‘I Think We’ve Heard Enough’: Senate Republicans Now Coalescing Behind an Impeachment Trial Strategy

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

Reports are that Senate Republicans are now coalescing behind an impeachment trial strategy. 

According to The Hill, they lining up behind the idea of having a short trial with few or no witnesses, with the hope that President Donald Trump will get a quick acquittal and clear the decks for the election. 

Some who previously spoke about immediately dismissing the matter, now appear to be agreeable to the short trial idea.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said his goal is “to have as short a trial as possible.”

“I think there’s a desire by senators, quite honestly, to get this chapter closed and moved forward,” Graham told reporters. 

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said that when it comes to a trial “shorter is better,” and that he thought his colleagues were coalescing behind that. 

“I think shorter is better for lots of reasons,” Cramer said. “I think people are ready to move on.” [….]

“I’m ready to get this thing and get it done,” said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). “It’s time for him to have his day in court. … I don’t want to a vote to dismiss. I want a vote to acquit. The president deserves to have due process.” 

Graham, who previously advocated dismissing the articles, added that a “motion dismissed will not stand. … I don’t want a motion to dismiss. I want a vote on the articles themselves.” 

Sen. Josh Hawley said that if the White House was amenable to not calling witnesses, he was ready to vote right away. “I’m ready to vote now,” Hawley said. “I think the articles are a joke.” 

The White House had previously spoken of calling a variety of witnesses from Hunter Biden and the whistleblower, to even Joe Biden, who just said he would not comply if subpoenaed for the impeachment trial. But their recent comments have appeared more open to the idea of the quick proceeding, with White House director of legislative affairs Eric Ueland saying “the facts belie the allegation and the facts speak very strongly for themselves.”

“Do we know enough? Have we learned enough after listening to all this to go on and vote on the two very weak articles of impeachment? Or do we want to have a show trial in which both sides try to embarrass the other and put on a, you know, an embarrassing scene, frankly, for the American people?,” McConnell said, characterizing the decision on witnesses. 

“Obviously, I think we’ve heard enough. After we’ve heard the arguments, we ought to vote and move on,” he added. 

But once they start the trial it isn’t solely up to McConnell, any vote to dismiss or any vote on the rules would require 51 Senators will be needed to sign off. There are currently 53 Republicans and 43 Democrats, with 2 Independents. 

No Republican Senators have said they agree with Sen. Chuck Schumer’s witness requests for people like White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney or former National Security Adviser John Bolton to testify. 

During the Clinton impeachment, they heard from three witnesses behind closed doors. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told a Maine radio station that she thought that the Clinton process was a good model, although it’s not clear that that’s what she would be endorsing. 

But Republicans have said that if Democrats want to call witnesses, then they can pull in Hunter and Joe Biden and ramp it up.

“Well, if we go down in the witness path, we’re going to want the whistleblower. We’re going to want Hunter Biden. You can see here that this is the kind of mutual assured destruction episode that will go on for a long time,” McConnell told Fox News Radio.

Republicans believe they could have an advantage because the administration is expected to exert executive privilege to prevent Mulvaney or Bolton from testifying, setting up a lengthy court battle for Senate Democrats. 

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) made that point during a recent closed-door caucus lunch, telling his colleagues that while Democrats’ witnesses could be tied up in a months-long court battle the GOP witness wish list would not currently face the same fight, according to a Republican senator who attended the lunch.

Kennedy echoed his warning publicly during a Fox News interview pledging that if Democrats want a “full-blown trial,” by calling witnesses Republicans oppose, GOP senators would follow suit.

“If they want a trial,” he said, “my God, we are going to have a trial.”

Proceeding, while likely to an acquittal, still could open up some things they don’t anticipate, like the peeling away of Republicans from having a solid “51 vote block” on rules and/or witnesses. And might it not be better to let Pelosi sit in the hole she’s made for herself while Republicans concentrate on winning the election? 

But there’s another question this doesn’t quite answer – what happens if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to sit on the articles? Do they intend to proceed without her? Constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz has said they can, but they still would need to change the present rules in order to do so since the present rules from 1986 presume the House presenting the articles to the Senate.

FBI Analyst Gets Jail Time for Illegally Accessing Right-Wing Lobbyist's Email to 'Protect' Mueller

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

We’ve seen the horrible FBI abuse revealed by the IG report issued by Michael Horowitz. 

But what it revealed was not just the specific abuse but an attitude under former Director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe that allowed such things to happen, of people thinking they were entitled to do what they want and they’d get away with it. 

While U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the FISA abuse and other misconduct, it’s really not clear whether that old attitude has been cleared up and out yet. 

