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The GOP’s Four-Point Defense Of Trump Is Devastating By David Marcus

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

The GOP’s Four-Point Defense Of Trump Is Devastating

During Thursday’s mark up of the articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans unveiled a four-point defense of President Trump that is stunning in its simplicity and blows massive holes in the Democrats allegations of abuse of power. Essentially the Democrats are accusing Trump of shaking down Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky by withholding aid and demanding announcement of investigations, including one involving Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

To this, the central charge in the articles of impeachment, Rep. Jim Jordan and others presented four specific facts. First, both Trump and Zelensky say there was no pressure applied. Second, the transcript does not indicate Trump making any demands or setting any conditions. Third, Ukraine was not aware that the aid was delayed. And fourth, aid flowed without any announcement of investigations. Taken together, these four defenses have more than enough weight to crush the Democrats’ case, but lets look at them one by one.

The fact that Zelensky says on the record that he did not feel pressure from Trump is an important one that has been widely ignored. As Rep. Matt Gaetz argued, there can’t be a shake down if the person being shook down has no idea its happening. Unless Zelensky is lying, the entire case against Trump just disappears.

Democrats on Thursday, as they have before, but more vehemently so, said that of course Zelensky must be lying. He needs American aid so he is lying to stay on the good side of the president. Setting aside the fact that the Democrats making this claim have no evidence to support it, it also undermines the credibility of Zelensky, one of the very things they accuse Trump of doing.

As to the transcript itself, the GOP members honed in on the fact the “favor” in the conversation was not a “a favor for me,” but a “favor for us.” And later the “us” is clarified as “our country.” This also strikes at the core of a case that depends upon the claim that Trump’s only interest in Ukraine policy was getting dirt on Joe Biden to help himself politically.

When Trump says, after asking Zelensky to investigate Ukrainian interference in 2016, “our country has been through a lot.” He means the Mueller probe, and he’s not wrong. How much evidence or information about Russian interference exists in Ukraine is up for debate, but the fact that it is a legitimate subject of interest for the President is not.

One of the few facts in all of this where there is some debate is when exactly Ukraine became aware that the military aid had been delayed. But all versions place it very late in the timeline of events, certainly long after the July 25 phone call with Zelensky. That’s like trying to blackmail someone with scandalous photos of them without letting them know you have any scandalous photos of them. It’s impossible.

The delay of the aid was part of a wider set of concerns regarding how much Ukraine could be trusted with the money. Throughout the late summer and fall, through a set of meetings and phone calls with American officials Zelensky proved to Trump that he could be trusted. That is what Trump wanted to know and why he released the aid without any announcement of investigations.

And that final fact, that the aid was released without the announcements Democrats claim were the condition to release them, really puts the period on the sentence. Democrats claim the aid was only released on September 11 because the White House became aware of the whistleblower report. But this ignores the fact the aid had to release by September 30, and doing so is a two-week process.

So essentially, aid was released on or about the deadline set to release it. That is a much more plausible explanation for the timing than some whistleblower report spooking Trump. Is it possible Trump was angry at yet again being undermined by people in the federal government for exercising his legitimate powers? Sure. But there is no evidence to suggest that Trump was ever planning to ultimately kill the aid.

These four basic points will make up the core of the Republican defense of Trump on abuse of power charges. The White House should be very happy. Unlike the serpentine choose your own adventure story the Democrats have cooked up, this is a straightforward and simple defense, it can be explained quickly and it all makes perfect sense.
David Marcus is the Federalist’s New York Correspondent. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

SCHIFF, HOROWITZ, IMPEACHMENT FOLLIES

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/impeachment_and_the_confrontation_clause.html  

By W. Bruce DelValle

Beware of those who promise to secure rights by denying them.

The clamoring likes of Rep. Andrew Schiff, Conservative Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, the Washington Post’s Deanna Paul, Professor Steve Vladeck, and others similarly ill-advised — the “Constitutional Deniers” — are intellectually and historically errant to suggest that the Constitution has no place in congressional proceedings and processes – especially impeachment proceedings. 

These Constitutional Deniers use the hollow argument that impeachment is not a criminal process, therefore the Sixth Amendment does not apply. While it is a political process, impeachment is shorn more in the cloth of a criminal process than that of a civil proceeding.

