW2F435_W6wrhgQ5h-8njW61lQ4C23WHzLN4gFC2zPT2nMV9-MvN86_DdBN7LCVy2GCyWsW24nf__4L1MmrN4JXQH_1nvT7f5zJXvM03" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://email.dailywire.com/e2t/c/*W4n-ptk20ymJxW8JtsBr1WvdDc0/*N9g4SqVFBFCcW95frjl3yBbvc0/5/f18dQhb0SbTX8Y9Wm6W80JfVF1k63-nN7sTcfmt_T69W6Dk5Rq5Cgxh0VnQ9Qq8ZvGN0W6yR8-3549KcjW7r98KK1SLhGnW328XxL2LWcZ_N4dPVJtql99tW1Vws8c2KWLmnW4cPwbS8HbRxPN8k1dMQpSBF3W8WhTQ14JftKGW8W5ZBz759s5xW7PNfvy96zRPSW6bT6L38RRjRDW5CktzD83KHrFN7J39rl1g4hYW4Dk-X22PGBDHW7lRZ4W8gjY6LW8WBKbV56sy_8W2NhXFJ6Y23ZhW5njKYK5lqJMTW6zzJtZ774x7FW59BDvc2dDPmkW5MhB-77ryzGvN4gl57p6Qr93W2L52jd4jqztHW4Pz5934zXcZfVwm8sc6wjgmDW1k0MNr7wyGhBW4cntCV310tMKW33KGSm6XvYPyN4lBZ6Fnpt4xW6GTq088Ph58-W594SN87x2btgW7w46LW2F435_W6wrhgQ5h-8njW61lQ4C23WHzLN4gFC2zPT2nMV9-MvN86_DdBN7LCVy2GCyWsW24nf__4L1MmrN4JXQH_1nvT7f5zJXvM03&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1573279322539000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHjohA6iENayXNCIer4Ab-w5ydxzA">FiveThirtyEight</a> indicates that Americans now support impeachment by a 3.6% margin. This margin has been generally narrowing of late, however, which could indicate that congressional Democrats are over-playing their current hand.
Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) actually holds a formal House-wide vote to authorize the impeachment inquiry. As readers will recall from previous Impeachment Wire updates, the much-ballyhooed vote that Pelosi led two weeks ago seems to only lay out the procedural rules for impeachment — as opposed to authorizing impeachment itself. The big impeachment-related news this week will come on Wednesday, when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has stated he will finally open up the initial impeachment hearings to the public.
This piece will be frequently updated.

House Democrats Hold Meeting To Discuss Impeachment Inquiry

Impeachment Wire: The Latest On The Effort To Impeach President Trump

2020 Election

Democratic Party

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocaiso-Cortez (D-NY) claimed on Saturday that Republicans were making the Democrats&#8217; impeachment inquiry a &#8220;partisan issue&#8221; and that it was &#8220;inappropriate&#8221; to ask Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden&#8217;s son, Hunter Biden, to testify before Congress despite the fact that this entire ordeal surrounds a business deal in which he was allegedly involved.
Ocasio-Cortez made the remarks during an interview with ABC News that aired on Sunday while she was on the campaign trail with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
&#8220;Congresswoman, I do want to ask you, we had some news that broke earlier today. Your Republican colleagues announced that they intend to call on Hunter Biden as a witness in this impeachment probe. Is he an appropriate witness?&#8221; ABC News asked.
&#8220;No, I don&#8217;t think he&#8217;s an appropriate witness, and not only that, but I think that the reason they&#8217;re calling for these witnesses, these new witnesses, is because they want to make a spectacle and a circus out of this entire proceeding,&#8221; Ocasio-Cortez said.
&#8220;They want to distract the American people from the very words that Donald Trump uttered from his mouth in that call with Ukrainian officials trying to extort a foreign government into intervening into the United States elections,&#8221; Ocasio-Cortez continued, apparently ignoring the fact that President Donald Trump released the transcript of the call.
&#8220;And, in fact, these witnesses that they&#8217;re calling are politically motivated,&#8221; Ocasio-Cortez continued, again apparently unaware of the fact that impeachment is a political event.
&#8220;Republicans are turning this into a partisan issue,&#8221; Ocasio-Cortez claimed, ignoring the fact that it was House Democrats who launched the inquiry and not a single Republican voted in favor of it and two Democrats voted against it.
&#8220;We need to protect the rule of law in the United States of America, and they&#8217;re imperiling it by trying to turn this into a sideshow, and it&#8217;s undignified and it&#8217;s wrong,&#8221; Ocasio-Cortez continued. &#8220;And you know, that, on another level is profoundly dangerous, and this is endangering people that we rely on to call on when government goes awry.&#8221;
&#8220;We rely on whistleblowers to maintain the integrity of our government, they play an important role, and that is why we have whistleblower protection laws on the books in the United States,&#8221; Ocasio-Cortez continued, apparently unaware of the fact that it is not illegal for anyone to identify the whistleblower except for the inspector general, as <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hostin-attacks-trump-jr-with-false-claims-on-whistleblower-transcript-heres-the-truth">stated</a> by U.S. law.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AOC</a> says Republicans want to call Hunter Biden as a witness to turn impeachment into a &#8220;sideshow.&#8221;
FACT CHECK: By a 5-point margin, more voters would like Joe and Hunter Biden investigated than support holding hearings to consider impeachment of <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a>. <a href="https://t.co/ujljl6RrYb">pic.twitter.com/ujljl6RrYb</a>
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveGuest/status/1193710407397134336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
RNC internal polling <a href="https://www.gop.com/internal-rnc-polling-more-want-biden-investigated-than-trump/">found</a> that 5% more Americans want the Bidens investigated over their business dealings in Ukraine than support holding impeachment hearing on the president.
Ocasio-Cortez made the remarks while campaigning for Sanders over the weekend where she suggested that Trump was a virus or a disease that Americans needs to vaccinate themselves from.
“Trump is a symptom, he is a symptom of much deeper problems,” Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ocasio-cortez-politicians-letting-me-down-feels-like-i-never-want-to-love-again">said</a>.
“Here’s the thing, is that we can beat him, but we have to vaccinate ourselves against something like this ever happening again,” Ocasio-Cortez said in reference to Trump’s 2016 election victory, adding, “and the way we inoculate ourselves from late-stage hyper capitalistic concentration of wealth among the very, very few is with a labor movement.”
Later on, Ocasio-Cortez said that when politicians let her down, &#8220;it feels like I never want to love again.&#8221;
“And so, when you elect a politician, and then they let you down, it feels like rejection,” Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ocasio-cortez-politicians-letting-me-down-feels-like-i-never-want-to-love-again">said</a>. “It feels like heart break. It feels like betrayal. It feels like I never want to love again. That’s what that feels like.”

