impeachment

Supreme Court blocks House Dems’ efforts to get Mueller grand-jury info released

The Supreme Court temporarily denied a motion Wednesday from House Democrats to obtain grand-jury testimony and other documents from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as they conduct what they’ve referred to as an “ongoing presidential impeachment investigation” into President Trump. The court’s order kept undisclosed details from the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election out of the Democrats’ hands until at least early summer. Democrats have until June 1 to brief the court about whether the full case should be heard. The Democrats had told the court Monday they were in an “ongoing presidential impeachment investigation” while arguing that Mueller’s now-completed Russia probe needed to be turned over as a result. “The [House Judiciary] Committee’s investigation did not cease with the conclusion of the impeachment trial,” the Democrats told the nine justices. “If this material reveals new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the articles adopted by the House, the committee will proceed accordingly — including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment.” They were seeking testimony, transcripts and exhibits to look into the possible influence over decisions made in the prosecutions of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Stone was sentenced to three years in prison for obstructing Congress and other charges. The Justice Department moved to drop its case against Flynn after serious questions were raised about the nature of the investigation that led to his guilty plea of lying to the FBI. The Trump administration has been reluctant to turn over further documents related to Mueller’s probe to House Democrats. DOJ officials said they turned over all relevant information, citing grand-jury rules for not providing unredacted material. The agency argued that federal guidelines protected the secrecy of grand-jury materials and that the exception allowing the disclosure “preliminarily to or in connection with a judicial proceeding” didn’t apply, especially given Trump’s acquittal by the Senate in an impeachment trial earlier this year. Democrats said the preliminary impeachment hearings in the House constituted a pending judicial proceeding. The DOJ has been conducting a separate internal review of the Russia investigation origins, which is expected to be completed sometime during the summer. John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, was appointed last year by Attorney General Bill Barr to review the events leading up to the 2016 presidential election and through President Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Durham has since expanded his investigation to cover a post-election timeline spanning the spring of 2017 — when Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel. On Monday, Barr said he didn’t expect the probe to lead to any criminal charges against either former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Joe Biden. “As for President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement based on what I know, I don’t expect Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man,” Barr said. “Our concern of potential criminality is focused on others.”

Kudos to the Supremes for this decision, albeit a temporary one.  The Dems are wanting confidential grand jury testimony, they know they can’t have, so they can do Impeachment 2.0..in a never-ending witch hunt to undo the 2016 election, or in hopes of having another hoax read should President Trump get re-elected in November.  This is a win not just for team Trump, but for the rule of law…which affects all of us.

How much is Trump’s impeachment costing taxpayers?

The third impeachment trial in U.S. history is rapidly heading toward a close, with President Trump’s acquittal all but guaranteed after the Senate on Friday rejected a call to allow new witness testimony. According to an estimate from the Heritage Foundation in December, the Democrat-led House of Representatives inquiry, and eventual impeachment of Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on Dec. 18, cost taxpayers an estimated $3.06 million. That price tag includes the money spent on the salaries of 106 congressional staffers from the House Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Reform Committee, who worked on impeachment from Sept. 24 to Dec. 13, according to the Daily Signal. It also included the estimated hourly fees of six attorneys who appeared during hearings. At the heart of the impeachment case is the allegation that Trump intentionally withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to pressure the country to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest natural gas company, while his father was vice president. Trump has maintained that he acted appropriately. While the figure doesn’t include the Senate trial, the tab through December is sharply lower than the one for the impeachment investigation and trial of President Bill Clinton two decades ago. According to CNN, the independent probe into Clinton cost taxpayers $80 million in 1994. The Republican National Committee is picking up the tab for at least two of Trump’s private attorneys, according to The Washington Post, a far different strategy than that employed by Clinton, who set up a legal fund that failed to cover millions of dollars in bills before he left office. The law firms of Trump’s lead lawyer, Jay Sekulow, and attorney Jane Raskin have received $225,000 from the RNC through November, the Post reported. The party will pay the duo for their work in January and this month as the trial continues, according to the Post, which cited people familiar with the arrangement. Last year, the RNC and Trump’s fundraising committees brought in a combined $463.6 million, ending the year with $194.8 million in the bank, highlighting the party’s success in capitalizing on the threat of impeachment. “[Donors] are tuning out the Democrats’ politically motivated impeachment charade and turning out for the president and his record of results,” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said..