Case in point: Mark Tolson, now a former FBI analyst, who was disturbed that lobbyist Jack Burkman was alleging he had information that might be damaging about Special Counsel Robert Mueller. 

Coincidentally, Tolson’s wife had the password to Burkman’s email account after having done work for him and she gave it to her husband. 

Tolson then illegally accessed Burkman’s email in October 2018, spied around, took screenshots of messages and then offered up those pictures to a journalist. 

Tolson admitted his crime last week, confessing that he did it to “try to protect Director Mueller.” His wife, despite her role in the action, wasn’t charged. 

“This is actually a very serious offense,” Brinkema said. “You’re lucky. Your wife is lucky. The government could have prosecuted her as well.”

“You can’t just rummage through other people’s accounts,” Brinkema added. “You had to have known better.” 

But despite that rebuke, Brinkema didn’t level a very heavy sentence. Tolson pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of computer fraud and abuse and faced a maximum sentence of a year. Brinkema sentenced Tolson to serve a week in jail and serve 50 hours of community service. He did however lose his security clearance and his job as a result. 

His sentence disturbed Burkman, who said he believed that Tolson got off easily because of politics.

Under Trump, USA has gone from...

Jon Dougherty reporting for The National Sentinel

Under Trump, 

USA has gone from creating one-fifth of the world’s GDP to creating one-FOURTH of it

The thing about Trump's pro-growth policies is that they even help Democrats

Posted on December 28, 2019

(TNS) Whenever President Donald Trump brags about how well the U.S. economy is doing under his administration and under his policies, the lamestream Democrat media rushes in to “fact-check” him with out-of-context references, measures, and figures in an attempt to refute him.

But the facts are thus: The U.S. economy under this president, not the last one, is reaching new heights and never-before-seen growth that can no longer be seriously refuted.

One of the latest stats demonstrating just how good Trump has made things for all Americans is this one: The massive U.S. economy comprised one-fifth of global GDP before he took office, and since it has risen to one-fourth of the world’s GDP.

In reporting on Britain’s rising economic might, The Sun noted:

France was due to overtake the UK economy in the 2016-19 period but failed to do so.

The research also found that the USA now makes up for a quarter of the world’s GDP – the largest share of the world’s economy since 2007.

And the American economy is not due to be overtaken by China until 2033 – three years later than forecast.

The US share of global GDP is 3.6 per cent higher than halfway through Barack Obama’s presidency in 2011.

“The USA in 2019 reached 24.8% of world GDP,” the Centre for Economics and Business Research added.

As for whether China will actually come to dominate the U.S. in terms of global GDP share and overall size of economy, time will tell. But clearly, if future presidents adhere to Trump’s pro-growth economic policies, we frankly don’t see how any country could outperform ours, even one as densely populated as China.

In addition to producing a quarter of global wealth, domestically, U.S. markets and Wall Street are booming as well, adding trillions in value to the 401(k) retirement accounts of tens of millions of Americans (including those who don’t support the president and his pro-growth agenda).

Anticipate House Impeachment Articles After January 3rd, 2020 – Oral Arguments for Mueller Grand Jury Material

credit: sundance at CTH

Oral arguments in the DC Court of Appeals for the House Judiciary Committee to obtain Mueller’s grand jury information, are scheduled for January 3rd, 2020.  The HJC is leveraging the Senate impeachment trial in their argumentsto gain access to the Mueller material. This approach is by design.

With that in mind it seems likely any House impeachment articles will not be delivered to the Senate until after the DC court arguments, and likely not before the ruling:

[HJC -vs- DOJ full brief link here]

In addition to the Mueller evidence, the HJC is seeking judicial enforcement authority to force the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn.  Both HJC appeals court arguments are using the Senate trial to bolster their case.

The rushed House articles were/are a means to an end. That is – a way for House lawyers to argue in court all of the constitutionally contended material is required as evidence for pending judicial proceedings, a trial in the Senate.

This would explain why all the prior evidence debated for inclusion and legal additions to “articles of impeachment” were dropped. Instead the House focused only on quickly framing two articles that could facilitate two pending court cases.

As interested observers will note the House never voted to authorize the full judicial impeachment process; instead they voted to approve an inquiry into whether an impeachment should take place.  By not voting to authorize articles of impeachment the House never gained ‘judicial enforcement authority‘.

What the house crew have assembled is an interesting back-door attempt to position a valid claim for evidence against the accused without having first gained judicial authority for it. The HJC is now arguing to appeals courts, and likely to SCOTUS, the blocked evidentiary material is critical evidence in a soon-to-be-held Senate trial.