Ocasio-Cortez

Ocasio-Cortez: Republicans Making Impeachment ‘Partisan,’ Hunter Biden Not ‘Appropriate’ Witness Despite Being Genesis Of Entire Ukraine Ordeal

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Speaking on the John Catsimatidis radio show, famed attorney and liberal Democrat Alan Dershowitz blistered CNN for its coverage of the impeachment proceedings against President Trump, saying, “CNN has banned me from their airwaves. CNN will not allow me on their network because they don’t want a liberal Democrat to be telling their viewers the truth about the Constitution.” Dershowiz also ripped Democrats, comparing them to the Russian secret police under the murderous Russian dictator Josef Stalin, asserting, “The Democrats are now making up crimes.”
Catsimatidis prompted Dershowitz by asking, “Do the Democrats today think that the American public is so stupid on some of the things they’re doing?”
Dershowitz replied:
<blockquote>They’re very scary. They’re very frightening to any civil libertarian. Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican; whether you come from New York or the middle of the country, you should be frightened by efforts to try to create crimes out of nothing. The latest twist was people on television, particularly CNN and MSNBC, are saying that if the president or somebody else was to name the whistleblower in the Ukrainian situation, that person would be guilty of a crime. I said in the afternoon yesterday — searching the federal criminal statutes from beginning to end — I couldn’t find the crime. It reminds me of Lavrentiy Beria, head of the KGB, said to Stalin, he said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Which he really meant, I’ll make up the crime.</blockquote>
Beria was the chief of the murderous Soviet security and secret police organization NKVD, which was the predecessor to the KGB.
<blockquote>And so the Democrats are now making up crimes. First they made up collusion. “Ahh! Collusion. It’s a crime!” I searched the statute books. There’s no crime of collusion except when businessmen get together to collude against the anti-trust laws, but no crime of collusion with a foreign country.
Then after that, they said “obstruction of Congress.” No, no, no, no, no. Obstruction of justice is a crime; obstruction of Congress is part of our system of checks and balances. If you get a subpoena from Congress, and you’re the president or in the executive department, and you think you have an executive privilege, you have an obligation not to respond. That’s not “obstruction of Congress,” that’s checks and balances under our Constitution.
So what we’re seeing, in a desperate effort to try to find crimes against President Trump: they’re just making it up. And that means we are all in danger, because if we can make up a crime — Congressman Cohen of Tennessee said that me and others who appear on Fox essentially were co-conspirators; we’re in on it. He’s now threatening people who are commentators, a liberal Democrat like me, who’s a commentator, that we’re in on it, that we’re co-conspirators. It is such a dangerous development to civil liberties.
The ACLU should be up in arms, but they’re silent.</blockquote>
Catsimatidis commented, “The lawyer involved also was tweeting years ago or during 2017, 2018 on impeachment?”
Dershowitz replied, “Yeah, obviously this is weaponized. This is being used by people who want to weaponize it against a particular president.” He added that if the shoe were on the other foot, Democrats would be up in arms.
He continued, “CNN has banned me from their airwaves. CNN will not allow me on their network because they don’t want a liberal Democrat to be telling their viewers the truth about the Constitution. Instead, they have people out there who are just parroting the party line over and over and over again and misleading their viewers. They got virtually everything wrong on the Mueller report; they predicted everything wrong and their viewers suffer. And when their viewers are denied my voice and the voice of other people to present a somewhat different narrative, it’s just a terrible thing.”
Listen <a href="https://twitter.com/JCats2013/status/1193552789038911494">here</a>.

Hulu Presents &#8220;Triumph&#8217;s Election Special&#8221; Produced By Funny Or Die

LISTEN: Liberal Democrat Dershowitz Compares Democrats To Russian Secret Police Under Stalin, Blisters CNN