Again, keep in mind that the $3.06 Million of our hard-earned tax dollars on this impeachment hoax was through Dec. 18th of last year.  It’s still going on, and we’re in February.  So, that figure is just the beginning.  And, that’s just a balance sheet way of looking at it.  It says nothing about the hours and hours the Democrats in the House spent on it, instead of doin the work of the American people.  This has been a colossal waste of time, money, and OUR money…especially when we ALL knew exactly how this would end.   Keep this in mind when you go to the polls in November.  Remember how te Dems wasted your money on this bs.

Tucker Carlson: Democrats are defeated and humiliated

It’s been an awfully long week. But thank God, we’re ending it with two pieces of good news. The first is that Great Britain is an independent country again, as it has been for most of the last thousand years. Brexit has gone through. Cheers to our friends in the United Kingdom. Secondly, in this country, the impeachment farce is almost over. That’s our good news. The president will be acquitted. Now, we knew that from the first day, of course – which is one of the reasons this whole overhyped charade was always such an insulting waste of time. But now it’s official. Even Trump-hating Republicans in the Senate are thoroughly sick of this. They want it over. Yet, once started, nothing in Washington ends easily. The process continues on like a ghost ship. It’s the same sickness at work as on Black Friday. Mobs of desperate people are grasping at trinkets to fill a void within. It’s sad to watch. Jerry Springer wasn’t in the Senate this week, but Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., was. Check out what happened when Chief Justice John Roberts asked prosecutors to answer a final question. Nadler and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., raced to the podium, all but elbowing each other out of the way to get one last blessed moment on C-SPAN. “I want to be on TV!” “No, I do!” These people are buffoons. That moment was really the whole impeachment from start to finish. Narcissistic, degrading, pointless. A nation as great as this one deserves more, but that would require impressive leaders. Maybe next week we’ll look back on this whole chapter in shame. But for a few more days at least, the hysteria will continue. In fact, it will likely increase, believe it or not. The media class seemingly just figured out that Trump will not be removed from office before the Super Bowl. You’ve always known that. Obviously they had no idea. They’re literally stunned over on MSNBC. A person called Mara Gay declared that if the results of the last election aren’t nullified immediately, democracy will be dead forever. Think about that for a minute. She clearly hasn’t. It’s kind of hilarious, actually. In fact, she’s a member of The New York Times editorial board. Not that that makes her a journalist, but she’s still the best they can muster. Ponder that over the weekend. The politics editor of The Root, meanwhile, told viewers that now that Donald Trump is staying in office and, nothing can stop him from becoming an authoritarian dictator. He said Trump is literally going to cancel the election in California, our biggest state. OK, Jason Johnson, let us know when he tries. People like Johnson are saying things like this because they are so shocked their brains no longer work. They really thought Trump was going to be fired at the end of impeachment. They thought a five-minute phone call about Hunter Biden’s corruption would be enough to undo an election that 136 million people voted in. The press and the Democratic Party let their fantasies to over strip reality, but they’re about to be shocked back to consciousness very soon. The Iowa caucuses are just three days from now. Bernie Sanders is likely to win there. His only real rival is a man who should be having dinner at 4:30 at Golden Corral. Party leaders don’t really want either one of them, Sanders or Joe Biden. Their plan? The plan in Washington is to force voters to back Michael Bloomberg, a Napoleonic billionaire known for screaming at people who drink the wrong soda. None of it seems very appealing. The Democratic Party is in trouble. It’s about to collide with itself. By the way, that didn’t need to happen if Democrats had just spent the last three years coming up with, I don’t know, a credible plan to lower housing prices or raise middle-class wages or fix the student loan crisis they might be winning the election, but they didn’t do that. Instead, they tried the easy way out. They wasted their energy on wild conspiracies about Russia and Ukraine. And while they were doing that, their unhappiest but most energetic activists forced their candidates to take lunatic positions on abortion, guns, race, gender, climate, you name it, positions that are way out of the mainstream, even among Democrats. It adds up to a disaster, and they know it’s a disaster. That’s why they’re so upset. The good news is that, as awful and stupid as impeachment was, it hurt the people responsible for it most of all.

