James Comey

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www.dailywire.com/news/not-over-klobuchar-says-democrats-wont-stop-fighting-for-witnesses-look-to-extend-trial

Following the Senate vote to block witnesses in the partisan impeachment of President Donald Trump, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) signaled that Democrats have not been deterred by the vote, but will continue to prolong the process for new witnesses.

“The caucuses are meeting right now,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Dana Bash following the vote.


“Right now we’re looking at amendments that we could do to maybe be more specific about witnesses, or getting more time. … Maybe with each and every day it will change their mind on allowing witnesses,” the presidential candidate continued.

“So, that’s what we’re working on right now,” she added.

The senator made similar comments during an appearance on Fox News, Friday evening.

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When it rains it pours. Having lost the main vote for new witnesses and documents Friday afternoon during the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump on a narrow, near party line vote of 51-49, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) hopefully asked presiding officer Chief Justice John Roberts Friday evening if he was aware of a precedent for him casting tie-breaking votes as the Senate prepared to cast more votes to table several Schumer resolutions on witnesses and evidence.

Schumer cited the 1868 Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson presided over by Chief Justice Salmon Chase in which he cast two tie-breaking votes.

Roberts was ready for the question and carefully read his reply:

I am, Mr. Leader. Uh, the one concerned a motion to adjourn, the other concerned a motion to close deliberations. Uh, I do not regard those isolated episodes a-hundred-and-fifty years ago as sufficient to support a general authority to break ties. If the members of this body, elected by the People and accountable to them, divide equally on a motion, the normal rule is that the motion fails. I think it would be inappropriate for me, an unelected official from a different branch of government, to assert the power to change that result so that the motion would succeed.

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www.speaker.gov/newsroom/13120-1

The Senate Republicans’ vote against calling witnesses and compelling documents in the impeachment proceedings makes them accomplices to the President’s cover-up.

“The President was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He is impeached forever. There can be no acquittal without a trial. And there is no trial without witnesses, documents and evidence.

“It is a sad day for America to see Senator McConnell require the Chief Justice of the United States to preside over a vote which rejected our nation’s judicial norms, precedents and institutions to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.”

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Republican Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) predicted what the deranged Democrats in the House will do to President Trump after the Senate impeachment trial is over.


Jordan said he believes that Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and the far-left radicals in the House will continue to subpoena witnesses in the House to testify against the President.

WATCH:

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When President Trump is acquitted next week he will no longer be impeached. It will be over. It will be removed from his record.

Sorry, Nancy. The charade is over.

Alan Dershowitz: Nancy Pelosi has pulled a real sharp one. She’s said even if he’s acquitted and vindicated he’s still impeached. That should not be how it is. Why? He did not have a fair trial. He was indicted. And what happens if a person is acquitted after indictment? The indictment disappears… And when you deny someone due process saying, “Well we’re only indicting him.” You can’t come back and say, “But he’s still indicted!” If he wins this I think no one should regard him as having been impeached anymore than you would regard someone who’s indicted as still being indicted if he won a unanimous twelve person jury.

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Well played Senator Cruz lol:

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amp.dailycaller.com/2020/01/31/jeffrey-toobin-senate-vote-impeachment

CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin reacted on air to Friday’s Senate vote against calling additional witnesses by declaring that President Donald Trump “won.”

The motion to compel witness testimony in the Senate impeachment trial failed 51-49 on Friday, with only two Republicans, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Utan Sen. Mitt Romney, siding with Democrats who had particularly hoped to hear from former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Trump won,” said Toobin. “He’s going to win this trial. He won on the issue of witnesses. He’s going to get acquitted, and that’s how history will remember what went on here.”

“I think history will also record that there are at least one, and perhaps other, pivotal, pivotal witnesses who were available to the House of Representatives, to the Senate to talk about the precise issue that is the subject of this impeachment trial, and the Senate decided not to hear from them,” Toobin lamented. “The idea that John Bolton is out there with a book and giving speeches for money and said he’s willing, and having someone leaking the contents of that book daily to the New York Times, and the Senate decided not to hear from John Bolton is just an absolute travesty.” (RELATED: Democratic Senator Claims To Chris Cuomo That Republicans ‘Don’t Want’ Hunter, Joe Biden As Witnesses)

Fellow panelist and former Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum responded to Toobin’s comments by noting that the senators who voted against witnesses “believe that the House case as presented in the articles of impeachment is not sufficient on its face to vote to remove a president.”

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www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/31/democrats-trying-to-undermine-trumps-looming-exoneration-acquittal-without-new-witnesses-worthless/

Democrats Trying to Undermine Trump’s Looming Exoneration: Acquittal Without New Witnesses ‘Worthless’

Democrat lawmakers, as their partisan impeachment effort near a climax, are seeking to delegitimize U.S. President Donald Trump’s looming acquittal in the Senate trial.