Alan Dershowitz

Democrats

Josef Stalin

On Sunday, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” and was asked about the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
After playing clips of multiple Republican lawmakers defending the president in various ways, and following a verbal skirmish over process concerns, host Martha Raddatz asked: “How do you defend against the substance?”
Thornberry replied:
<blockquote>I believe that it is inappropriate for a president to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political rival. Now that leads to a question, if there&#8217;s a political rival with a family member who’s involved in questionable activity, what do you do? Just let them alone. But set that aside. I believe it was inappropriate. I do not believe it was impeachable. And process – you know, you all always want to say substance, not process. There&#8217;s a reason we let murderers and robbers and rapists go free when their due process rights have been violated. We believe the integrity of the system, the integrity of the constitution, the integrity of the processes under our legal system, is more important than the outcome of one particular case. So, I don&#8217;t think you can sweep process under the rug, because it is part of an impeachment decision, which has a constitutional requirement: bribery, treason, high crimes and misdemeanors, but also a political element about whether it&#8217;s good for the country to pursue it under these circumstances&#8230;</blockquote>
Thornberry later added that “the constitution is very specific – bribery, treason, high crimes and misdemeanors, which basically means felonies. So, that&#8217;s what you have to prove as a threshold question. The second question is, under the circumstances, do you believe that it&#8217;s good for the country to proceed with impeachment. I would suggest a couple of circumstances are relevant here, number one, there&#8217;s not anything that the president said in that phone call that&#8217;s different than he says in public all the time. So, is there some sort of abuse of power that rises to that threshold that is different than the American people have been hearing for three years? I don&#8217;t hear that.”
Thornberry also suggested that because we’re so close to an election year, the American people should be the ones to decide if Trump is removed from office via the ballot box.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/MarthaRaddatz?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@martharaddatz</a> presses Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Mac Thornberry on the Republican strategy to manage the substance of allegations in the impeachment inquiry: &#8220;I believe it was inappropriate, I do not believe it was impeachable.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/kLSp2fgDiG">https://t.co/kLSp2fgDiG</a> <a href="https://t.co/iA9seNehYW">pic.twitter.com/iA9seNehYW</a>
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) <a href="https://twitter.com/ThisWeekABC/status/1193535609299558402?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
Appearing Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) went with a slightly different defense tactic, first saying that the “quid pro quo &#8230; is a red herring.”
He continued:
<blockquote>Here are the two possible scenarios. Number one, the president asked for an investigation of a political rival. Number two, the president asked for an investigation of possible corruption by someone who happens to be a political rival. The latter would be in the national interest. The former would be in the president&#8217;s parochial interests and would be over the line. I think this case is going to come down to the president&#8217;s intent, his motive. Did he have a culpable state of mind? For me, Margaret, there are only two relevant questions that need to be answered. Why did the president ask for an investigation? And number two, and this is inextricably linked to the first question, what did Mr. Hunter Biden do for the money?</blockquote>
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PJQc02RFg74?start=40" width="720" height="385" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
As the impeachment inquiry against the president moves forward at breakneck speed, some have accused Republicans of shifting the goalposts in their defense of Trump.
For his part, President Trump doesn’t seem at all pleased with the “not great, but not impeachable” argument, or the argument that his motive must be sought out before rendering a judgment.
On Sunday, following both Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Thornberry’s appearances on the morning shows, the president Tweeted:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The call to the Ukrainian President was PERFECT. Read the Transcript! There was NOTHING said that was in any way wrong. Republicans, don’t be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1193615188311912449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
<blockquote>The call to the Ukrainian President was PERFECT. Read the Transcript! There was NOTHING said that was in any way wrong. Republicans, don’t be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!</blockquote>
President Trump hasn’t made any follow-up remarks as of publication.

Trump.

Trump Tweets ‘NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG’ After Republicans Offer Mixed Defenses Of Him On Morning Shows

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley appeared in a Sunday-aired interview on CBS to promote her upcoming memoir, “With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace.”
During the interview, which touched on numerous topics, Haley defended President Trump against impeachment, and said she understood his controversial remarks to “the Squad,” despite finding the remarks themselves “ not appropriate.”
Host Norah O&#8217;Donnell first mentioned impeachment, asking: “Do you think ultimately the president will be impeached and removed from office?”
Haley replied, wondering on what grounds President Trump could be impeached:
<blockquote>No. On what? You’re going to impeach a president for asking for a favor that didn&#8217;t happen and giving money – and it wasn&#8217;t withheld? I don&#8217;t know what you would impeach him on. I mean, look, Nora, impeachment is like the death penalty for a public official. When you look at the transcript, there&#8217;s nothing in that transcript that warrants the death penalty for the president, and I think that –</blockquote>
O’Donnell interjected, noting that “it was not a complete transcript,” and that “there are still things that are missing from it,” adding that in the trabscript, Trump says “I would like you to do us a favor though.”
Haley continued:
<blockquote>The Ukrainians never did the investigation, and the president released the funds. I mean, when you look at those, there&#8217;s just nothing impeachable there, and more than that, I think the biggest thing that bothers me is the American people should decide this. Why do we have a bunch of people in Congress making this decision?</blockquote>
Haley isn’t alone in her thinking. Some commentators, such as Erick Erickson, have suggested that this matter should be left to the American people.
In one of his most recent columns, Erickson <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/erickson-use-the-other-political-process">wrote</a>: “Given the political nature of impeachment, I find it quite reasonable that something could be impeachable in 2018 or 2019 but not impeachable less than 365 days from the general election. In politics and political processes, timing matters. Let the voters decide. Impeachment seems foolhardy and will become a more divisive issue in an already bitterly divided nation.”
Guy Benson, the political editor of Town Hall, recently <a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2019/11/07/commentary-censure-trump-dont-remove-him-from-office-n2556021">argued</a> that instead of impeachment, lawmakers could “censure” the president:
<blockquote>I believe that impeaching and removing a sitting, duly-elected president, especially along party lines, is one of the most draconian and divisive political outcomes for which our constitution allows. Despite a <a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2019/10/10/polls-americans-have-impeachment-fever-n2554348">clear shift in public opinion</a> in recent weeks, a good deal of data suggests that an outright majority of the country is still <a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2019/10/30/suffolkusa-today-poll-clear-majority-of-americans-do-not-favor-impeachment-n2555578">highly reticent</a> about applying that form of punishment to this president, over these actions. This is especially true within the context of a presidential election on the horizon, within less than one calendar year.</blockquote>
O’Donnell then asked Haley about the president’s remarks pertaining to the Squad. “He tweeted this past summer telling the for Democratic female members of Congress – three of whom were born here in the United States – to ‘Go back and fix the crime-infested places from which they came.’ Was that appropriate?”
Haley replied:
<blockquote>No, it&#8217;s not appropriate, but I also can appreciate where he was coming from – from the standpoint of don&#8217;t bash America over and over and over again, and not do something to try and fix it.</blockquote>
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZHK5_MUiD-M?start=346" width="720" height="385" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
President Trump received significant backlash following his “Squad” tweet.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
&#8230;.and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how&#8230;.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381395078000643?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 14, 2019</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none">
&#8230;.it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381396994723841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 14, 2019</a></blockquote>
Although most of the backlash came from members of the media and the Democratic Party, some elected Republicans voiced their displeasure with the president’s tweets. Perhaps the most direct Republican criticism came from Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), who <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/will-hurd-gop-trump-racist-xenophobic-cnntv/index.html">said</a> the following: “I think those tweets are racist and xenophobic. They&#8217;re also inaccurate.”