The arguments to the contrary are devoid of even a modicum of intellectual credibility or historic reflection. The very fact that “high crimes and misdemeanors” are the entry point to begin the impeachment process seems to have evaded the Constitutional Deniers and the witless epigones of the Democratic Party. Federalist 65 recognizes that the impeachment process is a matter of “innocence or guilt” — alien terms in a civil proceeding.  

www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/of-course-the-fbi-spied-on-the-trump-campaign

Of course the FBI spied on the Trump campaign
Byron York, WashingtonExaminer.com

The great debate about whether the FBI spied on the Trump campaign continues. The question is why there is still any argument. The newly released report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz shows that by any definition the FBI did indeed spy.

The proof is in the details of the report. In addition to the much-discussed wiretap of Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, Horowitz discussed the bureau’s use of what is called a CHS (a confidential human source, or, in more common terms, an informant) and a UCE (an undercover employee, or a secret agent) to gather information from at least three targets in the Trump campaign. One was Page, another was George Papadopoulos, also a member of the advisory team, and the third was an unnamed “high-level Trump campaign official who was not a subject of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

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New Law Will Prohibit NY Judges From Jailing Armed Suspects Who Resist Arrest Holly Matkin 

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://defensemaven.io/bluelivesmatter/news/new-law-will-prohibit-ny-judges-from-jailing-armed-suspects-who-resist-arrest-yaX0r7GzQEGrM-qb9QkuLA/

New York lawmakers eliminated cash bail for many violent offenses beginning January 1, 2020.

New York, NY – Under the City of New York’s so-called justice reforms, suspects will no longer be held in jail for carrying weapons beginning in January.

Offenders found in possession of a wide array of weapons – including guns, switchblades, swords, machetes, and stun guns – will instead be issued a “desk appearance ticket” and “set free,” the New York City Police Benevolent Association (PBA) pointed out in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

Lawmakers also eliminated cash bail for hundreds of other criminal charges.

“This law starts on Jan. 1st for ALL of New York, not just New York City,” the PBA noted in another post.

On Nov. 19, Queens Senior Executive Assistant District Attorney James Quinn released a complete list of the offenses that judges will no longer be able to set bail for.

“Under the new bail laws…Judges in New York State cannot set bail on any of the following crimes (and most attempts to commit these crimes), and must release the defendant on non-monetary conditions, regardless of criminal record, ties to the community or previous bench warrants on other cases,” Quinn wrote.

The list stretched on for four pages, and included offenses such as stalking, arson, resisting arrest, money laundering in support of terrorism, rioting, vehicular assault, unlawful imprisonment, negligent homicide, and a slew of drug-related charges.

Criminal offenses against children, including child abuse, promoting child prostitution, facilitating female genital mutilation, and possessing or promoting a sexual performance by a child will also be treated with a mandatory release.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Cost of America’s Cultural Revolution Social-justice crusaders are stripping the future of everything that gives human life meaning: beauty, sublimity, and wit. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/social-justice-ideology

Social-justice ideology is turning higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars. Left-wing activists, masquerading as professors, are infiltrating traditional academic departments or creating new ones—departments such as “Solidarity and Social Justice”—to advance their cause. They are entering the highest rung of college administration, from which perch they require students to take social-justice courses, such as “Native Sexualities and Queer Discourse” or “Hip-hop Workshop,” and attend social-justice events—such as a Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress Symposium or a Power and Privilege Symposium—in order to graduate.

But social-justice education is merely a symptom of an even deeper perversion of academic values: the cult of race and gender victimology, otherwise known as “diversity.” The diversity cult is destroying the very foundations of our civilization. It is worth first exploring, however, why social-justice education is an oxymoron.

Why shouldn’t an academic aspire to correcting perceived social ills? The nineteenth-century American land-grant universities and the European research universities were founded, after all, on the premise that knowledge helps society progress. But social justice is a different beast entirely. When a university pursues social justice, it puts aside its traditional claim to authority: the disinterested search for knowledge. We accord universities enormous privileges. Their denizens are sheltered from the hurly-burly of the marketplace on the assumption that they will pursue truth wherever it will take them, unaffected by political or economic pressures. The definition of social justice, however, is deeply political, entailing a large number of contestable claims about the causes of socioeconomic inequality. Social-justice proponents believe that those claims are settled, and woe to anyone who challenges them on a college campus. There are, however, alternative explanations—besides oppression and illegitimate power—for ongoing inequalities, taboo though they may be in academia.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran fills the Vacuum Created by Trump’s Withdrawal by Con Coughlin

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15271/iran-vacuum-trump-withdrawal

President Trump has hastened the withdrawal of American forces from Syria, and is actively seeking to reduce America’s military presence elsewhere in the region, with troop withdrawals under active consideration in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Russia is always on standby to fill power voids. That is how it happened that Russian troops swept in when the US left northern Syria. To sum up that still unfolding story: nobody will remember it as our finest hour.”

