RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/strange_media_silence_after_vindman_testified_he_was_offered_job_of_ukraine_minister_of_defense_3_times.html

How is this not the major story coming out of the House Intelligence Committee “impeachment inquiry” hearings yesterday? A United States military officer serving in the White House with responsibilities for relations a foreign country being offered the post of minister of defense of that country is shocking.

Yet, yesterday’s testimony by Lt.Col. Alexander Vindman that he was offered the position of Minister of Defense of Ukraine is not the subject of banner headlines today.

Vindman duly reported the offer up his chain of command, as any such offer must be reported. The fact that 2 other embassy staffers witting with him when the offer was made, as he subsequently noted, made that report inescapable. He says that he did not take it seriously, calling it “somewhat comical” and “funny.” And the former Ukrainian official who made the offer, Oleksander Danylyuk, the former Chairman of the National Security and Defence Council in Ukraine, now claims it was made in jest. Erin Banc of The Daily Beast:

[A]  former top national security official in Ukraine told The Daily Beast that he was “joking” when he offered Vindman the post and never actually had the authority to make such an offer.

Oleksander Danylyuk, the former Chairman of the National Security and Defence Council in Ukraine, said he only remembers speaking with Vindman once about the defense minister position. He said it he and Vindman had engaged in a light-hearted conversation about how the two used to live close to one another in the former Soviet Union. It was then that Danylyuk jokingly told Vindman that he should take the defense minister job in Ukraine. 

“We both smiled and laughed,” Danylyuk said. “It was clearly a joke.” Danylyuk said he wouldn’t have been able to seriously offer Vindman the position without direct sign off from President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-impeachment-inquiry-adam-schiff-working-against-the-clock/

Time is not on Adam Schiff’s side.

A dam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry is incoherent. Given the impossibility of a senatorial conviction, the only strategy is to taint the president with the brand of impeachment and weaken him in the 2020 election.

Yet Schiff seems to have no sense that the worm has already turned. Far from tormenting Trump and the Republicans by a long-drawn-out Schiff extravaganza, Trump’s supporters are beginning to feel that the longer the farce, the better the optics. Polls show that Trump is almost back to where he was in popularity when Schiff unleashed his late-September Ukrainian caper. And the point, after all, was again to drive down Trump’s popularity and render him politically inert.

From the day Schiff reemerged after his licking his wounds in hibernation, following the Mueller implosion, his efforts have insidiously gone downhill. Once Trump released the transcript of his July 25th call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, the nation learned that the Schiff’s gold-standard whistleblower was no such thing. Instead, he seems a rank partisan and sloppy leaker whose machinations and background are already boomeranging back on those who put him up to this present circus.

Schiff never expected that Trump would release a classified transcript of his own presidential call — Democrats expected secrecy and coverup, much as the deep-state intelligence-agency miscreants acted unethically and illegally on the presumption that Hillary Clinton would be easily elected and their dishonest efforts would be rewarded and kept quiet.

One of the strangest developments of the opening inquiry was Schiff’s own doubling-down admission that he didn’t know the name of the whistleblower. After previously lying that neither he nor his staff had contact with the whistleblower (“We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower”) — he now ups the ante, apparently assuming that neither his staff nor the whistleblower will testify under oath.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-looking-into-possibility-that-criminal-enterprise-was-involved-in-jeffrey-epsteins-death/

The FBI has opened an investigation into a possible “criminal enterprise” involved in the death of Jeffrey Epstein, according to the Tuesday Congressional testimony of Bureau of Prisons director Kathleen Hawk Sawyer

Sawyer announced the inquiry during a line of questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

“With a case this high profile there has got to be either a major malfunction of the system or criminal enterprise at foot to allow this to happen. So are you looking at both, is the FBI looking at both?” Graham asked, to which Sawyer responded that “the FBI is involved and they are looking at criminal enterprise, yes.”

Sawyer took her position in August after Attorney General William Barr demoted Hugh Hurwitz a week after Epstein died in his Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Epstein, 66, died in what New York City’s chief medical examiner ruled was suicide by hanging on August 10, despite being put on suicide watch after attempting suicide a few weeks earlier on July 23. Prison staffers recommended days before his death that Epstein be taken off the watch for unknown reasons.

News broke Tuesday morning that the guards assigned to Epstein have been arrested and are accused of falsifying log entries to read that they checked on the late financier every half hour as required, when in fact they had neglected to do so for several hours.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-progressive-policy-community-ukraine-fantasy/

The Ukrainians merit our support as an enemy of Moscow, but they’re still a nasty, untrustworthy bunch.

‘A strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security.” This is the gospel according to Lieutenant Alexander Vindman, self-proclaimed member of our federal government’s “policy community,” the interagency conglomerate of experts on which Democrats are staking their case for the impeachment and removal of President Trump.

We need Ukraine as a “strategic partner,” Vindman told Adam Schiff’s impeachment-inquiry panel. We need it to be “stable, prosperous, and democratic,” a nation that is “integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community.” On this our vital interests depend, we’re told, because Ukraine is a front-line state and a “bulwark against Russian aggression.”

This, indeed, is why we’re supposed to be appalled at a new disclosure in testimony last week by Ambassador Bill Taylor, another policy-community stalwart. He says someone told someone that someone heard the president say he cared more about getting Ukraine to investigate possible Biden-family corruption than he did about Ukraine itself.

Imagine not caring about . . . Ukraine!

I can. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it.