Nikki Haley &#038; Trump.

WATCH: Nikki Haley Defends Trump On Impeachment; Calls His ‘Squad’ Remarks ‘Not Appropriate’

Nikki Haley

The Squad

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) broke down the recent election results in Kentucky during an interview on Sunday, explaining why he believes, contrary to the narrative in the media, there was actually a &#8220;red-wave&#8221; in the state. Also during the interview, Paul highlighted how existing U.S. law could actually protect President Donald Trump in the Democrats&#8217; impeachment inquiry into his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
&#8220;Let me start with the Kentucky results first, before we get into the events of later this week, just your initial reactions,&#8221; NBC &#8220;Meet The Press&#8221; host Chuck Todd said. &#8220;Matt Bevin, do you see his loss as something bigger than Matt Bevin, about the Republican Party as a whole?&#8221;
&#8220;Well, when you look at all the races, there were six statewide races, we won five out of six. Republicans won five out of six,&#8221; Paul responded. &#8220;We did lose the governor&#8217;s race. We were disappointed in it. But the interesting thing is we beat a lot of other candidates that no one expected us to. So actually, in many ways, there was sort of a red wave in Kentucky.&#8221;
&#8220;I think it was mostly particularly about one race. And I think the teachers were very unhappy. He tried to fix the pension but got crossways with the teachers,&#8221; Paul continued. &#8220;And I think the teachers&#8217; anger came out. But I think he was trying to do the right thing, which is save the pension for the teachers. But it&#8217;s tough. When you ask people to pay more to keep their pension in place, people get unhappy.&#8221;
Paul also highlighted that in some of the counties where Bevin lost, other Republicans who won in the election won in those counties by over 60%.
On the issue of impeachment, Paul noted that Americans want fairness and that they are not &#8220;going to judge fairness, when they&#8217;re accusing President Trump of the same thing Joe Biden did, threatening the aid, if some kind of corruption&#8217;s not investigated.&#8221;
&#8220;But if it were me, I wouldn&#8217;t give them the aid, because we don&#8217;t have the money,&#8221; Paul added. &#8220;We have to actually borrow the money from China to send it to Ukraine. So I&#8217;m against the aid. And I think it&#8217;s a mistake to do the aid.&#8221;
Paul then highlighted a defense of Trump&#8217;s actions that is likely to pick up steam in upcoming weeks, saying that current U.S. law prevents the U.S. from providing aid to corrupt countries, and so Trump would have to ask for an investigation into the Bidens, who Trump believes is corrupt, in order to be able to provide the aid.
&#8220;Foreign aid, by law, can only go out to countries that are not corrupt,&#8221; Paul said. &#8220;So, if you think that a country is acting in a corrupt way, a president can always withhold aid until the corruption is fixed. So, you&#8217;re going to have to get into the mind of Trump and his advisers and say, &#8216;Well, he didn&#8217;t really believe that the Bidens were corrupt.’ I think he absolutely does. I think you could give him a lie detector test and say, &#8216;Do you think the Bidens were corrupt? And do you think you were investigating corruption, and that corruption is in the law, that you can&#8217;t give aid to a country that has corruption?'&#8221;
&#8220;This ends up being a policy debate and a partisan debate,” Paul continued. &#8220;And it has nothing to do with legality or illegality or impeachment. It&#8217;s purely a partisan way of trying to overturn the election.&#8221;
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UTCN0C9ciic" width="730" height="385" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">﻿</iframe>

Rand Paul

Paul Highlights Law That Could Protect Trump In Impeachment Inquiry; Explains Kentucky Election Results

Kentucky

We should be able to objectively acknowledge the Democrats are rushing impeachment. They are. The impeachment of Richard Nixon took months just to investigate. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was based on a multiyear independent counsel investigation. This is a few weeks of Rep. Adam Schiff coordinating with a whistleblower behind closed doors, and now the spotlight is on a year-end rush to get the articles of impeachment drafted.
A trial will come at the beginning of next year. The election is less than a year away. Democrats in the Senate will be forced to miss campaign time for Iowa and New Hampshire.
Friends who really feel strongly will tell me the rule of law matters, but this is a political process. It is not a court of law process. If it were really about the rule of law, Democrats would not be in a rush to justice. They would be methodical.
In fact, we are in a funny game where Republicans say we need to hear from the original accuser: the whistleblower. The President has the right to face his accuser in a due process system. Democrats tell us that this is not a judicial process or a criminal process; it is a political process. They have plenty of other firsthand witnesses.
But then the Democrats turn around and say, with gusto, &#8220;If this isn&#8217;t impeachable, nothing is.&#8221; That&#8217;s the impeachment argument equivalent of, &#8220;A vote for a third party is a vote for the guy I want to lose.&#8221;
Only Andrew Johnson was impeached in an election year, and it is pretty clear from the history of that impeachment that it is not really apt to the present situation. Nixon and Clinton were impeached outside election years. Given the political nature of impeachment, I find it quite reasonable that something could be impeachable in 2018 or 2019 but not impeachable less than 365 days from the general election. In politics and political processes, timing matters. Let the voters decide.
Impeachment seems foolhardy and will become a more divisive issue in an already bitterly divided nation. Republicans, even the 19 who are departing the House of Representatives, are solidly with the President. Democrats are making no effort to persuade them or change other people&#8217;s minds. The Democrats seem intent on forcing impeachment through, and all the people screaming are the people who never wanted the president elected. No minds have been changed.
Democrats have, since Trump won in 2016, treated him as an illegitimate usurper. The very people who hated him then still hate him today, and they have done nothing to earn the trust of those who might be inclined to side with them on this issue. Since Election Day in 2016, it has been abundantly obvious we would get to this point if the Democrats took back the House of Representatives. The whistleblower&#8217;s lawyer, on January 30, 2017, just 10 days after the President&#8217;s inauguration, tweeted, &#8220;#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately. #lawyers&#8221;. How convenient he now represents a bureaucrat intent on bringing down the president.
This is a political issue. It is not a court of law issue. The Democrats in the House, who functionally serve as a grand jury, have been clamoring for this for years. They waited until they regained power and immediately began to act. The Senate Democrat jurors have been calling for impeachment for years. Some of these people have fundraised off the issue.
The president cannot get a fair trial because several of the Democrats have long been on record demanding his impeachment. But, you might say, this isn&#8217;t a court, and the jurors are politicians in a political process.
Exactly, I say.
Elections are a political process, too. And clearly, this issue should be decided in that political process — not one that half of America will view as the Democrats finally doing what they&#8217;ve been wanting to do for three years.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Capitol.

