Sunday, October 6, 2019

Beclown Yourself


Andy McCarthy: 

‘The Fact That House Democrats Invite You To Their Circus Does Not Require You To Beclown Yourself’

October 5, 2019

Late Friday evening, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney requesting he submit documents related to their impeachment inquiry by October 18th. In addition to Cummings, it was signed by Reps. Adam Schiff (Chair of House Intelligence Committee) and Eliot Engel (Chair of House Committee on Foreign Affairs). Cummings repeatedly insists that the letter is a subpoena.

The letter states, “We deeply regret that President Trump has put us—and the nation—into this position, but his actions have left us with no choice but to issue this subpoena.”

It cites several earlier deadlines which the White House has ignored.

Cummings writes that he is aware of President Trump’s intention to send a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday informing her that the White House refuses to cooperate with any document requests until a full House vote on impeachment has been taken.

Pelosi has refused to do so because once a vote is taken, Republicans will receive “some” rights to participate in the impeachment process. (Although the rights would be minor, Republicans currently have no rights. They can’t even question witnesses that come before the committee.) Additionally, she does not want to force Democrats serving in districts Trump won in 2016 to go on record voting for his impeachment.

He writes, “Speaker Pelosi has confirmed that an impeachment inquiry is underway, and it is not for the White House to say otherwise.” Mr. Cummings is telling Mulvaney it’s an impeachment inquiry because “Pelosi says it is.”
Not so fast, says former U.S. attorney and author Andrew McCarthy. He calls the Democrats’ impeachment action “Kabuki theatre.” He writes:
You are not to be faulted if you think a formal inquest is under way and that legal process has been issued. The misimpression is completely understandable if you have been taking in media coverage — in particular, reporting on a haughty Sept. 27 letter from House Democrats, presuming to direct Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on pain of citation for obstruction, to cooperate in their demands to depose State Department officials and review various records.

As mentioned above, McCarthy explains that until a formal vote is taken in the house, this is not an impeachment inquiry and their “subpoenas” are merely letters. “Legally, it has no compulsive power. If anything, it is rife with legal deficiencies.” Rather than conducting an impeachment inquiry, he says House Democrats are merely conducting their 2020 campaign.

He notes that “standing committees do have subpoena power,” but recipients often object to subpoenas and choose to litigate. “Such challenges take time, though, and Democrats are in a hurry to close this show after a short run. Democrats want to have an impeachment show — um, inquiry — on television; they do not want to defend its bona fides in court.”

McCarthy writes that the Democrats are trying to “ipse dixit” their way to impeachment. I had to look that one up. It means “an assertion made but not proved.” Yes, that’s exactly what they’re doing. That’s how the Russian collusion investigation began as well.

In both the letter to Mick Mulvaney and the letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it says that failure to comply “shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry.” But that is just not true.

The House is an independent body and can conduct an impeachment anyway they chose. However, McCarthy points out:
The courts maintain their authority to protect the legal rights of persons and institutions ensnared in kangaroo tribunals. The fact that House Democrats invite you to their circus does not require you to beclown yourself.

Any competent court asked to evaluate a demand for information under the rubric of impeachment will observe that the process has a history. When the Framers debated whether to include an impeachment clause in the Constitution, they had serious concerns. They were designing a separation-of-powers system that endowed the coordinate branches with checks and balances to police each other. They understood that impeachment authority was necessary, but feared it would give the legislature too much power over the executive.

They also worried that impeachment could be politicized. If it were too easy to do procedurally, or it could be resorted to for trifling acts of maladministration, factions opposed to the president would be tempted to try to overturn elections and grind the government to a halt.

To address these concerns, the Framers adopted a burdensome standard — high crimes and misdemeanors (in addition to treason and bribery) — that would restrict impeachable offenses to truly egregious abuses of power. Then they erected an even higher bar: a two-thirds supermajority requirement for conviction in the Senate.
All this was to ensure that the electoral will of the people must never be overturned in the absence of misconduct so severe that it results in a broad consensus that the nation’s well-being requires removing the president from power.

President Trump is not without defenses. He has various privileges available to him and McCarthy writes that judges are generally deferential toward an executive’s claims of privilege. But Congress is given wider latitude to probe in a real impeachment inquiry.