Democrats argue that without new witnesses and additional evidence, a vote to acquit President Trump of the impeachment articles approved in the House by a party-line vote would be meaningless. No Republicans joined Democrats in voting to impeach Trump. Meanwhile, it appears Trump’s acquittal may draw the support of some moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin from West Virginia, making it bipartisan.



Republicans are intent on exonerating the president this week.

The vote to allow new witnesses and additional evidence, expected soon, appears all but defeated, a move that would result in the Senate moving to acquit Trump. Democrats seem angry that their impeachment effort failed. They are trying to delay the inevitable — Trump’s exoneration.

“You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial. You don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation and all of that,” Pelosi (D-CA) declared during her weekly press conference Thursday. “Does the president know right from wrong? I don’t think so.”

A trial “without the evidence, without witnesses and documents would render the president’s acquittal meaningless,” Schumer added that day.

“Any conclusion that doesn’t allow witnesses and documents is going to make the president’s acquittal — if it should happen — worth very, very little. Zero,” Schumer added on Wednesday, later stressing, “You can’t convince the American people it was an acquittal if you don’t have witnesses and documents.”

Echoing House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, some of his fellow impeachment managers arguing in favor of convicting Trump in the Senate also stressed that a trial with no new witnesses would amount to an illegitimate acquittal.

“If witnesses are not called here, these proceedings will be a trial in name only, and the American people clearly know a fair trial when they see one,” Rep. Val Delmings (D-FL) said Friday.

Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), another House Democrat manager, reportedly added:



Whatever you say about this trial, there cannot be an exoneration without hearing from those witnesses. An acquittal on an incomplete record after a trial lacking witnesses and evidence will be no exoneration. It will be no vindication, not for the president, not for this chamber, and not for the American people.

Last Sunday, Schiff, the leading manager, told NBC News, “If they [Republicans] are successful in depriving the country of a fair trial, there is no exoneration. Americans will recognize that the country did not get what the founders intended.”

Trump’s defense team has repeatedly argued that the Senate should not call on more witnesses, noting that the House should have presented a complete case before moving proceedings to the upper chamber.

No one rushed the House to impeach Trump and move on to the Senate trial. However, they insisted on doing so before Christmas, months ahead of a presidential election in November 2020.

Trump’s team also acknowledged that legal fights over additional witnesses could extend a chapter in Congress that many Republicans have been eager to close for months.
Ironically, the Democrats’ effort to impeach Trump over allegedly trying to influence the upcoming elections will likely have an impact on voters.

In other words, Democrats may end up doing what they are accusing Trump of trying to do — interfering in the 2020 presidential elections.


For weeks, Democrats have claimed that the Senate cannot acquit Trump without new witnesses and additional evidence, adding that a lack of additional testimony would render the trial unfair.

On December 29, Sen. Chis Van Hollen (D-MD) accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) of rigging the trial to benefit Trump.
During an interview with ABC News, Van Hollen asked, “Is Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, going to try to rig this trial, working in lockstep with the president and his lawyers? Or is he going to allow a fair trial?”

“We keep hearing President Trump say he’s going to be exonerated,” he continued. “Look, if you have a rigged trial there’s no exoneration in acquittal.”
“There cannot be a true acquittal if there’s not been a fair trial,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said MSNBC on Friday.

Some pro-Democrat pundits joined in this week, parroting their allies’ argument that no witnesses amounts to no exoneration.

“It’s not a real trial, and it’s not a real exoneration,” Kirsten Powers, a USA Today columnist and CNN contributor, said on the cable news network Thursday.

Jennifer Rubin, self-described “conservative opinion writer” at the Washington Post and contributor at the left-wing MSNBC outlet, said on Twitter on January 24:

In behaving as they have, Republicans are managing not only to deprive the president of a legitimate acquittal in the eyes of Americans (who overwhelmingly want a real trial), but also to convince voters that Republicans should not be entrusted with power.

There is little doubt the Republican majority in the Senate will vote to exonerate Trump.

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www.dailywire.com/news/dem-senator-mazie-hirono-i-dont-care-about-legal-constitutional-defenses-trump-team-has

Dem Senator Mazie Hirono: ‘I Don’t Care’ About ‘Legal, Constitutional Defenses’ Trump Team Has

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) said on Friday that she did not “care” about the “legal” and “constitutional defenses” that President Donald Trump’s legal defense used during his Senate impeachment trial.

Hirono’s comments come as the Senate voted down Democrats’ attempts to prolong the Senate trial on Friday by calling for new witnesses and documents in a 51-49 vote.