ERICKSON: Use The Other Political Process

Trump Derangement Syndrome is not merely a cute-sounding phrase to deflect criticism of President Trump. It&#8217;s real. It&#8217;s palpable.
Case in point: The American Prospect&#8217;s Paul Waldman gives us an earful about President Trump and how Trump is destroying everything that&#8217;s good and decent in America. Let me share some of his words, which speak for themselves — but I&#8217;ll speak for them, too.
&#8220;The impending impeachment of Donald Trump brings with it the possibility of something that has been in short supply over the last three years: accountability,&#8221; Waldman writes. &#8220;At last, you may think, we can use a constitutional process to proclaim at last that This Is Not OK.&#8221; Waldman goes on to acknowledge that Trump probably won&#8217;t be held to account after all, because though the House will likely impeach him, the Senate will vote against removing him from office.
What strikes me is Waldman&#8217;s unchecked assertion that Trump&#8217;s accountability &#8220;has been in short supply.&#8221; He wholly ignores that Democrats have been feverishly pursuing Trump since he announced his candidacy. For two years, they&#8217;ve prosecuted a bogus case on Trump &#8220;colluding&#8221; with Russia, guaranteeing they had unimpeachable evidence.
They were lying, and their would-be savior, special counsel Robert Mueller, produced no evidence of collusion. Accountability? Why haven&#8217;t the Democrats had to answer for their wasting taxpayers&#8217; time and money over this lie? Neither they nor their legacy media co-conspirators have uttered one syllable of apology to the American people, let alone President Trump, for dragging us through this nightmare.
Instead, they immediately pivoted to Ukraine. Here we go again — but this time, it&#8217;s really serious. What is this, the fourth impeachment attempt? Why not? We now know from released transcripts that they&#8217;ve been planning this coup from the jump. We already knew it, but we&#8217;ve got the smoking gun. Will they be held to account for their election and post-election interference? Of course not, unless their constituents vote them out of office for abuse of power.
Waldman continues: &#8220;This is one of the products of Trump&#8217;s time in office: the contamination of our emotional lives. Trump has made us feel dread, despair, disillusionment, and a dozen other awful emotions whose grip it feels impossible to escape. And even if he loses in 2020 then slinks back to Mar-a-Lago to spend his days regaling his dwindling number of sycophants with tales of his matchless presidency, we&#8217;ll continue to live with the effects for years or even decades to come.&#8221;
I don&#8217;t know whom Waldman purports to speak for, but millions of Americans would find his words repugnant. Trump doesn&#8217;t make us feel dread and despair. Bullish on America and fighting leftist insanity and political correctness, he invigorates our patriotic instincts. His policies have stimulated robust economic growth, which is hardly cause for despair.
Waldman details &#8220;the unceasing parade of horrors emanating from the Oval Office,&#8221; citing the usual litany of Trump&#8217;s alleged sins — his oh-so-offensive tweets, his racism and his cruelty. It&#8217;s just so exhausting for poor Waldman. He writes: &#8220;And how many times have you found yourself almost involuntarily talking with friends or family about some awful thing Trump did or said, only to have someone stop and say, &#8216;Oh god, let&#8217;s just not talk about him for a while. I can&#8217;t take it.&#8221;
What&#8217;s exhausting is the ceaseless leftist noise machine railing against Trump. Leftists need to remove the smudges from their mirrors and see that they are projecting. They are the ones who have been vicious and hateful toward Trump from the beginning. They have wrongly accused him — and his supporters (half of Americans) — of racism and cruelty. They have contempt for all his supporters. Yet has Trump called them Nazis? Racists?
If you don&#8217;t believe me, read Waldman&#8217;s elaboration: &#8220;For many the mere fact that Trump could win in 2016 (even if he got three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton) was reason enough to lose faith in their country in a fundamental way. Eight years before they had convinced themselves that Barack Obama&#8217;s election meant America could be the place they wanted it to be: inclusive, tolerant, progressive, hopeful. Trump came along and told them that America was not that place.&#8221;
What? Precisely the opposite is true. Progressives are the antithesis of inclusion, tolerance and hope. They are intolerant of opposing viewpoints, and they readily use the power of government and social media giants to suppress conservative speech and religious liberty. They bully conservatives out of restaurants and college campuses. They are anything but hopeful. Former President Obama&#8217;s team told us the days of 3% growth were over. President Trump rejected the naysaying and gave us an economic boom, fulfilling his campaign promises and restoring hope.
The rest of Waldman&#8217;s piece is even more desperate and bitter, but space constraints preclude further dissection. I&#8217;ll just leave you with his closing paragraph, which encapsulates his TDS: &#8220;There may yet be more to come, if nothing else in the form of an election defeat next year. But it&#8217;s hard to escape the gnawing feeling that nothing we can do to Trump will ever make up for what he has done to us.&#8221;
To the contrary, Trump has done nothing to them, but they have done plenty to him. And he&#8217;s done plenty for us — specifically standing athwart the extreme left&#8217;s crusade to fundamentally and permanently transform America into a nation our framers wouldn&#8217;t recognize.
Thank you, President Trump, for standing up for America and those who still believe in it.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book is &#8220;Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win.&#8221; Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

“Impeach” sign.