The House Judiciary Committee (HJC) led by Chairman Jerry Nadler has been seeking: (1) Mueller grand jury material; (2) a deposition by former White House counsel Don McGahn; and less importantly (3) Trump financial and tax records.  Each of these issues is currently being argued. [The supreme courtwill hear financials/taxes in April].

House counsel Doug Letter responded to the DC Appeals Court arguing the forced testimony of White House counsel Don McGahn is needed for evidence in the impeachment trial. [Court pdf Avail Here] And the grand jury material is needed to highlight the second article, Obstruction of Congress [Court pdf Avail Here]

Looking at the legal maneuvers from that perspective means the grand jury material is the unspoken goal and impeachment is simply the enhanced means to obtain it.

The 6(e) material relates to evidence gathered by the Mueller team for grand jury proceedings in their two-year effort to construct a case against President Trump.

Remember, the Mueller evidence was gathered during a counterintelligence investigation, which means all things Trump -including his family and business interests- were subject to unbridled surveillance for two years; and a host of intelligence gathering going back in time indefinitely. A goldmine of political opposition research.

Obviously if Jerry Nadler could get his hands on this material it would quickly find its way into the DNC, and ultimately to the 2020 democrat candidate for president. This material would also be fuel for a year of leaks to DC media who could exploit rumor, supposition, and drops of information that Andrew Weissmann and team left to be discovered.

The oral arguments are next Friday, January 3rd, 2020.

Full HJC Brief Here

Full DOJ Response Brief Here

By Steven Hayward for POWERLINE

Beat the Drum, Liberals

Kevin Drum is a left-of-center writer who is worth reading at Mother Jones. He often departs from liberal orthodoxy, as we’ve noted here in the past. To end this year, Drum offers “A Few Things Liberals Believe That They Shouldn’t.” Six, to be precise. They are:

1. Head Start (and similar pre-K programs) raise student achievement.
2. American health care is expensive because of private insurance.
3. We have a retirement crisis.
4. The black/white test score difference is all about test prep, biased tests, etc.
5. The 1994 crime act was responsible for mass incarceration.
6. Charter schools don’t work.

Read the whole thing—it’s a short piece—for the details and supporting evidence. It is points 4 & 5 that are most interesting. On test scores, Drum says:

At most, the best evidence suggests that things like test prep account for a small fraction of the black-white difference in test scores. This is important. The black-white gap in education is one of America’s biggest failures, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge that it’s real, not to toss it off as merely a statistical artifact.

And on the incarceration rate, he offers this chart, showing that the increase in incarceration began before the 1994 crime bill:

One of the facts of this story that the left is trying to cram down an Orwellian memory hole is that the move to crack down on crime was supported strongly by local black leaders in many American cities (and in fact the Congressional Black Caucus largely supported the 1994 crime bill) because especially drug-related crime was out of control in the late 1980s.

Drum adds:

For what it’s worth, black incarceration rates have also dropped substantially over the past couple of decades.

Modern Liberalism Strikes Again

Convicted Pedophile and 'Antifa' Activist Is an Associated Press Photojournalist

If a photojournalist was accused of sympathizing with the alt-right, AFP and AP would catch that in a background check or immediately release a public statement condemning them if they were informed afterwards.

But a sex offender who preyed on kids and is personally involved in extreme-left activism he is supposed to be reporting on? Hard to believe, but this is not a deal breaker for employment in news gathering at prestigious wire services tasked with framing stories copied by most major publications, including conservative ones.

 Eric Striker Oct 28, 2019 



A man convicted of committing a sexual offense with a 13-year-old girl is a Philadelphia-based anarchist and professional photographer, National Justice can confirm.

40-year-old Cory Vernon Clark (born Yehudah Kalman) has his work featured prominently on a number of mainstream media outlets. He is a contributing photojournalist to the Associated Press, AFP, Sipa Press and has almost 1700 pro-Antifa propaganda images on media service Getty, credited under the name Cory Clark. 

Clark specializes in photographic propaganda glorifying left-wing extremists, and for the last several years has been a fixture at anarchist and communist events in Eastern Pennsylvania and Washington DC. He is one of a handful of journalists anarchist groups like Philly Antifa and Smash Racism DC allow to film them because they know he is on their side.

He was also instrumental in "doxing" people at previous National Policy Institute events going back to 2013. His high quality photographs were provided to Daryle Lamont Jenkins with the intention of identifying young men attending the conference and later harassing them. Here is an image of him outside the National Press Club in 2013 during an "Antifa" protest:



Clark's company, Lawless Media LLC, is run jointly with his wife Dani Finger. On their website they explain that the business' mission is to use their cameras to aid in the construction of leftist political narratives, rather than report news objectively:

For years I have sought to capture the struggles of people fighting not just for their freedom, but their lives and the lives of their families and communities. I have sought to capture the struggle for their humanity and against indignity and injustice, for something more than, day to day survival, for a future. Many of these images have been or are a part of specific projects, some have been published others have been distributed via social media or have been exhibited in art exhibitions.