If the House went to court to enforce their demands right now, before a formal vote has been taken, a judge would be less apt to side with them. McCarthy said, “The first thing a court’s going to want to know is, ‘Has the House voted to have an impeachment inquiry?’ And, a lot hinges on that, including how much expansion a court would give a president’s claim of executive privilege and privilege over matters that are in the president’s duties under Article II.”

Impeachment actions in the past have followed bipartisan debate in the House. They are conducted when a president is perceived to have committed a crime. Trump has not committed a crime and Republicans are not part of this action. The Democrats know they don’t have an “impeachable offense,” which is why they want to move so quickly. They are using impeachment as a political tool which is the exact opposite of what our Founders had intended.

McCarthy notes that, “If Democrats truly thought they had a case, they wouldn’t be in such a rush — they’d want everyone to have time to study it. But they don’t have a case, so instead they’re giving us a show.”

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Jim Jordan -vs- George Stephanopoulos

Representative Jim Jordan was present during a closed-door interview with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Kurt Volker.  Jordan appears on ABC to debate George Stephanopoulos over the carefully selected excerpts, and subsequent spun narrative, by House democrats and media.

Notice ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Fox’s Chris Wallace repeat the same defensive talking points in a united effort to protect the customary behavior of DC politicians who sell their political influence for personal financial gain.

At the heart of the matter, the selling of influence is the process that must be protected. The process of gaining wealth by selling influence is how/why most DC Senators and corrupt politicians run for the office.  President Trump is spotlighting this; hence the fury of the backlash from those the DC industry. 










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Rep. Chris Stewart -vs- Chris Wallace

Representative Chris Stewart (R-Utah) of the House Intelligence Committee debates the insufferable Chris Wallace over the issues of corruption in the swamp.

Obviously the tradition of politicians selling their office for financial gain political hits a nerve with Wallace who must defend the practice in order to defend the swamp.  The level of pearl-clutching pretzel logic by Wallace is off-the-charts…. In essence, all corruption must be accepted while politicians are running for office.

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Attack, Always Attack

https://townhall.com/columnists/gilgutknecht/2019/10/06/attack-always-attack-n2554238

Attack, Always Attack


Gil Gutknecht
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Attack, Always Attack
Source: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Alexander III (who would later come to be known as the Great) became the King of Macedonia at the tender age of 20. By the time he was 30 he had conquered much of the known world. He somehow knew that he was destined to become a historic figure. His success is attributed largely to his keen intellect. His military approach focused on relentlessly pursuing and attacking his enemies. He is credited with saying, “Always attack. Even in defense, attack.” Alexander also said that he feared an army of sheep led by a lion far more than he feared an army of lions led by a sheep. 

Today we see a pivotal conflict being played out on the battlefield known as the District of Columbia. The Democrats are attacking, relentlessly pursuing this president. Starting with the first days after his election, they have single-mindedly advanced toward the objective of overturning the will of the electors. Casting aside any pretense that they had a serious legislative agenda, their actions confirm the vulgar prediction of Congresswoman-elect Tlaib: “We’re going to impeach the M***** F*****!”

Their intentions should not come as a surprise to Republicans in Congress. The Dems spent over two years pushing the Russian collusion ruse. They turned over every rock. They squeezed Trump associates like General Flynn. With help from Ukrainians, they got a conviction of Paul Manafort. They counted on Robert Mueller and his team of partisans to deliver the final knockout punch.

They counted wrong.  

That was just a bump in the road, not the end of it. 

Too many Republicans seem surprised and befuddled by this nonstop assault. They are unwilling or incapable of launching anything resembling a counterattack. Even as Democrats cling to the slender reed of a second-hand whistleblower account of a fairly innocuous phone call, Republicans seem unable to muster much indignation. 

The president clearly and rightly wants to know what exactly started the FBI Russian collaboration investigation. How did they get surveillance warrants from the FISA Court to spy on his campaign? Who is this company called CrowdStrike? What role did they play in this sordid story? Many of us are looking for answers. So apparently is Attorney General Barr. 

Don’t we all want to know more about the former Vice President’s public boasting that he threatened withholding a billion dollars in aid unless a Ukrainian corruption investigator was fired…within six hours? Those were his own words. They are on tape. Most Americans clearly hear Mr .Biden bragging about a quid pro quo. Trump’s words on the other hand, required extensive “parity” reconstruction to help the uninformed come to a similar conclusion. Not surprisingly, these facts are somehow lost on the Dems and their cheerleaders in the media. 