LIMBAUGH: Trump Derangement Syndrome On Steroids

Media

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, demanded in a letter late on Friday night that Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) testify in a closed-door deposition about any interactions that either he or his staff may have had with the whistleblower.
&#8220;On November 6th, you announced the beginning of public hearings associated with the Democratic Party&#8217;s partisan impeachment inquiry into President Donald J. Trump,&#8221; Nunes <a href="https://republicans-intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/rm_ltr_to_chm_re_deposition_request_-_8_nov_19.pdf">wrote</a> to Schiff. &#8220;Based on the precedent and lack of jurisdiction, the House Intelligence Committee should not take the lead in conducting such hearings; however, by now the American people know your desire to see the duly-elected president removed from office outweighs your sense of responsibility to running a functioning intelligence oversight committee.&#8221;
&#8220;Prior to the start of your public show trial next week, at least one additional closed-door deposition must take place,&#8221; Nunes stated. &#8220;Specifically, I request that you sit for a closed-door deposition before the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight Committees.&#8221;
&#8220;As the American public is now aware, in August 2019, you and/or your staff met with or talked to the whistleblower who raised an issue with President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky,&#8221; Nunes continued. &#8220;Although you publicly claim nothing inappropriate was discussed, the three committees deserve to hear directly from you the substance and circumstances surrounding any discussions conducted with the whistleblower, and any commitment to let the committee’s interview the whistleblower directly, you are the only individual who can provide clarity as to these conversations.&#8221;
&#8220;As you know, the House Intelligence Committee has precedent for such an arrangement. During the committees investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, sitting members of Congress agreed to participate in closed-door depositions,&#8221; Nunes continued. &#8220;Given your championing of such an agreement two years ago, you should have no problem with you appearing before the three committees to discuss your interactions with the whistleblower.”
Nunes concluded, &#8220;This request is not intended to satisfy the rights of the minority to call witnesses for public testimony pursuant to section 2 of H. Res. 660. I appreciate your attention to this manner.&#8221;
The letter comes after Schiff stated during an appearance a September 17 on MSNBC, “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.”
Schiff&#8217;s claim was false, according to numerous reports, which earned him a &#8220;Four Pinocchios&#8221; rating from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
“The early account by the future whistle-blower … explains how Mr. Schiff knew to press for the complaint when the Trump administration initially blocked lawmakers from seeing it,” The New York Times <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-schiff-knew-about-whistleblower-allegations-days-before-complaint-filed">reported</a> in early October. “Before going to Congress, the C.I.A. officer had a colleague convey his accusations to the agency’s top lawyer. Concerned about how that avenue for airing his allegations was unfolding, the officer then approached a House Intelligence Committee aide, alerting him to the accusation against Mr. Trump.”
“The whistle-blower’s decision to offer what amounted to an early warning to the intelligence committee’s Democrats is also sure to thrust Mr. Schiff even more forcefully into the center of the controversy,” the Times added. “By the time the whistle-blower filed his complaint, Mr. Schiff and his staff knew at least vaguely what it contained.”

Republicans Kevin McCarthy And Jim Jordan Hold News Conference After Mueller Testimony