This is the rule, rather than the exception, when looking at how the press works in the United States and much of the liberal West.

The infiltration of extremists and deviants like Clark into liberal media has discredited self-chosen information gatekeepers and caused the public to lose faith in the "institution." There are many cases like this.

On Clark's merchandise website, he sells materials like "White Supremacy is Terrorism" and a "Fuck You Pig" t-shirt, a portrait of Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and an artistic print of two masked female "antifa" black bloc members.

If a photojournalist was accused of sympathizing with the alt-right, AFP and AP would catch that in a background check or immediately release a public statement condemning them if they were informed afterwards.

But a sex offender who preyed on kids and is personally involved in extreme-left activism he is supposed to be reporting on? Hard to believe, but this is not a deal breaker for employment in news gathering at prestigious wire services tasked with framing stories copied by most major publications, including conservative ones.

Like all Liberals, he is a pedophile, a rapist,a liar and of course a  LIBERAL  working for our Main Stream Media.  SURPRISED?

Testifying for Republicans should not be...

By Jonathan Turley Opinion Contributor at The Hill

The views expressed by contributors are

their own and not the view of The Hill 

Testifying for Republicans should not

be a sin for academics

December 28, 2019

Greg Nash

American journalist H.L. Mencken once observed, "Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them." Despite an unending respect for Mencken, this is an occasion in which I found him mistaken, after I violated the Eleventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not testify for Republicans."

Worse yet, I am a recidivist sinner, after testifying as a constitutional expert in both the Clinton and Trump impeachment hearings. Like all mortal sins, the violation of the Eleventh Commandment comes with not just eternal but immediate damnation. What is most striking about this commandment is that it does not matter if your testimony is made in good faith. For example, under the Ninth Commandment, you are only guilty if you give false evidence against your neighbor. Under the Eleventh Commandment, it does not matter if your testimony is true or false. A law-fearing academic must not give any testimony for Republicans.

In my recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding President Trump's impeachment, I opposed the position of my fellow witnesses that the definition of actual crimes is immaterial to their use as the basis for impeachment - and I specifically opposed impeachment articles based on bribery, extortion, campaign finance violations or obstruction of justice. The committee ultimately rejected those articles and adopted the only two articles I felt could be legitimately advanced: abuse of power, obstruction of Congress. Chairman Jerrold Nadler even ended the hearing by quoting my position on abuse of power. Our only disagreement was that I opposed impeachment on this record as incomplete and insufficient for submission to the Senate.

None of that matters under the Eleventh Commandment, however. It is the act of testifying for Republicans that is a sin against the legal academy. Indeed, what followed was a series of false stories attacking not my testimony but me, personally. The falsity of these stories is a warning to any academic who considers straying from the Democratic path.

Turley flipped his testimony from the Clinton impeachment. One of the most bizarre false stories was that I testified differently on my views of impeachment during the Clinton and Trump impeachments. Given the 21-year gap, it might not be strange for views to change. However, my views in the two cases were the same.

In both hearings, I said a president could be impeached for noncriminal conduct, including abuse of public office. Yet stories on CNN and other outlets objected that, in the Clinton case, I warned Congress, "If you decide that certain acts do not rise to impeachable offenses, you will expand the space for executive conduct." Somehow this was portrayed as a "flip-flop" since I was arguing against impeachment in the Trump hearings on this record. It doesn't matter that the Judiciary Committee did precisely what I suggested in dropping the four criminal theories for the articles or going forward with the two I said would be legitimate. I was not arguing against impeaching on the two articles adopted - only that a completed record was absent.

More importantly, the statement in the Clinton case referred to perjury. Democrats argued back then that a president could commit perjury on some subjects, such as sexual relations, and not face impeachment; they argued that an impeachment crime must be tied to the office, not to personal interests. That was ridiculous and would allow a president to kill a lover but not face impeachment. Indeed, the Democratic position would allow a presidential Harvey Weinstein to abuse countless interns and then pressure them to lie to an independent counsel.

Turley thought Justice Sotomayor wasn't smart enough. Perhaps the most vile false story can be traced to a tweet sent out by a University of Baltimore law professor asking, "Does anybody else remember @JonathanTurley appearing on MSNBC to explain that Sonia Sotomayor didn't have the intellect to serve on the Supreme Court?" I certainly didn't remember that - because I never said anything like that. No matter: Soon, from MSNBC to liberal websites, the story was all the rage, with titles such as "Jonathan Turley thought Sonia Sotomayor wasn't smart enough to be on the Supreme Court."