Republication National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel posted the video of Hirono’s remarks, which the senator made on MSNBC, writing: “Democrat leaders want to destroy the Constitution in order to impeach @realdonaldtrump. … That’s wrong on so many levels.”

WATCH:

Trial lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillon mocked Hirono by comparing her to the Wicked Witch of the West, played by Margaret Hamilton in the film “The Wizard of Oz,” writing: “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little Constitution too!”

TRANSCRIPT:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Senator, I could see you listening as I read a portion aloud of your colleague Senator?

MAZIE HIRONO: Did you see me rolling my eyes and muttering to myself, too?

WILLIAMS: I wasn’t going to characterize what I was seeing, but your reaction to Lamar Alexander and this parting statement tonight, as we reckon he’s already home or close to it. He’s a no-vote but backs up the case of the House managers, in part, if not in full.

HIRONO: Did you get the impression from what he said that the House managers did prove that there was abuse of power, that he would vote to convict the president? I don’t think so. It didn’t sound like that to me. So, maybe he’s going to split the baby. I do not know. But the fact of the matter is, even as to article two on the obstruction of Congress, that they can put forth all kinds of claims to executive privilege and all that without really having to prove anything. So, it was blanketed comprehensive. In the law, we have this thing called good-faith negotiations. If you’re not negotiating in good faith, that’s bad faith, and I would say that there’s ample evidence to show that the president, who at the very outset said, “I will fight every subpoena,” and “I’m giving you nothing,” by the way, throughout this whole process, he’s called the process a witch hunt, a sham, whatever else. He had no intention of cooperating. So, you bring out these lawyers to say, oh, well, he was actually asserting constitutional privileges. Don’t make me laugh, okay? So, let’s get to the abuse of power. Do you have any questions about that? He did it!

RACHEL MADDOW: Is it cold comfort to you that even as your colleague, Lamar Alexander, is saying he doesn’t want to vote to hear witnesses — and perhaps with his decision here, that forecloses that possibility — he is saying, by the way, I completely admit that he did it. He says, “It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent. When elected officials inappropriately interfere with such investigations —“ I mean, he’s saying, the question is not whether the president did. He did it. >>

HIRONO: Yes, and the question becomes — so, Rachel, this is the last response for these two days of question and answers that I got from the president’s team, and that is, let’s just assume he did it. So what? And I’ve been saying for a long time that that’s probably what they’re going to end up with. You can say all these things, but so what? And the so what means that this president, who believes that he can do anything he wants under article two of the Constitution will continue to go for it. And I tell you, when the Trump team said, oh, well, you know, if you’re going to impeach him and convict him for what he did, that means this president is going to be facing impeachment at every turn, what they really are afraid of is that this president, unfettered without a conviction, means that he’s going to be doing a lot more stuff that was subject to impeachment because that’s what this guy is. He believes he’s king now. I think our country is in great danger. >>

MADDOW: Well, to that point, if the president has, in arguing his defense in this impeachment, has staked out new, totally unprecedented legal ground, in which he and his legal advisers assert that he can do anything — >> Yes. >> He can condition the U.S. Government’s actions for anything that would help him for his re-election, as long as it’s to try to help him get re-elected and he thinks that would be good for the country — I mean, what do you think this opens the Gates to?

HIRONO: Which is the most bizarre kind of defense. So, there’s Dershowitz. He hardly made sense at all throughout this whole thing. But what I get from Dershowitz — and he is part of their legal team, so I assume that the defense he was putting forward is something they all subscribe to, even if they try to weasel out of parts of it. But yes, it means that the president can ask for foreign interference in our elections, in spite of the fact that we have a law prohibiting that, but not to these guys. And then he can use money that the Congress has appropriated — he can illegally withhold that money and don’t tell anybody, either, because most of the time when we hold foreign aid, it’s all out in the open, but this one was in secret. So now he can do it in secret, he can — what other pot of money is he going to use as a bribe? What other country is he going to bully, you know? This is a president who already we know he has very few constraints on his behavior, and there will be even fewer. He will be running around saying that he has been exonerated. No, he has been let off the hook by the Republicans who are not going to vote for his conviction, but he is not going to be set free by the American people, I hope, who get that this was not a fair trial with no witnesses, no documents, total stonewalling by the president. And I don’t care what kind of nice, little, legal, constitutional defenses they came up with, all in my view in bad faith.

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www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/forty-percent-of-ilhan-omars-campaign-spending-went-to-alleged-boyfriends-firm

In the second half of 2019, out of every $10 that Ilhan For Congress spent, $4 went to the E Street Group, the political consulting group run by Tim Mynett, Rep. Ilhan Omar’s alleged boyfriend.

And more than 90% of the E Street Group’s entire earnings reported to the FEC came from Ilhan For Congress.