Top Republican Demands Top Democrat Testify In Impeachment Inquiry

On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the media’s attempt to romanticize the next phase of impeachment proceedings in order to manipulate the public’s emotions. Video and partial transcript below: 
They’ve scheduled open impeachment hearings for next week — theoretically open impeachment hearings, and let&#8217;s just listen to the way CBS News, Norah O&#8217;Donnell, who is really bad. She is, she&#8217;s not just bad, she&#8217;s stiff and performative on the news. She&#8217;s so prejudiced, so biased that anyone with any sense of fairness has got to listen to her and think, &#8220;Wait a minute, this isn&#8217;t the news. These are Democrat talking points.&#8221; But you got to listen to this, the way she promotes the upcoming impeachment hearings.  
<blockquote>O’DONNELL: Tonight: Lights, camera, testimony. The stage is set for the first televised hearings of the impeachment inquiry. We now know when they will happen and who may be the Democrats&#8217; star witness. 
Good evening and thank you for joining us. It&#8217;s official: Historic, televised impeachment hearings begin a week from today, and it promises to be must-see TV. The Democrats plan to start with their star witness, a West Point grad with 50 years of public service. Acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor will testify Wednesday alongside Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent. Then on Friday, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch will testify. House Democrats say that&#8217;s just the beginning. 
Today, more Democrats — I should say, more of the Democrats released more transcripts from those closed door depositions, and Nancy Cordes says they offer a preview of what&#8217;s expected to be bombshell testimony.</blockquote>
Bombshell? It’s a bombshell! Lights, camera, action! I mean, it’s like over at NewsBusters, they said it&#8217;s like a prize fight, but it&#8217;s just like promotion for entertainment, promotion for a movie. It&#8217;s a blockbuster &#8230;
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3t2OFnH_VEY?start=411" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Anyway, so they&#8217;re promoting this thing like it&#8217;s a movie, and here&#8217;s a piece that The Washington Post ran on Adam Schiff, the congressman in my district. Now this guy to me is like a greasy McCarthyite dishonest guy. He&#8217;s been caught lying repeatedly. Right, he lied about the whistleblower, he lied about having evidence of Russian collusion with Trump, he has just lied from the beginning, plus he looks like a turtle taken out of his shell. I&#8217;m sorry, but he does, he looks like a turtle. [The] guy is a turtle taken out of its shell and he lies all the time, and the Left, both The New York Times, a former newspaper, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/adam-schiff-once-wanted-to-be-a-screenwriter-can-he-give-the-trump-presidency-a-hollywood-ending/2019/10/31/07cb9594-f748-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html">The Washington Post</a>, where democracy dies in crap, are trying to glorify this guy to make him look like a romantic figure. It is utterly amazing. I mean, people do have eyes. They do have ears, they do see things, but they&#8217;re living in their own world. So here&#8217;s the [headline]:
&#8220;Adam Schiff once wanted to be a screenwriter. Can he give the Trump presidency a Hollywood ending?&#8221; 
And we know what The Washington Post — this is in the style section, by the way. We know what The Washington Post thinks a Hollywood ending to the Trump presidency would be: It’s Trump led out of the White House in handcuffs. Ain&#8217;t going to happen, but let me read you some of this, because it actually does tell you exactly what&#8217;s happening when you think about it. 
<blockquote>When Adam Schiff was a young assistant U.S. attorney living in Los Angeles, he did what everyone does when they moved to Hollywood. He wrote a screenplay. He spent hours at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sciences, reading the scripts for &#8220;Silence of the Lambs&#8221; and &#8220;Witness&#8221; in the library (it was the ‘90s). He leaned on his courtroom experience, thinking back on snippets of dialog during trials as he typed out a crime thriller. The prosecutor was the hero, naturally. He called it &#8220;Minotaur,&#8221; and, if you ask Schiff, it was pretty good.
&#8220;I got an offer of an option from Nick Wechsler,&#8221; Schiff said, leaning back in a leather chair inside his Capitol Hill office late last month. &#8220;He produced &#8216;The Player,’ remember that movie with Tim Robbins?&#8221;
Schiff turned down the offer, he said. He doesn&#8217;t remember it being a huge sum of money, and anyway, he was getting into a different kind of storytelling business: Politics.</blockquote>
This is The Washington Post glorifying this guy and yet also playing his hand.
<blockquote>In some ways, he&#8217;s become the chief storyteller of this drama-filled political moment. Schiff is the head of the House Intelligence Committee and leader of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry of President Trump. He&#8217;s in charge of calling witnesses, taking depositions, and subpoenaing documents. More than that, it&#8217;s his job to stitch it all together into a believable, easy-to-follow narrative. Imagine the pitch meeting: It&#8217;s like &#8220;The Manchurian Candidate,&#8221; except the president has heel spurs. It&#8217;s &#8220;The Godfather&#8221; meets &#8220;Borat.&#8221;</blockquote>
Alright, they’re telling you — you know, I talk about this on college campuses a lot because really, my expertise, is storytelling. That is what I&#8217;ve done all my life, that&#8217;s what I know about. I&#8217;ve studied it a lot, I’ve studied it deeply. I would say, I know about narrative and how it works, and I know about how it affects people and about how storyteller stories manipulate your emotions. 
Again, I think I mentioned this yesterday, you go to a movie and you cry over the death of someone who never lived, right? And that&#8217;s an important thing — it tells you that your emotions can be manipulated at a very high level, and it&#8217;s a good thing. We like it when it&#8217;s done right. But it can also be used against you, because they can manipulate emotions that are geared to one thing and tell you that they&#8217;re about another. 
The best example I can think about is a movie like &#8220;Avatar,&#8221; which is also the movie &#8220;Dances with Wolves,&#8221; which is also the movie &#8220;Pocahontas.&#8221; They&#8217;re all the same movie: A man from a civilized, in these cases white, society enters the world of a less civilized, non-white society and discovers that they&#8217;re the innocents and they&#8217;re these wonderful — what do they call them in the old days, the noble savage? — and his society is deeply corrupt. That&#8217;s the story in each one of those instances, right? His civilized society is bad, and the innocent brown people with their primitive society is good. 
Listen, all stories that move you are telling the truth, but it&#8217;s up to you to find out what that truth is. The truth is, we all know that there&#8217;s something distorting about technology, there&#8217;s something distorting about civilization. Freud called it &#8220;Civilization and Its Discontents,&#8221; and we all have this Rousseauvian feeling that there&#8217;s something we left behind, just like we have a feeling that there&#8217;s something we left behind in childhood. Maybe those feelings are connected? 
Okay, so they&#8217;re manipulating that to tell you that the white cavalry men in the West were bad and the Native Americans were good. They’re manipulating a true feeling to tell you something that is historically a lot more complicated than that, right? Historically, it&#8217;s a lot more complicated, and &#8220;Avatar&#8221; is even worse because they&#8217;re manipulating you to think that the American military is bad. Basically, they were telling you that the Iraqis and the Afghanis were innocent people and we were going in there to steal their oil. &#8230;
Anyway, this is what they&#8217;re doing: Manipulating us. They&#8217;re playing this up, [saying] it&#8217;s a dramatic moment in politics. It&#8217;s not dramatic, it&#8217;s really not. We know what the story is, we know the real story. We know that this is something that&#8217;s been going on for a long time — that they&#8217;re trying to get this president impeached.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. 
</a><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show">Watch “The Andrew Klavan Show” on-demand!</a>

Nancy Pelosi And Adam Schiff

KLAVAN: Lights, Camera, Impeachment!