I am pretty sure I care more about Ukraine than President Trump does. That said, it’s a lousy country. I’m very sympathetic to the goal of supporting it as a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin’s formidable anti-American regime. But I am certainly much more interested in knowing about what the Bidens were up to in Ukraine (and China), and in getting a full accounting of Ukraine’s collusion with Democrats in connection with the 2016 election, than I am in Ukraine.

The Impeachment ‘Partial Transcript’ Lie Just Got Blown Out Of The Water

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/the-impeachment-partial-transcript-lie-just-got-blown-out-of-the-water/

In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, both Jennifer Williams, an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman stated that the transcript of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zolodymyr Zelensky was substantively accurate.

In direct response to a question as to whether the transcript was complete and accurate, neither suggested that it was not, except for minor details they found in their notes of the call.

This testimony blows up a month-long lie pushed by Democrats and their media allies that the transcript was partial, or redacted, suggesting that the White House was potentially hiding important details. For weeks the baseless claim that the transcript was so doctored that we don’t really know what happened on the call has been floated all over mainstream media coverage.

 
Vindman Just Admitted To Leaking To The Anti-Trump Whistleblower

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/vindman-just-admitted-to-leaking-to-the-anti-trump-whistleblower/

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman admitted to the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday to leaking information to the anti-Trump whistleblower at the center of the Democrats’ partisan impeachment proceedings.

Vindman Exaggerated His Resume In Prepared Congressional Statement

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/vindman-exaggerated-his-resume-in-prepared-congressional-statement

Vindman claimed to be the “principal advisor to the National Security Advisor and the president on Ukraine.” Turns out, he’s never spoken to the president.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/18/the-swamps-swingline-stapler/

We are to believe that crying EPA employees, out-of-the-loop ambassadors, holier-than-thou law enforcement chiefs, and jobless assistant deputy undersecretaries for blah-blah affairs are the victims of a rogue president who must be removed from office for hurting their feelings and challenging their authority.

In December 2008, Barack Obama summarily fired every ambassador appointed by George W Bush.

The media did not care for four reasons. First, it was Barack Obama. Second, they recognized that the president controls the executive branch. Third, it was a parting shiv to Bush. Finally, it was Barack Obama.

Whether any of the ousted diplomats cried is unknown.

But now in the Trump era, as Obama-era somnambulists awake every day to a new outrage that heretofore had been considered standard operating procedure inside the Beltway, a dismissed ambassador is given hours to vent her thoughts and feelz in front of one of Capitol Hill’s most powerful committees. If you weren’t moved by the sad tale of former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch—an Obama appointee—getting the ax by Donald Trump, according to Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, you don’t have a pulse.

Perhaps Wallace has a point. After becoming accustomed to heads of state referring to you as “Madame Ambassador” and “Your Excellency,” being addressed as “Ms. Y” by a dozen or so Georgetown University whippersnappers would bruise anyone’s ego. (Yovanovitch admitted that she still retains a position at the State Department at the same salary with no daily responsibilities but also is allowed to moonlight as a Georgetown fellow. Sweet gig.)

Further, being forced to move out of a mansion in Kyiv tended to by a doting staff that helps you host important receptions for important people would sting, too. In one telling moment, Yovanovitch explained that the night she learned of her pending dismissal, she was hosting a party for a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist. “I was at my house,” she told one Democratic lawmaker.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-impeachment-inquiry-democrats-whistleblo

Congressional Democrats are obstructing the impeachment inquiry.

You heard that right. It has become rote for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and his fellow Democrats to chide the Trump administration for blocking testimony from White House staffers and the president’s private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Yet, those witnesses actually have confidentiality privileges that are well settled in federal law, shielding communications between the chief executive and his top advisers, and between attorney and client, from disclosure.

When a person asserts a privilege recognized by law, we don’t call that obstruction. We call it the law in action.

By contrast, Schiff is playing a lawless game with the so-called whistleblower: predicating the impeachment inquiry on this intelligence official’s complaint while blocking Republicans from questioning the official and other policy officials with whom he dealt. The suppression of relevant information obstructs the congressional investigation.

I have argued from the outset that the “whistleblower” is not actually a whistleblower in the strict legal sense because the statute governing the protection of such sources is inapposite. (That is, the statute covers disclosures relating to activities of the intelligence services, not the president’s conduct of foreign relations.) For present purposes, though, let’s assume I am wrong and that the “whistleblower” is covered.

If this were a legal case, there is not a court in America that would keep the whistleblower’s identity and the details of his role in the origins of the Democrats’ Ukraine investigation under wraps.

Congressional Democrats are not merely withholding the identity of the whistleblower. They are denying committee Republicans the right to question other witnesses about relevant dealings with the whistleblower.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/purging-the-pro-lifers-11574122435

Anti-abortion Democratic officeholders are about as rare as pandas, but many in their party’s leadership won’t be satisfied until they’re extinct.

On Monday the Democratic Attorneys General Association decreed that it will only give money and strategic help to AG candidates who “publicly commit” to supporting access to abortion. The message: If you’re a pro-life Democrat, or merely one with misgivings about the party’s opposition to any restriction on abortion, don’t run for attorney general. Or for any other office.

Mark this as one more step toward making America’s two main political parties into warring cultural camps with no room for individual conscience. American politics was healthier, and less polarized, when Democratic ranks included pro-lifers and some Republicans favored abortion rights. Compromise and tolerance were easier to come by.