When then-Judge Sotomayor was nominated, I was asked as a legal commentator to review her opinions and give my view of what that body of work suggested about her potential on the Supreme Court. The issue at the time was whether President Obama was appointing an intellectual counterweight to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. I noted that her opinions were narrow and offered few insights into her potential as an intellectual force on the court. My comments were directed to her opinions, not her intellect. And I was not alone in this conclusion: Adam Liptak in The New York Times noted that her opinions were "narrow" and "reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language."

In the interview cited by the Baltimore professor, I gave my view of 30 of Sotomayor's opinions, which did not contain anything particularly deep or profound in judging her possible impact on the court. However, I immediately stated that this is not unique and that other justices have had similarly short, unremarkable appellate opinions yet proved to be profound on the Supreme Court. I expressly compared Sotomayor to Justice John Paul Stevens, whom I have long praised; I also said that Sotomayor could prove to be a truly great justice but that her opinions did not offer any glimpse into how she might emerge in such a role.

In my analysis of Justice Sotomayor's nomination, I returned to these points and specifically objected to those who said her narrow decisions were evidence of a lack of intellectual depth. I wrote, "This is demonstrably absurd. These opinions are little different from those of [Justices] Alito, Souter, or the limited writings of [Justice] Thomas. Clearly, Sotomayor is quite intelligent. This record is little different from records of Republican nominees who enthralled these same critics." And I repeatedly stressed that she could prove to be a great nominee in finding voice and depth in her opinions on the court.

Some articles objected that, in an "unprompted" comment, I raised Sotomayor's gender and race. I did so to praise the selection of the first Latina to the court, a nomination that I said was "rightfully" a point of pride. Moreover, the vast majority of news stories also referenced that historic aspect of her nomination. However, that was separate from the analysis of her opinions and the question of her intellectual legacy. What also was omitted is that, before Sotomayor's nomination, I wrote a column on intellectual leaders on the courts and pushed for the nomination of Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit, a liberal powerhouse.

None of that matters, however, because heresy demands condemnation - whether or not it is based in reality. After all, this is all meant to get people not to seriously consider the flaws in the impeachment, including the proposed articles that ultimately were dropped. So, for any academic tempted to testify for Republicans in an impeachment proceeding, I can only caution that Romans 12:19 may say that "vengeance is mine ... sayeth the Lord" - but judgment will be more immediate for anyone who strays from the chosen professorial path.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law for George Washington University and served as the last lead counsel during a Senate impeachment trial. He testified as a witness expert in the House Judiciary Committee hearing during the impeachment inquiry of President Trump.

Where those insane ideas about getting rid of prisons and police come from

 Article by Monica Showalter in "The American Thinker":

The far left has been throwing out unpopular, seemingly out-of-the-blue, and very much un-discussed bad ideas, such as the two described by Thomas Lifson this morning, the one about how schoolkids can no longer be suspended for disobeying their teachers, and the other one about abolishing the police.

These ideas are coming from somewhere, and it's not the homeless encampments that are the inevitable outcome of leftist social policies.

The Soros front groups can take some of the blame - Soros himself has always been all about creating chaos in the name of "open society" and sometimes "civil society" by ending all norms of civilization, reserving those things for the very, very rich who can pay for security guards and other security measures. George Soros's baleful foundation which finances so many "justice" initiatives, such as ending "the school to prison pipeline" has been promoting those crazinesses for years.

The prestigious universities, though, are another source. We all know how the universities were there to scoop up Bill Ayers after his 'guilty as sin, free as a bird' aquittal for terrorism, and how he's since promoted "justice" initiatives. His adopted son Chesa Boudin has just got elected District Attorney in San Francisco on the argument of ending all norms of crime and punishment, his schtick is pressuring victims into something called "restorative justice" which means violent criminals, with consent of their victims, don't have to go to jail. 

And it's not just the baleful influence of Ayers in academia, there are far more brazen advocates of these bad ideas. Way back in 2014, when I wrote this editorial for Investor's Business Daily, criticizing the University of California at Los Angeles for bringing back far-left former Communist Party U.S.A. and Black Panther activist (and acquitted terrorist) Angela Davis triumphantly back to the University, where she received awards and a big-dollar one-day-a-week lecture gig, I recall how in her speech to the students, she called for abolishing prisons. That's right, get rid of them entirely, in the name of "restorative justice." At the time, I thought she lived on another planet and didn't write about it. I probably should have. 

But there Davis was -- five years ago she made her call to end incarceration altogether, the lefties batted their palms together in applause, and then she left the stage, taking no questions afterward. 