Republicans have had plenty of time to memorize the Democrats' playbook. Fake right. Run left. And always blitz the president. 

The Dems are all-in with their latest coup attempt. Once unleashed, Nancy can’t call the dogs off. Rep. Al Green, the author of the first Articles of Impeachment, admitted that they had to impeach him. Otherwise President Trump would be re-elected. The Speaker said this week that she understands that this gambit is risking her majority and any hopes they may have for next year. She knows that if you go after the king, you have to topple him. As more Americans actually read the whistleblower complaint and the transcript of the phone call, support for their case gets weaker. We now know that Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff and his staff coached and coordinated much of the whistleblower’s complaint after saying they had no contact. With House Democrats having taken a position so far out on the thin ice, maybe we should consider sending the Congressional Republicans some ice picks. 

Once again Republicans look like an army of mostly sheep. They are easily spooked and scattered by the jackals in the media.The bad news for the Dems however, is that the GOP is led by a lion. Donald Trump may not have studied Greek Classics or Macedonian military history. But Trump instinctively understands the Alexander strategy of fearlessly attacking his adversaries. So even in defense, he attacks. 

In the era of full contact, take no prisoners, blood-sport politics, that strategy serves him well. 

Gil Gutknecht served twelve years in the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota. 
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NBC’s Chuck Todd Goes Bananas During Spastic Effort to Protect The Swamp

Chuck Todd is fully vested in defending the overall CIA and FBI efforts in the 2016 election.  Throughout his “reporting” Todd has been one of the biggest defenders of corrupt political behavior by the intelligence apparatus and John Brennan.

Today, amid media marching orders that must be retained, Senator Ron Johnson appears on Meet The Press and Chuck Todd angrily confronts any effort to reveal the corruption. 




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If you want the truth on impeachment, stay away from the fringes



If you are a member of #TheResistance or a #NeverTrumper, it is doubtful you will allow yourself to see the enormous problem with the move toward show hearings in the House and a vote on articles of impeachment.

If you are an #AlwaysTrumper, you will be in a position to persuade no one of the fact that an off-the-rails House is abusing the provisions of impeachment for purely partisan purposes. Those purposes might include launching this preemptive strike as a way of distracting public attention from a report expected soon from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concerning misconduct allegations in the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. The report might well find that the FBI abused its powers by running counterintelligence operations against U.S. citizens and shattering the norm of law enforcement staying far away from choosing sides during a political campaign.


But if you are a rule-of-law conservative, especially one with great faith in the Constitution’s durability, you will have staunchly defended Robert S. Mueller III’s appointment as special counsel to investigate Russia’s election-meddling, pursuant to Justice Department regulations. You might have been shocked by the strange and distorting effects that partisanship clearly had on the special counsel’s team, but you’d still be an institutionalist, still confident in the rule of law.

Now come two events. The first is the publication of Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley A. Strassel’s new, thoroughly persuasive book “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.” The second is the rush to turn an insignificant phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into an impeachable offense. Read the rough transcript. The hysteria is risible.

As Strassel writes, the rule of law has been undermined over the past several years by deeply compromised senior officials in the intelligence and law enforcement communities, along with allies in the Obama White House during the period between 2015 and 2017. The long, drawn-out Mueller investigation added to the miasma of false narratives about the president. Now add to that brew both the manifest partisanship of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the domination of news coverage by elite-media liberals and their #NeverTrump allies-of-convenience (pretending to a conservatism that exists independent of long-held constitutional norms), and any fair-minded political observer and proponent of constitutional order should be on high alert.

Most of us in the group of “sometimes Trumpers” have long records of criticizing the president on a host of issues, most recently the failure — twice — to respond to Iran’s aggression with military strikes that would restore deterrence. Our most frequent criticisms target the way Trump brawls without reserve. We don’t believe that the media is “the enemy of the people.” We don’t believe that dubious “whistleblowers” or even partisan extremists are guilty of treason. We reject most of the president’s non-China tariffs, and we wish his criticism of NATO allies was balanced with applause for what they do right. We would prefer a much less confrontational, much more upbeat stream of rhetoric from the president, such as in the speeches he delivered in Saudi Arabia, Poland and in France on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings.