Let’s hope..  Thanks Tucker!  That was excellent!!!   🙂

Opinion/Analysis: Trump’s conviction in impeachment trial not justified even if Bolton claims are true

After sitting on their hands and listening to arguments for a week in President Trump’s impeachment trial, senators were finally allowed to pose their own questions Wednesday. It proved to be illuminating. As is often the case, the first question was the most penetrating and important one. It got to the heart of the Democrats’ principal accusation regarding why they contend the president should be removed from office. Democrats claim that when Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into what Trump called troubling actions by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Trump was seeking a political advantage against a prospective opponent in the November presidential election. This, argue Democrats, was an impeachable “abuse of power,” and was the basis of the first article of impeachment approved by House Democrats in December. Trump’s legal team has countered that the president had every right to ask Ukraine to examine and produce any evidence of a potentially corrupt act by a U.S. public official. The act to be examined was Joe Biden’s demand that Ukraine fire a prosecutor who was allegedly investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that employed his son. By any reasonable and objective standard, Hunter Biden’s employment was highly suspicious and unusual. At a time when his father was serving as vice president and in charge of Ukraine policy for the Obama-Biden administration, Hunter Biden was being paid $83,000 a month to sit on the natural gas company’s board – despite having absolutely no experience in the energy sector and no experience in Ukrainian affairs. The question put to Trump’s defense team by Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah was: “If President Trump had more than one motive for his alleged conduct such as the pursuit of personal political advantage, rooting out corruption and the promotion of national interest, how should the Senate consider more than one motive in its assessment of Article 1?” More than any other question, this one needed answering. Setting aside whether Trump was genuinely motivated by electoral gain, Deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin explained that presidents often make decisions that have multiple or “mixed motives.” This is an obvious truth. As I argued in my last column, nearly all presidential actions involve some ancillary political calculation. Sometimes there is a dual or overlapping purpose. History is replete with examples of how presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, have rendered decisions that benefited themselves and the nation simultaneously. This does not mean their judgments constituted an abuse of power. If it were otherwise, nearly all presidents would be impeached and evicted from office. Philbin reasoned that all elected officials are mindful of how their conduct will affect their political standing because “there’s always some personal interest in the electoral outcome of policy decisions.” In asking President Zelensky to look into then-Vice President Biden’s threat to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid from Ukraine unless the prosecutor allegedly investigating Burisma was fired, Philbin explained that Trump had a legitimate public purpose. “If there were a motive that was of public interest, but also some personal interest, it follows more clearly that it cannot possibly be the basis for an impeachable offense,” Philbin said. He added that “lots of their own witnesses from the State Department said that, on its face, it (Joe Biden’s actions) appeared to be a conflict of interest.” Constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz was even more animated in defense of the multiple motives argument when he spoke in President Trump’s defense at the impeachment trial. “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest,” Dershowitz said. “And, mostly, you’re right. Your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” Dershowitz again cited the example of President Lincoln, who encouraged General William T. Sherman to grant his men leave from the battlefield to return to Indiana to cast votes for Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. Did Lincoln use the power of his office for personal and/or political gain? Of course, he did. Was it an impeachable “abuse of power?” No, said Dershowitz, “because the president believed it was in the national interest. He believed that his own reelection was essential to victory in the Civil War.” The retired Harvard Law School professor added: “Everybody has mixed motives, and for there to be a constitutional impeachment based on mixed motives would permit almost any president to be impeached. How many presidents have made foreign policy decisions after checking with their political advisers and their pollsters? If you’re just acting in the national interest, why do you need pollsters? Why do you need political advisers? Just do what’s best for the country.” Dershowitz tied his constitutional analysis together by stating: “For it to be impeachable, you would have to discern that he [the president] made a decision solely on the basis of, as the House managers have put it, a corrupt motive and it cannot be a corrupt motive if you have a mixed motive that partially involves the national interest and partially involves electoral interests.” Only an unlawful act by the president would be impeachable, Dershowitz concluded. Yet, House managers have not alleged a crime or violation of the law in their articles of impeachment. The defense argument – blending history, precedent and common sense – renders the prospect of the Senate calling new witnesses, such as former National Security Adviser John Bolton, superfluous. For the sake of argument, let’s assume – as The New York Times has reported – that Bolton’s upcoming book recounts how Trump mentioned in a conversation that he “wanted” to withhold $391 million in U.S. security assistance from Ukraine unless that nation investigated the Bidens. Let’s further assume that Trump’s motive was, in part, political. This still does not meet the proper impeachable standard for several reasons. First, can anyone truly argue that the behavior of the Bidens was not suspicious enough to merit an investigation? Democrats’ own witnesses said it posed a serious conflict of interest. Evidence produced by Republicans during the Trump impeachment trial has raised the specter of influence peddling and self-enrichment. Video clips were played of the media asking persistent questions regarding the Bidens and airing stories suggestive of corruption. This demonstrates that President Trump had a legitimate basis to ask Ukraine to scrutinize what happened. It was a matter of public interest. Even accepting that the leaked story about the Bolton book is accurate, a president wanting to do something and actually doing it are two very different concepts. Lots of presidents want to do things they never choose to do. After delaying U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Trump released the funds to the nation without any strings attached. No “quid pro quo” ever came to fruition. The idea – if there ever was one – was discarded. Importantly, President Zelensky and his foreign minister both stated they were never pressured to investigate anything and had no idea that American aid was temporarily halted until well after the fact. President Trump may have talked with Bolton about conditioning aid to Ukraine on an investigation of the Bidens, but such action never occurred. To remove Trump from office for merely discussing something with a senior aide is to turn Congress into the “thought police” where contemplation is tantamount to an impeachable offense. Finally, there’s the matter of Bolton’s suspected breach of confidential communications with Trump and the disclosure of classified material. Presidents have the right to obtain confidential advice and to engage in private deliberations without the intrusion of the legislative branch. The principle of executive privilege has been recognized and respected since President George Washington invoked it more than two centuries ago. It is a paramount privilege when matters of national security are at stake. Trump’s conversation with his national security adviser is most likely covered by the privilege. It is deeply disturbing that Bolton would have the temerity to write a book that would breach this privilege and profit by it financially. Three days before The New York Times reported its story based on (you guessed it) anonymous sources, a senior director at the National Security Council sent a letter to Bolton’s lawyer. The letter warned that the manuscript submitted to the council contains “significant amounts of classified information,” including some “at the TOP SECRET level.” Under federal law, and perhaps as well as under the nondisclosure agreement that Bolton signed as a condition to his employment, publication of the existing manuscript could subject him to criminal charges. The Times reports that Bolton has already circulated his book manuscript to “close associates” – something Bolton denies doing. If the newspaper report is correct and those individuals did not have the highest security clearance, the law may already have been broken. Whoever leaked to the Times could also be prosecuted if the information conveyed was deemed classified. Regardless of the security issues, senators are still not entitled to pierce the veil of executive privilege unless Trump waives the privilege or the federal courts determine that it does not apply. Is it really worth a protracted legal battle for the Senate to gain access to a purported presidential discussion of a “quid pro quo” that, in the end, never actually happened? To pose the question is to answer it.