According to the campaign’s latest fourth-quarter filing of last year, $216,564.64, or more than half of Ilhan For Congress’s spending, went to the E Street Group. Omar’s team reported a total of $403,139.73 in disbursements to retain her seat in an overwhelmingly Democratic district. In the third quarter, Omar’s campaign allocated $146,712.64 of its $493,389.80 in disbursements to the E Street Group.

That means that, in half a year, $363,277.28 of her campaign’s total reported disbursements went to her alleged paramour’s firm, one that seems to have not existed prior to the last election cycle. In fact, of the $677,913.44 that the E Street Group reported receiving from campaigns to the FEC for the entirety of its existence, a majority, $369,551.02, came from Ilhan For Congress.

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Maria Bartiromo: Why will the vote to acquit the president be on Wednesday? Why not tomorrow?

Senator Lindsey Graham: Well the Democrats have the ability to drag out the trial. There was an agreement reached to do it Wednesday at 4 to allow some Democratic candidates to go to Iowa. I think that had a lot to do with it. But we’re going to turn the page on impeachment at 4 o-clock on Wednesday.

Once again the GOP let down President Trump.
They could not let him have his VICTORY SPEECH at the State of the Union Address.

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www.dailywire.com/news/romney-not-welcome-at-our-annual-conservative-summit-after-impeachment-trial-vote-cpac-says

Sen. Mitt Romney, whom conservatives have long complained is not one of them, joined with Democrats on Friday in a crucial Senate vote during President Trump’s impeachment trial.


As Democrats pushed to call more witnesses, Romney announced he would join their effort, saying he wanted to hear from former National Security Adviser John Bolton. Just one other Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, voted with all Democrats on the measure, which failed 51-49.

Republicans were furious that Romney broke ranks, and now one conservative group is seeking to punish the Utah senator for his transgression.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) says Romney won’t be welcome at their Washington, D.C., conference in February.

“The ‘extreme conservative’ and Junior Senator from the great state of Utah, @senatorromney is formally NOT invited to #CPAC2020,” tweeted Matt Schlapp, who leads the organization behind CPAC.

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BREAKING: The "extreme conservative" and Junior Senator from the great state of Utah, @senatorromney is formally NOT invited to #CPAC2020. pic.twitter.com/f35tYy73V1

— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) January 31, 2020


Schlapp told Fox News that each year, CPAC “formally disinvite someone who has been particularly egregious.” Romney, however, was not technically “disinvited,” as an invite was never formally extended.

“Mitt Romney deserved this [because] his Senate tenure is a waste and his vote was the latest outrage,” he added.


Trump and Romney have battled in the past before apparently burying the hatchet. Still, Romney loves the spotlight, and before the crucial vote in the Senate on witnesses, Romney blasted the president’s “brazen” requests for foreign nations to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who was employed by a corrupt energy company in Ukraine. “By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” he said.

CPAC holds one of the largest conservative summits in the nation each year, and Trump has spoken at the conference the last three years. This year’s event starts Feb. 26 at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, and Republican California Rep. Devin Nunes, conservative commentator Mark Levin, and Brexit leader Nigel Farage, among others, are scheduled to speak.

Romney’s decision to vote with Democrats drew harsh criticism from former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who had served as Romney’s top adviser during his failed 2012 run for the White House.

“It’s disappointing because I think Mitt Romney is clearly letting his personal dislike of the president influence him more than trying to deal with [what] this country needs,” Sununu told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”

Before Friday’s failed vote on witnesses, Romney said he thought the move woulds garner Republican support.

“I think, with the story [about Bolton’s book] that came out yesterday, it’s increasingly apparent that it would be important to hear from John Bolton,” Romney told reporters.

“I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton,” Romney said. “I’ve spoken with others who’ve opined upon this, as well.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the vote that calling more witnesses would have been unprecedented.

“There is no need for the Senate to reopen the investigation which the House Democratic majority chose to conclude and which the [House] managers themselves continue to describe as ‘overwhelming’ and ‘beyond any doubt,’” McConnell said in a statement. “Never in Senate history has this body paused an impeachment trial to pursue additional witnesses with unresolved questions of executive privilege that would require protracted litigation. We have no interest in establishing such a new precedent, particularly for individuals whom the House expressly chose not to pursue.”

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www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/02/02/paul_sperrys_notebook_theft_near_white_house_of_investigative_reporter_john_solomons_laptop_122236.html

On the night before the Senate impeachment trial began, someone broke into veteran Washington investigative journalist John Solomon’s car parked near the White House and stole his laptop, according to a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department report obtained by RealClearInvestigations.

The computer contained notes on Ukraine and former Vice President Joe Biden and other sensitive information, Solomon, 52, said in an interview. He said he was preparing to launch a new podcast and news site at the time.