But we know as well that Trump has put scores of originalists on the federal bench who will defend the Constitution. We know that he has poured money into a depleted U.S. military. We know that his “America first” rhetoric, far from being exclusionary, is confident, purpose-driven and appropriate. We think the 2020 election will be about policy choices and temperament — and it will be another starkly binary choice.

Those of us who have tried to observe, write and comment from the no man’s land of the raging political battle cannot have failed to perceive a sinister turn of events as the House moved toward staging an impeachment show trial. The feeling of an illegitimate attempt at a coup dressed in constitutional clothing marks this latest turn as it never did the special counsel’s investigation.

Sunday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin noted that the House would be judged by how it conducts itself. I pointed out soon thereafter that Schiff had already failed that test, going full Queen of Hearts from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” who did not need due process of any sort before wanting heads to roll.

Fair-minded observers will look back at the past three-plus years and conclude not that there is a so-called deep state — there isn’t — but that there are many compromised people desperately trying to maneuver their way out of a huge legal and ethical corner they put themselves into. Do not trust the always-hate-Trump pundits. Do not trust the Trump-does-no-wrong pundits. Trust the people doing the hard work of putting together the puzzle of the past three years while at the same time keeping a cool, precise eye on the president’s conduct.

There aren’t many in that category. Follow them closely.



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DemRep Supporting Impeachment Gets Blasted By Voters For Spreading Fake News About Ukraine Call


Screenshot from this video.

There are 31 House districts where voters are pro-Trump and voted for him in 2016, but who also voted for Democratic candidates for the House in 2018. 

People have been speculating that these Democrats will face some backlash as they go into their re-election if they support impeachment against President Donald Trump. 

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is one who found out how real that backlash can be when she tried to push her rationale for impeachment at a constituent event. She said that “the issue that got to me, was that the president, the most powerful man in the world, reached out to a foreigner, to a foreign leader, and asked him to dig up dirt on an American.” But voters were not buying her recasting of the call. People in the audience immediately called that out as false, “Not true,” some shouted. “Fake news,” cried someone else.



Good on CNN’s John King for reporting on it, he’s one of the few reporters at CNN who doesn’t seem married to pushing the Democratic narrative. 

The problem with her statement is that it wasn’t true, as the folks in the audience who spoke correctly noted. Trump asked the president not to “dig up dirt” on an opponent but to take a look if the investigation was legitimately shut down. Big difference. Here’s the relevant part in the call: 


Sounds like Slotkin is repeating the fabricated version of events pushed by her colleague, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). But voters were having none of it, which may not bode well for her re-election. 

Apparently, she has no problem with Hillary Clinton using foreign national Chris Steele to reach out for Russian info on Donald Trump or the DNC again allegedly reaching out for information to Ukrainian officials on Manafort to undermine the Trump campaign, also in 2016. U.S. Attorney John Durham is now looking into some of those questions. 

CNN previously depicted Slotkin as a “badass” for daring to support impeachment, basically delivering a campaign ad for her and the other women lawmakers they were praising for going against Trump.

She also is a former CIA officer (who seem to be all over the Ukraine matter) and a former Obama administration official, as an Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

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“It's impeachment or violence. Take your pick.”


“It's impeachment or violence. 

Take your pick.”



The Left finds it not only acceptable, but necessary to kick old men while they are on the ground, clinging to their pro-life protest signs.  Worse is yet to come.

Leftists make the case that their violence is justified because we, the conservatives, are Nazis.  They say we cage innocent children at the border (even though it was Obama who did this).  They say our words instigate violence against people of color and against people of various sexual tendencies.  They say we force women to bear unwanted children.  There seems to be no important issue on which we can agree, be it the environment, welfare policy, or foreign affairs.  Not only do we disagree, but the disagreements are so inflamed as to necessitate violence against us.

If you or I were growing up in Germany, in 1937, and if we knew what the Nazis were doing, we too would resist by all means possible, whatever the risk, however violently we felt compelled to act.  A great many courageous people did so, and nearly all of them were crushed into anonymous deaths.

But this is America 2019, and the comparison of the pro-life movement to Nazism is a grotesque deception.  It is a deception perpetrated by those who seek power — absolute power — in a future authoritarian, totalitarian government that they seek to impose, and to impose by any level of violence they find available.