Indeed…and well said, Gregg.  Gregg Jarrett is the author of that excellent legal analysis.   He is a former defense attorney and adjunct law professor, and the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His latest book is the New York Times bestseller “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History”  Excellent!    🙂

Trump lawyer: ‘Quid pro quo’ isn’t inherently unlawful

Trump defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz said on Wednesday that a “quid pro quo” involving a U.S. president isn’t inherently unlawful and that one of the goods or services exchanged has to be illegal in some way. Mr. Dershowitz posited a case where a Democratic president told Congress he was withholding financial assistance to Israel or Palestine unless the countries met certain requirements on settlements or terrorism. “And the president said, ‘quid pro quo — if you don’t do it, you don’t get the money. If you do it, you get the money,’ ” Mr. Dershowitz said. “There’s no one in this chamber that would regard that as in any way unlawful. The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were, in some way, illegal.” He said politicians can have several motives for taking action: a motive in the public interest, a motive in their own political interest and a motive in their personal financial interest. “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. And mostly you’re right — your election is in the public interest,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” He said it would be a different story if a president told a foreign leader to build a hotel with his name on it “and unless you give me a million-dollar kickback, I will withhold the funds.” “That’s an easy case — that’s purely corrupt and in the purely private interest,” he said. Mr. Dershowitz was speaking at President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial on the first day senators were allowed to pose questions to the House impeachment managers and to Mr. Trump’s team.

