The nonsense is off-the-charts around this issue. The DNC media apparatus are playing a game of willful blindness (Mamet Principle) and the RNC media appear genuinely oblivious… It is beyond silly.
Today Pelosi stutters about releasing the articles sometime “soon”.
WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she’s not withholding articles of impeachment from the Senate “indefinitely” and will probably send them over “soon,” responding to mounting pressure to allow the Senate to open proceedings in President Trump’s impeachment trial.“You will keep asking me the same question, I will keep giving you the same answer,” Pelosi said in her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday morning. “As I said right from the start, we need to see the arena in which we are sending our managers. Is that too much to ask?” (more)
The House didn’t contract with two-dozen former Obama legal minds from in/around the Lawfare community (and the Mueller group) back in December ’18 and January ’19 including: Douglas Letter, Mary McCord, Norm Eisen, Barry Berke and Daniel Goldman, for a specific process; and now simultaneously get to pontificate that Speaker Pelosi is in charge of this process. She ain’t. Period.
This was/is an organized plan by all of the aforementioned with the goal of gaining legal authority to exploit the same team’s prior opposition research on Trump. The House impeachment is a means to an end; not the end itself.
The House has a group of dozens of various DOJ and former Obama officialsworking on their behalf. That House network also has several currently employed DOJ, FBI, State Department and Intelligence Community officials feeding them information on current real-time events. The HJC are currently arguing the Mueller material and the McGahn testimony are needed for the impeachment trial of President Trump.
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.
If the HJC team wins the argument to the three member DC Appellate Court, the DOJ will likely file for a full ‘en banc’ review by the entire panel. If the HJC wins the ‘en banc’ argument the DOJ will likely appeal for an administrative stay by the Supreme Court.
However, if the HJC team loses, they will most likely not file an appeal and will quickly release the impeachment articles to the Senate. The impeachment articles (Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress) are currently withheld in an effort to bolster the DC appeals court argument.
The primary goal is to gain the Mueller material; by design the impeachment process is a means toward that end. Impeachment is not the end; impeachment is the means to an end. Impeachment is the legal standing to exploit the Mueller material. [Background]
Remember, the Mueller evidence was gathered during a counterintelligenceinvestigation, 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.
The Mueller investigation itself was purposed to dig, legally, into every aspect of Donald Trump, his family, his friends, his finances, his companies, his legal holdings, his lawyers, his accountants, his history… all of it… and they did so under both Title-1 and Title-3 surveillance authority because the Mueller probe was a counterintelligence operation.
President Trump: travel records, phone records, electronic files, electronic communications, emails, electronic records, family files, medical records, bank records, tax records,… THE WORKS …all with unlimited surveillance authority as granted by former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and the useful status of an unlimited counterintelligence operation. Think about the scale of the material Weissmann and Mueller gained access to.
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.