“There are some deeply malign forces at work in the broader Middle East…disengagement is just another term for leaving all the power to them.” – Richard Cheney, Former US Vice President,” Arab Strategy Forum, Dubai.

It is a measure of the failure of the nuclear deal with Iran that former US President Barack Obama helped to negotiate in 2015 that Tehran used the brief easing of tensions with Washington to strengthen and consolidate its military presence in Arab countries such as Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

There are now serious concerns that Mr Trump’s desire to reduce America’s military presence in the Middle East will only encourage Iran to intensify its own activity, thereby increasing the threat to Israel and pro-Western Arab states.

The problem for small states such as Lebanon, though, is that they are no match for a regional superpower like Iran. And so long as the mullahs have the resources and weaponry to maintain their aggressive presence in the region, there is very little that small states like Lebanon can do to stop them.

The threat by a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps this week “to flatten Tel Aviv” from Iranian-controlled bases in southern Lebanon provides arguably the most graphic example of the deepening dangers the region faces as a result of the Trump administration’s decision to scale down its military presence.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Is NATO Still Vital? by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15265/is-nato-still-vital

Many additional countries who joined the alliance — such as Poland, Hungary and the Baltic States, which had been Soviet satellites — still consider post-Communist Russia an extremely disquieting potential threat. That is just one issue that has created friction among NATO nations….

The larger question [is] the degree to which enemy countries perceive NATO as a unified organization that would respond militarily to aggression against any member state — a crucial psychological factor in deterrence.

Its reason for being should not be written off quite yet…

The two-day summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — held in London on December 3-4 to commemorate its 70th anniversary — may have been marked by controversy, but the gathering constituted an important reminder of why the international alliance was established in the first place.

Founded in April 1949 by the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom, NATO was a pact created to counter the world’s greatest threat at the time: the Soviet Union and its race for global domination.

At the time, it was clear that all NATO members were dependent on and deferred to American political and military leadership. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, some of the original NATO member states began to seek systems that would protect their particular individual interests.

Germany, for instance, has become Europe’s economic powerhouse, enjoying a favorable balance of trade with the US. France, no longer viewing Russia as an existential threat to the Free World, now seems more motivated to protect NATO’s southern flank from radical Islamic terrorist groups in West Africa, and from mass migration from former French colonies in North Africa.

Meanwhile, many additional countries who joined the alliance — such as Poland, Hungary and the Baltic States, which had been Soviet satellites — still consider post-Communist Russia an extremely disquieting potential threat. That is just one issue that has created friction among NATO nations, particularly with Turkey’s decision to purchase a Russian air defense system. Another internal bone of contention is the failure of some members to reach the minimum defense-spending level of 2% of GDP, a goal established by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

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James Comey’s War on America His only loyalty is to himself, at the expense of the country. Julie Kelly

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/11/james-comeys-war-on-america/

James Comey’s investigation into the Trump campaign didn’t just taint candidate Donald Trump right before the 2016 election.

Comey’s exploitation of powerful surveillance tools to entrap Trump campaign aides didn’t just violate U.S. law or agency protocol. Nor did Comey just almost destroy the lives of Carter Page, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos among others.

Comey’s presentation of the most outlandish claim in the phony dossier—that the Kremlin had a recording of Trump peeing on Russian prostitutes—to the incoming president of the United States days before he took office didn’t just rattle Trump.

Comey did not just sabotage a presidential candidate, his transition team, and his new administration to remind Donald Trump who’s boss. Comey did not just try to oust a duly-elected president from the Oval Office based on made-up “memos” he wrote to document the president’s alleged criminality.

James Comey didn’t just help launch his pal Robert Mueller’s destructive two-year probe into the imaginary crime of Russian “collusion.”