Their models for this plan include China and Venezuela; Iran and Cuba; and, perhaps the worst hell-hole of all, North Korea.

The American Left has moved very far in this direction.  Until recently, its pace was patient and methodical.  Over the decades, those on the Left have carefully infiltrated academia, the news industry, entertainment, and the legal profession, among others.  Theirs was not to be a revolution, but an evolution, the parable of the frog in the slowly heated pan of water.  We weren't supposed to notice.

Then came Donald Trump.

The Left was ready for the likes of Jeb Bush and John Kasich.  They were even prepared for such people as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum, all of whom promised to govern in accordance with respectable conservative policies and values.

But it is clear, in retrospect, that any of those potential presidents would have, even if unintentionally, further entrenched the system, not ended it.  What was needed was a shake-up, a demolition man, a wrecking machine.

Trump came seemingly out of nowhere.  He had little (if any) real experience in politics, none in governing, and even less in the endless modes of treachery with which he was met.  He was not even taken seriously until the shocking outcome of the 2016 election, and then it was too late.

Suddenly, the progressive timetable was shredded.  There could be no more careful, patient maneuvering into absolute power.  Revolution, not evolution, became the order of the day.

And so off came the leftist velvet gloves, and out came the iron fist, the hammer, the sickle, the swastika.  The rules of democracy, of decency and honor, were cast aside in favor of lies, propaganda, and outright criminal activities. 

Thus came we to this day, wherein the leftist pot calls black the kettle, wherein a Democrat representative openly admits, even boasts, that if Trump is not impeached, the American people will re-elect him — and the American people must never be permitted to do that.

For the American Left, and for much of the political establishment, including many weak Republicans, the contest has become more than that — it has become an existential struggle.  The Left knows that if Trump is re-elected, it will cease to exist as a political force; its power will evaporate, and its major proponents will be exposed for what they are: unprincipled totalitarians.

The kind who kicked an 85-year-old pro-life man to the ground.

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Smoking Gun! Audio Of Ukrainian Official Admitting He Interfered In U.S. Election

To Help Hillary


Glenn Beck has just released an audiotape of the former Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, admitting he “helped” Hillary during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Sytnyk was convicted for election interference in December 2018 in Kiev. The court ruled that the publication of the “black ledger” documents “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

On the tape, he tells his friends, “Kolya” and “Ivan,” that “I was in charge of the investigation of their “black accounting” records. We made the [sic] Manafort’s data available to general public.”

 Note: On Aug. 19, 2016, Serhiy Leshchenko, then the acting Ukrainian Prosecutor General, held a press conference in Kiev where he revealed the “black ledger” of the Party of Regions. Leshchenko said it contained “previously secret records of payments made by the former pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych” to then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Yanukovych’s government was overthrown during the Ukrainian Revolution and he fled the country in February 2014. Leshchenko told reporters that “the information was obtained by an anonymous source in the burned-out ruins of the headquarters of Yanukoych’s party.” It’s unknown if the ledger was authentic or forged. Either way, it showed that large cash payments had been made to Paul Manafort. The revelation forced him to resign from the Trump campaign and signaled the start of his legal problems.

Beck said this tape has been floating around Ukraine for a while, but it was only recently translated into English.