Which is really convenient, actually. When you have ideas as crazy as that, it's best to only take questions in a classroom where you can mark down anyone with the temerity to question.

Bottom line - these bad ideas -- getting rid of jails, getting rid of police, getting rid of visits to the principal, and what next, getting rid of restriction, are all crazy ideas percolating away in prestigious universities and well-monied think tanks, outside the purview of voters. They may be dismissed as ivory tower la-de-da nonsense but because these are fancy and monied places, they are getting into wider society now, not through democratic discussion, but from imposition by leftists with power. 

 Maybe it's time to end publicly funded liberal universities and tax bad think tanks, instead of abolish those critical safeguards that keep civilized society civilized, such as police, punishment and prisons.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/where_those_insane_ideas_about_getting_rid_of_prisons_and_police_come_from.html#ixzz69VzLg8aT

The lies and distortions by the hatchet men at Fusion GPS

Jason Foster commentary at Washington Examiner

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch tried to keep the American people in the dark as long as possible. For most of 2017, the founders of Fusion GPS hid the truth about the origins of their now-infamous dossier on President Trump. The real story behind their fight to keep its partisan funding a secret is very different from the version the journalists-for-rent tell in their recent book, Crime in Progress. I know, because I was there. 

They smear me, and my former boss, Sen. Chuck Grassley, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then they paint themselves as victims of “ruthlessly partisan” McCarthyite tactics. The irony is rich, given that these former journalists collected a million bucks from one political party to accuse the other of acting as agents of Russia. 

The dossier they peddled ignited hysteria about alleged traitors in our government more than anything else has since Joe McCarthy’s Enemies from Within speech nearly 70 years ago. Unlike traditional opposition research, the dossier relied on anonymous foreign sources to allege an international criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Two independent reviews have since gutted its sensational claims. 

The report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general exposed how the FBI improperly used the dossier to justify domestic spying (a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant). The IG made it clear that the dossier was clearly unreliable. Special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to find sufficient evidence to charge a single American with the dossier’s collusion conspiracy despite two years, $32 million, 500 witnesses, and 2,800 subpoenas-worth of additional investigation. 

Like the dossier itself, Fusion’s attempt to defend its work in Crime in Progress cannot withstand scrutiny. It devotes a chapter to denouncing Grassley for asking inconvenient questions about Fusion and the dossier. The essentially fictitious story casts Simpson as “Captain America": 

Working to “protect the republic at all costs” from a Manchurian Candidate, with the First Amendment as his only shield, Simpson battles Congressional persecutors who were “trashing the Bill of Rights” by subpoenaing his bank to learn who funded the dossier. 

Fusion’s founders target me, as then-counsel to Grassley, for supposedly “pulling the strings” that led to outing their secret. They had promised never to reveal who bankrolled the project. Why? Their book concedes a “more strategic reason” to stonewall: They wanted to control the larger political narrative. 

As they write in Crime in Progress: “If it came out too soon that the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton Campaign, that revelation would allow the Republicans to depict [Christopher] Steele’s work as a partisan hit job.” It was “a fact that Fusion managed to keep secret” for nearly 11 months after the dossier became public. 

During those 11 months, Fusion’s clients denied their involvement, and Fusion fought to keep anything from coming to light that would contradict those denials. Grassley tried to learn more about the dossier’s claims and Fusion’s involvement. Fusion’s founders claim they would have been willing “to explain their past work” without a protracted battle if “Grassley had simply approached Fusion in good faith and asked.” 

Actually, we tried. When I called Simpson, he immediately refused to talk. He lawyered up. He’s also one of only two people who refused to cooperate with the inspector general. Without voluntary cooperation, prying any information loose would prove to be a challenge. Absent a full committee vote, no subpoena could be issued without Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s agreement. Contrary to Fusion’s caricature of our efforts as hyperpartisan, we adopted those new rules in early 2017 to strengthen the committee’s hand in what we expected would be bipartisan oversight work during the Trump administration. 

Feinstein was initially willing to question Fusion, but bipartisan efforts to look into the dossier and its allegations soon disappeared. In the beginning, she co-signed document requests to Fusion, which its founders misrepresent in their book as ominous partisan threats solely from Grassley. Feinstein also agreed to subpoena Simpson to testify at a public hearing in the summer of 2017, but he refused to appear, citing his Fifth Amendment rights. We later negotiated a limited voluntary interview in private, where he refused to answer questions on many topics, including who funded the dossier. 

Feinstein increasingly began to resist any dossier-related line of inquiry. At the time, Grassley and his staff were unaware the Democratic National Convention’s law firm had funded the dossier or that that a former Feinstein staffer, Daniel Jones, had privately claimed to the FBI that he raised $50 million from “seven to 10 wealthy donors primarily in New York and California.” That money reportedly funds Fusion’s ongoing postelection efforts to vindicate the dossier. It’s unclear how much Feinstein and her staff knew about this at the time.