No, James Comey, in fact, declared war on America.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Time Mag Chooses School-Skipping Brat Over Millions Fighting Oppression in Iran, Venezuela, and Hong Kong Wed Dec 11, 2019 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/time-mag-chooses-school-skipping-brat-over-daniel-greenfield/

Time Mag’s ‘Lefty Cause of the Year” came down to a race between endorsing the removal of President Trump from office or endorsing the destruction of civilization through radical environmentalism. 

In the choice between the particular, the ‘whistleblower’, and the general, environmentalism, Eric Ciaramella lost out to Greta Thunberg.

The moral of the story here is that if you skip school, you cut ahead in line of the guy with an actual career.

Meanwhile the millions of people in Iran, Venezuela, and Hong Kong, fighting for freedom were ignored by the same media that once glamorized Arab Spring Islamist protesters. Christians fighting Communism, starving Venezuelans fighting Socialism, and Persians fighting Shiite theocracy, are not the media’s idea of the kinds of causes it wants to promote.

And so, while sidelining the people risking their lives to fight for freedom, Time decided to honor an obnoxious brat who became an international celebrity for skipping school until civilization is destroyed.

Everyone has their priorities. Especially the media. 

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

What Purpose Does NATO Serve? What U.S. interests does the bloated bureaucracy advance — at our expense? Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/what-purpose-does-nato-serve-bruce-thornton/

While the political class obsessed over act two of the House impeachment hearings while normal people ignored them, NATO met in London for an international photo-op and a celebration of the treaty’s 70th anniversary. Nothing of substance happened, and no needed reforms were discussed. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union made NATO irrelevant, no one can say what strategic purpose this bloated bureaucracy serves, nor how––despite being financed mainly by the U.S––it advances U.S. interests and security.

Of course we were treated to the usual claims that “NATO kept the peace” in Europe during the Cold War, along with the other institutions of the “rules-based international order.” This globalist marketing slogan is hard to credit. The postwar Europeans were in no condition to fight each other, because most had neither the matériel nor the morale to fight with. Nor did NATO keep the Soviets out of Europe: that was accomplished by 70,000 American nuclear warheads and 400,000 American troops. The contributions of European pygmy-militaries to American military capability were in the end comparatively minimal.

Then there were the usual petty squabbles, snarking at President Trump, and bombastic rhetoric about the “world’s oldest military alliance.” The issue of European members’ continuing failure to increase their puny military spending was brought up again. Trump-haters, of course, have used his aggressive lobbying of the Europeans on this score to buttress their claims that he is a dangerous geopolitical ignoramus unschooled in the technical and diplomatic knowledge of the foreign policy establishment and the “interagency consensus” mentioned in act one of the House impeachment hearings––finally, a confession that we do indeed have an unaccountable “managerial elite” that thinks it should run foreign policy rather than their boss, the Chief Executive elected by the people, and the Commander in Chief to whom the Constitution has given this authority.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Pushes Back Against Campus Anti-Semitism Pro-Palestinian thuggery on campus finally gets a rebuke. Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 12th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/trump-pushes-back-against-campus-anti-semitism-robert-spencer/

President Trump made history again on Wednesday, when he signed an executive order authorizing the Department of Education to act against anti-Semitism on American college and university campuses, and making it clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal money, “would apply to institutions that traffic in anti-Semitic hate,” that is, virtually every public institution of higher learning in America.

This executive order is long overdue. The Jerusalem Post reported that as far back as 2015, “more than 30 organizations, including Jewish fraternity AEPI, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Zionist Organization of America wrote to University of California regent Bruce D. Varner in July, requesting that substantive measures be taken to combat rising anti-Semitism on UC-affiliated campuses.”

The problem wasn’t restricted to the University of California, either, but nothing was done. And it is virtually inconceivable that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or any presidential hopeful on the scene today would have signed the executive order that Trump signed Wednesday. Trump pointed out that earlier efforts to combat campus anti-Semitism “didn’t get it done,” and declared: “This year, there’s no roadblock.”

There have been roadblocks for years. Campus groups, most notably the notorious Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), have grown increasingly aggressive as the Left has intensified its embrace of opposition to Israel and open anti-Semitism. Jewish students and supporters of Israel on campuses have been shouted down, defamed, vilified, and physically menaced, with only a handful of groups, particularly the David Horowitz Freedom Center, providing any support for those students.