Here is a transcript of the tape. Scroll down for the audiotape (Sytnyk’s conversation begins at 4:00).
Kolya: Did they, those Russians, help Trump? Your people?
Sytnyk: I think they did. Yeah. I helped him, too. Not him, but Hillary. I helped her.
Kolya: Yeah. Right. Then her position tottered, right?
Sytnyk: Well, this is how they write about it, right.
Ivan: Hillary’s humanitarian aid … [indiscernible.]
Kolya: Well, I’m about … the commentaries. At the time, we were not [indiscernible.]
Sytnyk: Trump … his purely inner problem … issue … they dominate over the external matters. While Hillary, she is — how shall I put it? She belongs to the cohort of politicians who comprise the hegemony in the US. Both in the US and the entire world, right? For us, it’s … sort of … better. For Americans … what Trump is doing is better for them.
Kolya: Well, we have lots of those American experts here now … [indiscernible.]
Sytnyk: Well, there, you see why Hillary lost the elections? I was in charge of the investigation of their “black accounting” records. We made the Manafort’s data available to general public.
Kolya: So what?
Sytnyk: He was imprisoned. Manafort then was the head of the Supreme Headquarter of Trump, right? Then he was dismissed, too, including due to the “black accounting.” After that, he was sentenced to 80 years of imprisonment term. How about Trump? Did he not give a s***. They have their system working there and it works smoothly.
Kolya: Everybody worked smoothly there.
Sytnyk: And when they carried out the elections, a week before the elections, the FBI reopened the investigation in respect of Hillary. So her rating dropped for 7 percent and that’s why Trump managed to win the elections at a pinch.
I’m still unable to understand why he’s fighting with the FBI. They try to catch him on the hand. If it were not the FBI, he would not have won the elections. They torpedoed Hillary’s ratings for 7 percent.
Glenn says, “So here he is. He is admitting to tampering with our elections. Admitted working with the Hillary Clinton campaign. He is actually convicted in the highest court in the land in Ukraine. This is all front page news, in Ukraine, while we are saying, ‘Was there anyone tampering with the election?'”

At the beginning of the podcast, Glenn reads an email written by Alexandra Chalupa , a Ukrainian-American lawyer and DNC contractor, sent to Louise Miranda at the DNC. Chalupa had been working feverishly to bring down Paul Manafort in 2016. This email is not new. Dan Bongino wrote about it in his book, “Spygate,” which was published last fall. I have posted about it. Chalupa writes:
Hey, a lot coming down the pipe. I spoke to a delegation of 68 investigative journalists from Ukraine last night at the Library of Congress, the Open World Society forum. They put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort. I invited Michael Isikoff, who I’ve been working with for the past few weeks, and connected him to the Ukrainians. More offline tomorrow, since there was a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in the next few weeks. Something I’m working on that you should be aware of.
Note: Glenn tells an interesting story about the day Manafort was arrested. He said on that very day, Clinton pal Tony Podesta shut down his lobbying firm which was one of the largest in Washington and had been operating for 30 years. He says: “This is why Tony Podesta shut down the Podesta Group, like on the day that Paul Manafort was arrested. Okay? As soon as they arrested him, the biggest lobbying firm, the Clinton lobbying firm, millions of dollars, [Podesta] walks into the office in one day, and says, ‘close the doors.’ Not like, ‘Hey, at the end of the week, or at the end of the month, we’re going to wrap things up,’ [he said ] ‘Close the doors.’ And he shut his firm down. Well, why? Because he’s working with the same group of people, that Manafort [was.]” 

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‘The Fact That House Democrats Invite You To Their Circus Does Not Require You To Beclown Yourself’



Late Friday evening, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney requesting he submit documents related to their impeachment inquiry by October 18th. In addition to Cummings, it was signed by Reps. Adam Schiff (Chair of House Intelligence Committee) and Eliot Engel (Chair of House Committee on Foreign Affairs). Cummings repeatedly insists that the letter is a subpoena.

The letter states, “We deeply regret that President Trump has put us—and the nation—into this position, but his actions have left us with no choice but to issue this subpoena.”
It cites several earlier deadlines which the White House has ignored.

Cummings writes that he is aware of President Trump’s intention to send a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday informing her that the White House refuses to cooperate with any document requests until a full House vote on impeachment has been taken.

Pelosi has refused to do so because once a vote is taken, Republicans will receive “some” rights to participate in the impeachment process. (Although the rights would be minor, Republicans currently have no rights. They can’t even question witnesses that come before the committee.) Additionally, she does not want to force Democrats serving in districts Trump won in 2016 to go on record voting for his impeachment.

He writes, “Speaker Pelosi has confirmed that an impeachment inquiry is underway, and it is not for the White House to say otherwise.” Mr. Cummings is telling Mulvaney it’s an impeachment inquiry because “Pelosi says it is.”

Not so fast, says former U.S. attorney and author Andrew McCarthy. He calls the Democrats’ impeachment action “Kabuki theatre” he writes:
You are not to be faulted if you think a formal inquest is under way and that legal process has been issued. The misimpression is completely understandable if you have been taking in media coverage — in particular, reporting on a haughty Sept. 27 letter from House Democrats, presuming to direct Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on pain of citation for obstruction, to cooperate in their demands to depose State Department officials and review various records.
As mentioned above, McCarthy explains that until a formal vote is taken in the house, this is not an impeachment inquiry and their “subpoenas” are merely letters. “Legally, it has no compulsive power. If anything, it is rife with legal deficiencies.” Rather than conducting an impeachment inquiry, he says House Democrats are merely conducting their 2020 campaign.