Grassley played it straight. He supported the Mueller investigation and bucked his own GOP leadership in the Senate to shepherd a bipartisan bill protecting Mueller’s independence through his committee. He worked to conduct vigorous oversight and ask tough questions of everyone, even threatening to subpoena Trump’s son to ensure Democrats had an unlimited opportunity to question him on the record. Of course, Fusion’s narrative omits this evidence of good faith. 

The House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Fusion’s bank records, and in late October 2017, its clients confessed to funding the dossier after it became clear they were going to lose in court. New York Times senior White House correspondent Maggie Haberman wrote, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” A nonpartisan, nonprofit organization complained to the Federal Election Commission that campaign disclosures falsely described payments to Fusion for opposition research as “legal services.” 

During the court battle, Fusion unleashed “a blizzard of filings” in which it “piled on new allegations” of supposed congressional misconduct. The court rejected all of them. 

One of the failed tactics that Fusion considered “central” was to argue that the House Intelligence Committee learned “Fusion had an account at TD Bank from someone in Grassley’s staff” and to imply that was somehow improper. While it is true that we had asked about the bank during Simpson’s voluntary interview on the Senate side, it is false to claim, as Fusion does, that we learned the bank’s name from his “confidential” interview and that the information was unavailable elsewhere. 

Anyone reading the transcript (p. 17-18) can see that committee staff already knew the bank’s name and mentioned it first. Fusion’s attorney did not ask how we learned it, and we wouldn’t have answered if he had. The committee protects whistleblowers and confidential sources, just as the press does. Fusion had apparently made little effort to keep its bank’s name confidential up to that point. Not only did Simpson voluntarily confirm it when asked, but we also had reason to believe he listed it on invoices to clients, so it was hardly a state secret. 

Casting aspersion on the congressional investigators who forced the truth about the dossier’s funding into the open is no more effective in Fusion’s book than it was in the court proceedings. In the end, it’s merely a distraction from the bigger issues with the dossier’s unreliability, which go far beyond the partisan motives of its sponsors. 

Although the special counsel and inspector general reports dealt devastating blows to its credibility, Simpson and Fritsch still maintain in their book that “time will tell” whether the dossier “deserves to take its place among” documents that have “bent the course of history,” such as the Pentagon Papers or the Warren Report. A more apt analogy might be the phony list of traitors hyped by McCarthy. But, unlike the Americans targeted in the dossier, a few of McCarthy’s victims actually were colluding with the Russians.

Jason Foster was chief investigative counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
He is now a consultant at DCI Group.

Latest progressive ‘big idea’ is so foolish it’s hard to believe they’re serious… but they are

Article by Thomas Lifson in "The American Thinker":

Some progressive ideas sound good and seduce the young and naïve with their idealism. Socialism, for example, pretends that selfishness and indolence would not result from common ownership of the means of production.  “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was so seductive that it helped inspire communists for over a century, and still appeals to those whose needs exceed their abilities.

But some other ideas, currently being taken seriously by American progressive intellectuals are so self-evidently ridiculous that it is hard to believe that anyone could take them seriously. But this, via City Journal, is not a joke:

The latest call to action from some criminal-justice activists: “Abolish the police.” From the streets of Chicago to the city council of Seattle, and in the pages of academic journals ranging from the Cardozo Law Review to the Harvard Law Review and of mainstream publications from the Boston Review to Rolling Stone, advocates and activists are building a case not just to reform policing—viewed as an oppressive, violent, and racist institution—but to do away with it altogether. When I first heard this slogan, I assumed that it was a figure of speech, used to legitimize more expansive criminal-justice reform. But after reading the academic and activist literature, I realized that “abolish the police” is a concrete policy goal. The abolitionists want to dismantle municipal police departments and see “police officers disappearing from the streets.”
One might dismiss such proclamations as part of a fringe movement, but advocates of these radical views are gaining political momentum in numerous cities. In Seattle, socialist city council candidate Shaun Scott, who ran on a “police abolition” platform, came within 1,386 votes of winning elected office. During his campaign, he argued that the city must “[disinvest] from the police state” and “build towards a world where nobody is criminalized for being poor.” At a debate hosted by the Seattle Police Officers Guild, Scott blasted “so-called officers” for their “deep and entrenched institutional ties to racism” that produced an “apparatus of overaggressive and racist policing that has emerged to steer many black and brown bodies back into, in essence, a form of slavery.” Another Seattle police abolitionist, Kirsten Harris-Talley, served briefly in as an appointed city councilwoman. Both Scott and Harris-Talley enjoy broad support from the city’s progressive establishment.