Washington Post

Four and a half months after President Trump’s inauguration, Democratic congressman Al Green announced plans to impeach him. He cited as justification the president’s perfectly legal firing of FBI director James Comey — ironically one of Trump’s most popular decisions on both sides of the aisle — but  Green later admitted the real motivation behind impeachment. &#8220;I&#8217;m concerned that if we don&#8217;t impeach this president, he will get re-elected,” Green confessed.
When that resolution failed, Democrats tried to impeach Trump for conspiring with the Russian government during the 2016 election, which sent special counsel Robert Mueller on a two-year, $32 million-dollar wild goose chase that ended in the exoneration of the president. Next, the Democrats sought to oust Trump for paying hush money to a porn star — a morally dubious exchange but hardly worthy of &#8220;high crimes and misdemeanors.&#8221;
When that failed, Democrats claimed Trump colluded with Ukraine, presently at war with Russia, the previous object of their collusion narrative. Specifically, Democrats allege that Trump engaged in a quid pro quo by asking the Ukrainian government to investigate the quid pro quo that Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden admitted on camera to having negotiated while vice president. As evidence, they cite the official complaint of the [alleged whistleblower], a career CIA analyst who just so happens to have served as Bide&#8217;s lackey on Ukraine policy when the former vice president&#8217;s quid pro quo took place.
The whistleblower complaint itself fails to offer any firsthand account of wrongdoing, citing instead secondhand &#8220;information from multiple U.S. Government officials&#8221; alleging that the president acted inappropriately during a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a charge the White House considers so outlandish that it took the rare step of releasing the transcript of the call to the public. The next-best evidence of wrongdoing the &#8220;whistleblower&#8221; mentioned in his complaint is a television interview the president gave to George Stephanopoulos and a tweet from Rudy Giuliani, both of which are matters of public record and neither of which require whistleblowing.
But then the &#8220;whistleblower&#8221; isn’t a whistleblower. He’s a political operative with &#8220;an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate,&#8221; according to the intelligence community inspector general. He coordinated with the office of Democratic congressman and impeachment inquiry leader Adam Schiff before filing his complaint. And this latest impeachment attempt, like all the others before it, isn’t a legitimate exercise of congressional oversight; it’s an attempted coup. The impeachment instigator’s own lawyer admitted as much just days after President Trump’s inauguration.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/coup?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#coup</a> has started. First of many steps. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/rebellion?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#rebellion</a>. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/impeachment?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#impeachment</a> will follow ultimately. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/lawyers?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#lawyers</a> <a href="https://t.co/FiNBQo6v0S">https://t.co/FiNBQo6v0S</a>
&mdash; Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) <a href="https://twitter.com/MarkSZaidEsq/status/826262311560216578?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 31, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;#coup has started,” tweeted Mark Zaid, one of the attorneys representing the &#8220;whistleblower.&#8221; &#8220;First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately. #laywers.&#8221; Regarding Trump&#8217;s firing of Obama holdover Sally Yates as acting attorney general, the hashtag-happy lawyer reiterated his point. &#8220;#coup has started. As one falls, two more will take their place. #rebellion #impeachment.&#8221; Six months later, he predicted, &#8220;[CNN] will play a key role in [Trump] not finishing out his full term as president.&#8221; If CNN fails, it won’t be for lack of trying.
We now know that elected Democrats colluded with federal bureaucrats, known also as the &#8220;deep state,&#8221; to oust the duly elected president in a &#8220;coup&#8221; — so described by the bureaucrat impeachment instigator’s own lawyer, who himself admits the whole affair relies upon the complicity of a corrupt press. Lies pervade the entire plot, and we ought to distrust every person pushing it, except in one regard: When conspirators confess their treachery, believe them.

Rep. Al Green

KNOWLES: When Leftists Admit Impeachment Is A Coup, Believe Them

Leftism

On Sunday, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) appeared on Fox Business Network’s “Sunday Morning Futures” with host Maria Bartiromo.
During the segment, Bartiromo asked Gabbard about her thinking when she voted in favor of the formalization of the impeachment inquiry on Thursday.
<blockquote>BARTIROMO: So, you voted “yes” on this resolution last week. Tell us why.
GABBARD: To get the facts. To get the information. There were serious questions and concerns being raised. The American people deserve to get some answers to those questions so we can bring out into broad daylight what exactly happened, gather this information – understanding that the vote that took place was a vote for more transparency as this inquiry continues.
BARTIROMO: What about the treatment of the Democratic party? I mean, you yourself have talked about this process being unfair, and we see this unfair treatment every day with this impeachment inquiry going on behind closed doors. Can you give us a sense of what’s going on in the [Democratic] Party that we’re not seeing more transparency on all of the above?
GABBARD: Well, I think one of the issues has been that only those who are serving on the Intelligence Committee have had access to the different interviews and conversations they’ve been having. I think as this inquiry moves forward, once again, this is why I voted for that inquiry the other day, is to make sure that the American people actually are getting the information that only some members of Congress have been getting access to thus far.</blockquote>
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Gabbard has previously appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity,” where she made <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-echoes-republican-concerns-about-closed-door-impeachment-process-on-fox-news/">similar remarks</a>.
“I think it needs to be a transparent process. I have long expressed my concern about going through impeachment proceedings in a very, very partisan way because it will only further tear apart an already divided country. I think that inquiry needs to be done in a very narrowly focused way, and it must be done transparently,” Gabbard told host Sean Hannity.
Gabbard added that she didn’t “have access” to much of the information, and that Americans “deserve” to see the evidence as it rolls out.
Polling data shows that a slim majority of the American people agree with the House’s impeachment resolution. As of publication, the <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/public_approval_of_the_impeachment_inquiry_of_president_trump-6956.html">RealClearPolitics polling average</a> has 50.9% in favor of impeachment, and 42.3% opposed.
Looking more deeply into the raw data, three of the most recent polls suggest a general consensus around impeachment.
According to a <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-49-percent-favor-impeaching-trump">Fox News poll</a> conducted between October 27-30: “49% want Trump impeached and removed from office, 4% say he should be impeached but not removed, and 41% oppose impeaching Trump.”
An <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6538104-19433-NBCWSJ-Late-October-Poll.html">NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll</a> conducted at the same time asked respondents: “Based upon what you know today about President Trump&#8217;s call and actions related to his discussion with the Ukrainian president, do you approve or disapprove of the impeachment inquiry being conducted by Congress to determine if there is enough evidence to remove Donald Trump from office?”
53% approved, while 44% disapproved.
When probed further, 49% of respondents said they wanted Congress to “impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office,” while 46% said that the president should not be impeached or removed from office.
An <a href="https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/zgaz948hzw/econTabReport.pdf#page119">Economist/YouGov poll</a> conducted between October 27-29 asked respondents: “If the U.S. House of Representatives votes to impeach Donald Trump, do you think the U.S. Senate should or should not remove him from office?”
47% said that the Senate “should remove” Trump, while 40% said the Senate “should not remove” Trump from office. 13% were “not sure.”

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