He notes that “standing committees do have subpoena power,” but recipients often object to subpoenas and choose to litigate. “Such challenges take time, though, and Democrats are in a hurry to close this show after a short run. Democrats want to have an impeachment show — um, inquiry — on television; they do not want to defend its bona fides in court.”

McCarthy writes that the Democrats are trying to “ipse dixit” their way to impeachment. I had to look that one up. It means “an assertion made but not proved.” Yes, that’s exactly what they’re doing. That’s how the Russian collusion investigation began as well.

In both the letter to Mick Mulvaney and the letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it says that failure to comply “shall constitute evidence of obstruction of the House’s impeachment inquiry.” But that is just not true.

The House is an independent body and can conduct an impeachment anyway they chose.

However, McCarthy points out:
The courts maintain their authority to protect the legal rights of persons and institutions ensnared in kangaroo tribunals. The fact that House Democrats invite you to their circus does not require you to beclown yourself.
Any competent court asked to evaluate a demand for information under the rubric of impeachment will observe that the process has a history. When the Framers debated whether to include an impeachment clause in the Constitution, they had serious concerns. They were designing a separation-of-powers system that endowed the coordinate branches with checks and balances to police each other. They understood that impeachment authority was necessary, but feared it would give the legislature too much power over the executive.
They also worried that impeachment could be politicized. If it were too easy to do procedurally, or it could be resorted to for trifling acts of maladministration, factions opposed to the president would be tempted to try to overturn elections and grind the government to a halt.
To address these concerns, the Framers adopted a burdensome standard — high crimes and misdemeanors (in addition to treason and bribery) — that would restrict impeachable offenses to truly egregious abuses of power. Then they erected an even higher bar: a two-thirds supermajority requirement for conviction in the Senate.
All this was to ensure that the electoral will of the people must never be overturned in the absence of misconduct so severe that it results in a broad consensus that the nation’s well-being requires removing the president from power.
President Trump is not without defenses. He has various privileges available to him and McCarthy writes that judges are generally deferential toward an executive’s claims of privilege. But Congress is given wider latitude to probe in a real impeachment inquiry.

If the House went to court to enforce their demands right now, before a formal vote has been taken, a judge would be less apt to side with them. McCarthy said, “The first thing a court’s going to want to know is, ‘Has the House voted to have an impeachment inquiry?’ And, a lot hinges on that, including how much expansion a court would give a president’s claim of executive privilege and privilege over matters that are in the president’s duties under Article II.”

Impeachment actions in the past have followed bipartisan debate in the House. They are conducted when a president is perceived to have committed a crime. Trump has not committed a crime and Republicans are not part of this action. The Democrats know they don’t have an “impeachable offense,” which is why they want to move so quickly. They are using impeachment as a political tool which is the exact opposite of what our Founders had intended.

McCarthy notes that, “If Democrats truly thought they had a case, they wouldn’t be in such a rush — they’d want everyone to have time to study it. But they don’t have a case, so instead they’re giving us a show.”
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Brennan Hears Footsteps....

Brennan Hears 

Barr's 'Chilling' Footsteps


James Clapper, the man who lied to Congress about spying on the American people was shocked back in April to hear William Barr testify before Congress that, yes, he thought that the Trump campaign had been spied upon by his political opponents. 

 As Breitbart reported:
Well, I thought it was most stunning and scary. I was amazed at that and rather disappointed that the attorney general would say such a thing. The term “spying” has all kinds of negative connotations, and I have to believe he chose that term deliberately. And I think it’s incredible that if he has concerns, he would have easily on his first day on the job, after his confirmation, asked his own IG, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, for a briefing on his preliminary, in the course of his investigation, that is, the IG’s investigation, whether there was any wrongdoing by the FBI. 
Barr has more than that, it would seem and has sent chills up Clapper’s spine that the walls may be closing in, not on President Trump, but on Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan for their seditious roles in the attempted coup against the President. According to a Wall Street Journal report:
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says… that Attorney General William Barr appears to be investigating a high-confidence finding of the US intelligence community assessment of the 2016 election sends a "chilling message to the intelligence community."