Though the laptop has since been recovered, the investigation is still open. “The case has been assigned a detective and is under investigation,” MPD spokesman Sean Hickman told RCI.

The Secret Service is also involved in the matter, which appears suspicious. Break-ins are rare in the high-security area where the crime occurred, just outside the White House perimeter, and a sophisticated device appears to have been used to get into the vehicle.

The computer and bag, which also contained his U.S. Capitol press security badge, were discovered the next day nearly a block away from where his car had been parked. The contents of the bag had been dumped out on a picnic bench near the FDIC building. The location had no security cameras, so there is no known video surveillance footage that can be reviewed. Authorities described it as one of the few “dark spots” in the area.

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dailycaller.com/2020/02/02/adam-schiff-proved-impeachment-donald-trump/



Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff claimed Sunday that House Democrats “have proved” their impeachment case against President Donald Trump.

Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also suggested in the same interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” that some GOP senators also believe House Democrats “proved” their case and that Trump is planning to “cheat in the next election.”



What is remarkable is that you now have Republican senators coming out and saying, ‘Yes, the House proved its case. The House proved the corrupt scheme that they’ve charged in the articles of impeachment, the president did withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from an ally to try to coerce that ally into helping him cheat in the next election’ … I think it’s enormously important that the country understand exactly what this president did and we have proved it.

But those Republican senators who contemplated extending the Senate trial with witnesses did not say they believed the Democrats proved Trump committed an impeachable offense nor that he had plans to cheat in the 2020 presidential election. (RELATED: Rep. Schiff Has Done 419 TV Interviews Pushing Russian Collusion Conspiracy)

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said in a statement, “Given the partisan nature of this impeachment from the very beginning and throughout, I have come to the conclusion that there will be no fair trial in the Senate.”

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 24: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House during an event with U.S. mayors on January 24, 2020 in Washington, DC. The President signed H.R. 2476, Securing American Nonprofit Organizations Against Terrorism Act of 2019, which appropriates $75 million per year to protect houses of worship and other nonprofits from terrorist attacks through target hardening and enhanced security measures. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House during an event with U.S. mayors on Jan. 24, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Without saying how, Schiff repeated his claim that “[Trump] is threatening to still cheat in the next election.” (RELATED: White House Lawyer: Schiff ‘Untruthful On Whistleblower And Russian Collusion)

“I still think it is enormously important that the president was impeached because the country is moving away from its democratic ideals … By standing up to this president we are helping to slow the momentum away from our Democratic values,” Schiff added.


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Although it was rejected by the Mueller report, Schiff recently resurrected the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy after he had admitted he had no evidence to substantiate the claim that the Trump campaign worked with Russia to help win the 2016 presidential election.

During his opening statement during the impeachment inquiry, Schiff fabricated the contents of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019.

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www.dailywire.com/news/cnn-panics-amid-reports-president-trump-will-not-apologize-after-anticipated-acquittal

CNN Panics Amid Reports President Trump Will Not Apologize After ‘Anticipated Acquittal’

Sources close to President Donald Trump revealed to CNN that they do not expect him to apologize in a speech on Wednesday, following his “anticipated acquittal” in the Senate’s impeachment trial, leaving reporters for the network baffled and shocked.


“Trump not expected to apologize or admit any wrongdoing after anticipated acquittal,” a headline on the network’s website blared Sunday.

“nlike the last President to be acquitted, don’t expect Trump to apologize or express any contrition for his conduct,” the outlet complained. “Instead, people close to the President say they anticipate he will claim vindication and continue to proclaim his complete and total innocence.”

CNN notes that that is a marked departure from other impeached presidents, including President Bill Clinton, who “apologized to the nation” after he was acquitted in his own Senate impeachment trial in the late 1990s. Clinton, at the time, said he was “profoundly sorry” for the events that led to his impeachment trial.

Clinton, however, was caught on tape committing perjury, a chargeable offense. Although the Senate ultimately decided to allow Clinton to remain in office, there was tangible evidence of Clinton’s crime.


For President Donald Trump, the picture is not so clear. Although Trump is accused of abusing his power as president, Democrats, in a hurry to complete an impeachment inquiry in the House, limited witness testimony, leaving gaping holes in their case. Blocked from having additional witnesses testify in the Senate, Democrats were forced to extrapolate on the evidence they had, never establishing a concrete quid-pro-quo between Trump and Ukrainian officials, the release of foreign aid for an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.

After closing arguments from both the president’s lawyers and the House impeachment managers, the Senate will vote on whether to acquit Trump — a vote that is definitely expected to go Trump’s way. Republicans have a solid majority in the Senate and several Democrats, including West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin, are expected to vote to acquit the president.


That vote is expected Wednesday. Afterwards, White House sources say, the president is likely to move on to other issues.