I had the pleasure of seeing Professor Dershowitz’s fiery defense earlier today on tv, and his whole explanation of “maladministration” was awesome.  He looked directly at the Democrat House Managers and basically said, “you’re wrong.”…and here’s why…and preceded to destroy their argument.  It was like Mastercard; “priceless.”  We need to see more of his animated history lessons.    🙂

Alan Dershowitz: House managers’ case falls short of impeachment standard even if true

Alan Dershowitz, who is part of President Trump’s impeachment legal defense team, said Sunday that even if the House managers successfully laid out the facts in their case they would still fall short of the standard needed to impeach and remove Mr. Trump from office. He said abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, which are the charges Mr. Trump stands accused of, are “vague, open-ended” criteria. “Even if the factual allegations are true – which are highly disputed and which the defense team will show contrary evidence – but even if true, they did not allege impeachable offenses,” Mr. Dershowitz said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So there can’t be a constitutionally authorized impeachment.” “The conduct has to be criminal in nature – it can’t be abuse of power; it can’t be obstruction of Congress,” he said. “Those are precisely the arguments that the framers rejected.” Mr. Dershowitz also addressed an old clip from around the time of President Clinton’s impeachment where he said “you don’t need a technical crime” for an impeachment. He said that in 1998, Mr. Clinton was charged with perjury. “I did say that then, and then I’ve done all the extensive research. I’ve been immersing myself in dusty old books, and I’ve concluded that no, it has to be crime,” he said on Sunday. Mr. Trump’s team opened their defense of the president on Saturday, and they’re expected to go into more detail starting on Monday. House impeachment managers had completed about 24 hours of presenting their case on Friday, arguing that Mr. Trump abused his power by improperly withholding military aid to Ukraine and then obstructed Congress by impeding the subsequent House investigation into his conduct. Mr. Trump’s defense team has suggested they won’t take the entire 24 hours they’re allotted over three days to refute the arguments from House Democrats.

Keep in mind, Professor Alan Dershowitz from Harvard is a very liberal, Jewish, registered Democrat who “proudly voted for Hillary” in the last election.  So, not exactly a career Republican hack…and he is a well-respected constitutional attorney, and Harvard professor.  So, the tools over at CNN and MSNBC are having the toughest time taking personal pot shots at him and trying to dismiss his comments.  He was a very smart choice by the Trump team.

CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin complains about ‘white men’ filling Trump’s legal team

CNN Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin blasted President Trump’s legal team on Saturday, arguing that its composition — all white men — highlighted how Democrats cared more about diversity. “White House and white people,” Toobin said. “This is a lesson in the diversity of the two parties — I mean you look at the House managers. It was almost evenly divided between men and women. You had two African-Americans, you had a Hispanic.” “It was all white men today, there are allegedly two white women on the team — we’ll see if they’re allowed to argue,” he continued. “But I think, you know, in a visual medium, when you have one side that has a very diverse team and the other side that’s all white men, that says something in and of itself.” This wasn’t the first time CNN made racially-tinged comments. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper previously said it was “exciting” that white people will no longer represent the majority in the country. “The idea that, you know, whites will not be the majority, I mean, that’s — it’s an exciting transformation of the country, it’s an exciting evolution and you know, progress of our country in many different ways,” he had said in August. Toobin’s comments came as White House lawyers defended President Trump in the ongoing Senate impeachment trial. They argued that Democrats were trying to interfere in elections by seeking to remove Trump from the 2020 ballot for doing “absolutely nothing wrong.” White House Counsel Pat Cipollone said Democrats have no case and are doing damage to democracy by trying to undermine the will of American voters. “For all their talk about election interference, they’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history,” Cipollone said in his opening remarks to the Senate. “And we can’t allow that to happen.”

Agreed..   Jeffrey Toobin and Anderson Cooper are such self-loathing, liberal agenda pushing WHITE guys obsessed with race.  I mean..who the heck cares about the gender and ethnicity of someone’s lawyers??  I mean, really.  The left has this pathological obsession with race and identity politics.  You have to have so many people of this ethnicity, gender, and now sexual (or lack thereof) orientation in order to get the approval of the liberal elite.  It’s exhausting..  What happened to just hiring the best person for the job regardless?  Someone ought to ask Jeffrey or Anderson if they feel “guilty” for being white men….and if maybe a female or a black guy should have their jobs instead…and see what their reaction is.  What a bunch of nauseating tools..  No wonder CNN’s ratings are in the toilet and continue to plummet.  Nobody wants to hear this crap.