Brennan may be hearing those footsteps get louder as well with his increasingly hysterical commentaries at MSNBC, which, along with CNN, is where liars and leakers go to die, warning President Trump to keep off the grass. As Fox News reports:
Brennan… said he was "supposedly" going to be interviewed by U.S. Attorney John Durham but was concerned about Barr's role in the process of looking at the origins of the long-running Russia election meddling probe.
Given that Barr is now accompanying Durham on these things, it really makes me think that the hand of politics and of Trump are now being used to massage what this ongoing review quasi-investigation is," Brennan told host Nicole Wallace. "So I am concerned."
Fox News commentator and former congressman Jason Chaffetz notes Brennan’s panic and feels he is right to be concerned:
Chaffetz expressed that it was important for Barr to investigate Brennan and former director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
"If you're going to get to the bottom of the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] abuse, you have to understand what those two gentlemen were doing or not doing, and Barr has to pursue those facts."
"I think Brennan and Clapper have both shown their political bias. I think they're frightened to death that Michael Horowitz report is on the verge of coming out, that Mr. Durham has been on their tail, that the truth is going to be exposed…" 
It is laughable for Brennan to be concerned about “the hand of politics” since it was his intelligence community that meddled in the 2016 elections in ways a foreign adversary such as Russia could only dream of and attempted to overthrow a duly elected president. And where did the Ukraine whistleblower come from? John Brennan’s CIA.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer once warned, some would say threatened, Trump, even before he took office, regarding the power of the intelligence community and its wrath against those who question its authority over our government and our lives. As the Washington Examiner reported:
"Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday evening on MSNBC after host Rachel Maddow informed him that intelligence sources told NBC news that the briefing had not been delayed.
Is the Ukraine “whistleblower” the latest attempt by John Brennan’s intelligence community “getting back” at Trump?

“Now, John Brennan’s hands are as dirty as Obama’s in this whole thing. John Brennan… traveled to Ukraine back in the time period around 2016 under a fake passport so it wouldn’t be known that he had gone, and he was arranging data on the dossier and all of the other dirt that they were trying to amass. Ukraine -- not Russia, Ukraine -- is the center of the universe of all this… “John Brennan, Obama’s director-CIA, went to Ukraine under a fake passport so that nobody would know it was him. Fake name. Can you do that? Can you get a fake passport? No. John Brennan can, CIA director. I’m surprised he even needed a passport. But he went under a fake passport to get opposition research on Trump!
As I wrote here recently, Brennan may have colluded with foreign spies to help Hillary Clinton. And the mind harkens back to the day when an op/ed in the Washington Post, that right-wing rag, called for Brennan to be firedfor conducting illegal surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then lying about it:
Brennan was asked by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell whether the CIA had illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers “to thwart an investigation by the committee into” the agency’s past interrogation techniques… Brennan answered:
As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s -- that’s just beyond the -- you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do. {…}
And, you know, when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.

Now we know that the truth was far different. The Post’s Greg Miller reports:
CIA Director John O. Brennan has apologized to leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee after an agency investigation determined that its employees improperly searched computers used by committee staff to review classified files on interrogations of prisoners. {…}
A statement released by the CIA on Tuesday acknowledged that agency employees had searched areas of that computer network that were supposed to be accessible only to committee investigators. Agency employees were attempting to discover how congressional aides had obtained a secret CIA internal report on the interrogation program.
Brennan’s briefing of Sen. Harry Reid, which included information from the Steele dossier, certainly is a key indicator of his participation in the campaign to keep and/or kick Donald Trump out of the White House:

“According to Russian Roulette, by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of the left-wing Mother Jones, Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia’s interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only one who took direct action.

Two days after the briefing, Reid wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey asserting that “evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount.”

Reid’s letter referred to some public reporting about Trump campaign associates’ links to the Kremlin, but he also included a reference to information that may not have been made public at the time. He cited allegations that were included in the infamous Steele dossier about Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign at the time.

Brennan is a ringleader in the deep state coup against Trump. Instead of accusing AG Bill Barr of being corrupt, this might be a good time for Brennan to exercise his right to be silent.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.     
          

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