“I don’t see the President making a big statement one way or another that would indicate anything different than what he’s been saying for many months,” one Republican told CNN.

Democrats have one consolation: the White House had hoped the trial would end with an acquittal vote on Friday, leaving the president free to trumpet the results of his Senate impeachment trial during the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. But because the Senate adjourned early Friday, after voting not to allow further evidence and witness testimony, and setting the rules for Wednesday’s landmark vote, the president was forced to head to a weekend retreat at Mar-a-Lago still under the specter of impeachment.

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www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/02/02/dershowitz-on-trumps-likely-acquittal-its-the-fault-of-nancy-pelosi-and-others-for-failing-to-charge-an-impeachable-offense/

During an appearance with Fox News on Sunday, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz responded to criticism that the lack of witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial put a “taint” on what is likely to be an acquittal.

Dershowitz blamed House Democrats for not bring charges that involved actual impeachable offense.


Partial transcript as follows:

WALLACE: [T]op Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi in the House, Chuck Schumer in the Senate, say, that the failure to call witnesses is going to put a taint on any acquittal. Listen to them.

DERSHOWITZ: Sure.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): This country is headed towards the greatest cover-up since Watergate.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA): Well, he will not be acquitted. You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DERSHOWITZ: Of course, you can be acquitted if you don’t have a trial. If they don’t charge you with a legitimate crime. It’s the fault of Nancy Pelosi and others for failing to charge an impeachable offense.

WALLACE: But they’re going to say — they say he’s never going to be truly acquitted because you didn’t have witnesses. You didn’t have new evidence. You dismissed it before you even really got to hear what the facts were.

DERSHOWITZ: Well, if — in the criminal context that would be called a victory, a great victory. Here, if they haven’t charged an offense, then maybe he hasn’t been acquitted, but he also hasn’t been charged. He’s in exactly the same situation he should have been in had they done the right thing and not impeached him at all.

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Sean Hannity asked President Trump about working with Pelosi and Schumer.

He was not expecting too much.

“I’d like to, but it’s pretty hard when you think about it because it’s been such — I use the word ‘witch hunt,’ I use the word ‘hoax.’ I see the hatred, They don’t care about fairness. They don’t care about lying. You look at the lies. You look at the reports that were done that were so false. The level of hypocrisy. So I’m not sure they can do it, to be honest. I think they just want to win and it doesn’t matter how they win.”

This was an excellent interview.

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www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/02/02/jim-jordan-bipartisan-majority-will-acquit-trump-in-senate/

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told Breitbart News Saturday that a “bipartisan majority” of senators will acquit President Donald Trump of any wrongdoing during the Senate impeachment trial.

Jordan, a member of the president’s legal defense team, spoke to Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle as the Senate moved this week to block having additional witnesses testify during the impeachment trial of President Trump.




The Senate trial will continue Monday, and it appears that the upper chamber of Congress will move to acquit President Trump on Wednesday.

Jordan said he believes that there will be a bipartisan majority of senators to acquit Trump. Media outlets have speculated over whether red-state Democrats such as Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and Gary Jones (D-MI) might vote to clear Trump of wrongdoing at the end of the impeachment trial.

Jordan told Breitbart News Saturday, “Here’s the good news: he’s not only going to be acquitted, he’s going to be acquitted in a much stronger fashion than the conventional wisdom said what was going to happen back in September when this started…and no one would have predicted, no one in this town, no one in this country would have predicted when the actual articles came out for a vote in the House that every single Republican vote against them, one Democrat would vote with us, a single Democrat would vote with us on one of the articles, a third Democrat vote present, and a fourth Democrat would vote with us and then switch parties.”

“And I also think what’s going to happen this coming Wednesday is that you’re going to see a bipartisan majority, just like in the House, a bipartisan majority, vote for the president and all along, they said all along that it was going to be the other way around. So, that just shows you again how ridiculous this was, how much the facts were on the president’s side and how strong of a case legally and a strong case on the facts,” he added.

Jordan also said that impeachment may backfire on Democrats and that if President Trump wins the 2020 presidential election, there remains a good chance that Republicans may take back the House majority.

“I think the president is going to win. I mean, in Ohio, he is so strong in our state, and I just feel good about his race across the country, and I think there’s a very good chance he wins big. I’ve been saying all along if the president wins big, we take back the House,” the Ohio conservative said.

[soonernvolved]

thefederalist.com/2020/02/03/impeachment-opened-with-primal-screams-and-died-with-a-whimper/

Impeachment Opened With Primal Screams, And Died With A Whimper
The Get-Trump forces have deflated. Like a primal scream ending in soft whimpers, the impeachment charade has been a bust.