As it happens, something like this was attempted when the Boston Police went on strike a century ago.  Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge called out the National Guard and mobilized other forces, such as the park police, but there was widespread looting and open criminality in the streets. Nine people died as inexperienced Guardsmen and others (including Harvard students who volunteered as strikebreakers – how times have changed!) fought the rising anarchy.

A policeman has no more right to belong to a union than a soldier or a sailor. He must be ready to obey orders, the orders of his superiors, not those of any outside body. One of his duties is the maintenance of order in the case of strike violence. In such a case, if he is faithful to his union, he may have to be unfaithful to the public, which pays him to protect it. The situation is false and impossible.... It is the privilege of Boston policemen to resign if they are not satisfied with the conditions of their employment.... but it is intolerable that a city ... should be deserted by men who misunderstand their position and function as policemen, and who take their orders from outside.... [I]t is an imported, revolutionary idea that may spread to various cities. There should be plain and stern law against it. It is practically an analogue of military desertion... [I]t ought to be punished suitably and repressed.

As with President Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike shortly after he took office in 1981, the strikers were fired and replaced with new police officers.  Calvin Coolidge rode the wave of public approval all the way to the White House.

Progressivism is defined by the belief that wise governance (by progressives) can change human nature and bring about a social and political order that will overcome the selfishness, greed and other deadly sins that have been with is since the dawn of humanity.

How is that Harvard students and the New York Times of a century ago were so much more sensible than their successors today?  My hunch is that the extended peace and prosperity has allowed elites to drift off into fantasyland, where they indulge themselves in beliefs that win approval from others similarly untethered to reality, having never experienced unpleasant encounters with the baser instincts and behavior of humanity.

The very phenomenon of the current embrace of foolishness by those who occupy prestigious positions belies the notion of progress in human affairs. 

Hat tip: Richard Baehr

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/latest_progressive_big_idea_is_so_foolish_its_hard_to_believe_theyre_serious_but_they_amareem.html#ixzz69Vt1WmBH

WaPo: ‘We Were Wrong’ to say...

Beth Bauman reporting for Townhall

WaPo:

 ‘We Were Wrong' to Say Northam Should Resign

The Washington Post is walking back their previous calls for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to resign. The newspaper penned an editorial back in February after a photo of Northam wearing blackface or Klu Klux Klan garb emerged. At the time, the newspaper said he could "no longer effectively serve the people" in the state. 

"Facts do matter, and the ones surrounding the Northam fiasco remain unsettled and unanswered. First and foremost among the questions they raise: How could he possibly have admitted to something as damning as appearing in the photo if he was certain he wasn’t one of the people in it? How did that photo wind up on his page if he didn’t furnish it to the yearbook editors? What do the governor’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t statements say about his judgment?" the editorial board wrote at the time. "The explanations Mr. Northam has proffered are vague and unconvincing. Virginians deserve better. Mr. Northam’s time is up."

According to the editorial board, Northam has made great strides since the blackface scandal took place and they were wrong in calling for his resignation.

"...Mr. Northam has refocused his governorship on racial equity and reconciliation in what amounted to an extended act of public contrition and atonement. It has been astonishingly effective not just in terms of his own political rehabilitation — his poll numbers climbed from the depths — but also in setting a clear theme for his four-year term in office, delimited by Virginia’s prohibition on governors succeeding themselves," the newspaper wrote in a new editorial.

The Washington Post cited specifics that they claim show Northam has made great strides, like his weekly and monthly visits to racially significant sites and "seeking out counsel from black leaders or announcing an initiative to advance racial justice." They also referenced him recently hiring Janice Underwood as Virginia's first state director of diversity, equity and inclusion; the establishment of the Commission to Examine Racial Inequity to reevaluate Jim Crow-era laws; the creation of the Commission on African American History Education in the Commonwealth; and his biennial budget that includes providing low-income and minority students with free community college, expanding pre-k, and providing more funding to reduce the maternal mortality among women of color.

One of the newspaper's columnists shared the new editorial on Twitter, saying her previous calls for Northam's resignation "were wrong."

How many of these programs were established and funding was allocated so Northam could win reelection? As much as we'd like to believe that politicians do things like this to better their community, it's really a way for people like Northam to say they have learned and grown from their mistakes. Whether or not that's actually the case is a different story.

It's amazing to see a major newspaper, like the WaPo, say they were wrong in wanting a man who either wore blackface or dressed in KKK clothing to resign. You would think they would stick by their previous position. What Northam did was wrong. He can implement plenty of policies but nothing will negate that fact.