Adam MillBy Adam Mill
FEBRUARY 3, 2020

On Friday, the arguable climax of Rep. Adam Schiff’s Senate trial of Donald Trump, The New York Times and The Washington Post published barely anything regarding impeachment. CNN published not one but two editorials suggesting it was time to move on.

The Get-Trump forces have deflated. Like a primal scream ending in soft whimpers, the impeachment charade has been a bust. “We are lost,” moaned Dana Milbank in his article in the Washington Post.


Milbank seems to have forgotten there’s an election in just a few months. The Democratic Party will soon have the opportunity to legally unseat the president. Milbank apparently hoped to skip a competitive election to award the presidency to his political ally. The Constitution can be so inconvenient to those seeking permanent power.

Milbank, like so many others in the left, argued that president’s Senate acquittal will be illegitimate. He argues, in the same article, no less, that “Once…prospects faded that [John] Bolton would be called as a witness. The trial degenerated into farce,” but that, “House managers tried their case too well. Evidence piled up on the Senate floor over the past 10 days that the president withheld military aid to force Ukraine to announce probes of his political foes. And former national security adviser John Bolton’s firsthand account leaked about the quid pro quo.”

Just to recap, he’s arguing the House managers proved their case so well that they were denied a fair opportunity to prove their case.

As the president’s attorney pointed out, if the House proved its case, then why would it need more witnesses? The Democrat argument for more witnesses collapsed for two reasons. First, it would have lengthened an already tortuous process to the detriment of key Democrat senators, including three running for president.


It must have been agony to listen to the untalented Schiff prance around for 24 hours during the debate. A Denver radio host, Mark Griffith, noted that Schiff sabotaged his case by speaking for so long. Had the Democrats kept their presentation short and concise, the media would have gladly carried the focused message to the public.

Instead, Schiff tortured senators with a repetitive loop of melodrama. At the end of his presentation, a few Democratic senators even considered acquitting. That would be a sublime act of patriotism in defense of the autonomy of the great institution of the Senate. We can only hope.

Second, Democrats took the position that “fairness” dictated that only their witnesses would be approved. Republican requests for Joe and Hunter Biden, Schiff, and the whistleblower were rejected. As reported by The Hill, Democrats said, “Trump allies are demanding an irrelevant witness in exchange for one with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s actions.” Yeah, that’s not going to fly.

As I noted here, the impeachment accusations depend on two key assumptions: (1) that the prosecutor Biden had gotten fired was “corrupt,” and (2) that Trump’s inquiry into why Biden had the prosecutor fired was “baseless.” Schiff never proved Trump’s suspicions were baseless, and the president would have been completely justified to call Biden to ask whether he was indeed motivated to protect his son’s company.


So Democrats irrationally screamed foul because they were not allowed the same one-sided witness selection Schiff imposed in the House impeachment inquiry. That kind of argument may be received with bobblehead nods on MSNBC, but the public tuned it out as more Get-Trump politics. As of Jan. 31, Trump’s approval remains at around 43 percent, roughly identical to before the impeachment and similar to President Obama’s approval at roughly the same point in his presidency.

What should we conclude about public confidence in the media when coverage of Trump during impeachment was 100 percent negative for Trump’s defense team and 95 percent positive for Democrats? We can conclude that the public sees the media for what it is, a never-ending propaganda machine. It will take years of conscientious professionalism to repair the damage to journalism.

Why didn’t The New York Times bombshell leaking Bolton’s tell-all have the devastating effect that revelations about Christine Blasey Ford did in the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh confirmation? You may remember that Democrats held back Ford’s testimony until after the regular confirmation hearing for maximum ambush effect.

Then, like now, the Democrats sought to delay the process to allow for new witnesses to come out of the woodwork and then re-investigate Kavanaugh using the FBI. The impeachment senators are the same senators, by and large, who fell for the dirty tricks in the Kavanaugh hearings. Dirty tricks are like dirty jokes. They don’t work when repeated too often.


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Schiff should be concerned about reprisals. Not from President Trump, but by Democrats in both the House and the Senate, who were over-promised and under-delivered. The precious five months of legislative time Schiff wasted on this mess can never be recovered for a House that operates on two-year cycles. The damage to the country, the Democratic Party, and the media has yet to be assessed.

All of the fawning media pundits got it exactly wrong. Schiff’s speeches were dishonest, overdramatic, factually vague, and an exercise in unbearable vanity. He made the decision not to work up a proper factual record in the inquiry process, hoping hatred of Trump would midwife his fragile case to conviction. That’s not how the Senate works.

James Madison described the Senate as a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” the passions of the House just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.

Once cooled, Schiff’s tea was found too weak to drink. He was a terrible prosecutor with a terrible case, and that’s why he lost.

[soonernvolved]

amgreatness.com/2020/01/29/heres-how-the-senate-should-handle-impeachment-witnesses/

Here’s How the Senate Should Handle Impeachment Witnesses
Before we tear up executive privilege, Adam Schiff should first be required to prove that the original Ukrainian prosecutor was “corrupt” and that the inquiry into Joe Biden’s involvement in the prosecutor’s removal was “baseless.”

Adam Mill - January 29th, 2020

Imagine for a moment a man peeking through the slats of his blinds to watch a neighbor returning to her house with a cup full of a white powdery substance. The nosy man calls the police to report the presence of drugs in his neighborhood. Law enforcement officers crash through the neighbor lady’s door. In a matter of hours, they leave behind slashed furniture cushions, pulled-up floorboards, and torn out drywall until one observant officer spies the suspicious cup (now empty) with a white powdery residue still coating the inside. Law enforcement officers carefully bag and label the cup, a vanilla pound cake, and the adjacent recipe book (also bearing the residue).

In a few days, the lab reports the results: the cup tests positive for sugar.


In America, at least before the “get-Trump” movement, we would not have tolerated this kind of invasion of privacy based upon the neighbor’s suspicion that the powder was drugs. An experienced judge would have refused to sign the warrant until law enforcement demonstrated good reason to believe the white powder the nosy neighbor reported was the fruit of a drug deal, and not—as it later proved to be—a cup of sugar borrowed from a neighbor to finish a cake recipe. Sure, it might have been cocaine. But the Fourth Amendment does not allow the destruction of a sacred constitutional right based upon a flimsy hunch.

Neither should the U.S. Senate allow the destruction of the sacred confidentiality between a president and his close advisors based upon U.S. Representative Adam Schiff’s (D-Calif.) flimsy hunch that the president was up to no good when he briefly suspended U.S. aid to Ukraine. The ability of the president to have confidential conversations with his advisors is essential to our form of government. We should not let Schiff root around in those conversations unless he can show a good faith basis for believing the cup of powdery substance could not have been sugar.

There are two possible interpretations of the pause in Ukraine’s aid. In the “cocaine” scenario, as charged by the articles of impeachment, President Trump “corruptly” solicited “the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into a political opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.,” for “corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit.” Under the “cocaine” scenario, investigating the Bidens has no public purpose.


and a mat, this is all
about the body weight.
00:00
Under the “sugar” scenario, the investigations of the Bidens did have a public purpose. As Trump said in his July 25 phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, “I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved.”

So before we figuratively slash open the furniture cushions and break down the drywall by invading the confidential communications of the president, it’s worth asking whether we can use less-invasive means to evaluate whether we’re looking at cocaine or sugar.

House manager Schiff issued a 300-page report stating his impeachment case against the president. He argues that the president acted on corrupt motives when he asked about Biden getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired because the firing was justified for other reasons.


“President Trump then asked President Zelensky ‘to look into’ former Vice President Biden’s role in encouraging Ukraine to remove a prosecutor widely viewed by the United States and numerous European partners to be corrupt,” Schiff wrote. “In so doing, President Trump gave currency to a baseless allegation that Vice President Biden wanted to remove the corrupt prosecutor because he was investigating Burisma, a company on whose board the Vice President’s son sat at the time.”

To prove Trump’s corrupt motive then, Schiff must establish that Biden wanted to remove the prosecutor because the prosecutor was “corrupt,” and that the alternate view that Biden wanted to protect his son’s company was “baseless.”

We do not need to hear from any of Trump’s inner circle to probe whether the cup may have contained sugar—i.e. that the prosecutor was investigating Burisma and that Biden was interested in protecting his son. Trump actually doesn’t even need to prove he was right. He just needs to show that a reasonable person could believe that what Joe Biden did was worthy of a closer look based upon a legitimate concern over Biden abusing his office for his son’s financial benefit.

For that, we can (yes) ask Biden directly whether his interest in the prosecutor had anything to do with Burisma. As John Solomon points out, the timeline of events is damning.

On January 18, 2015, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office declared Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Ziochevsky a fugitive and “wanted in Ukraine.” On December 8, 2015, the New York Times published an article questioning whether Hunter Biden’s participation on the Burisma board might be undercutting Biden’s “anti-corruption” agenda. On February 4, 2016, the Ukrainian prosecutor announced the seizure of Ziochevsky’s assets.

Biden reportedly demanded the prosecutor’s termination during a March 22, 2016 phone call with the president of Ukraine at the time, Petro Poroshenko. Biden has since boasted that he directly conditioned U.S. aid upon getting the prosecutor fired. The prosecutor was fired a few days later. Within a year, all charges against Burisma were dropped or settled under the supervision of the new Biden-approved prosecutor.

There’s pressure to add “witnesses” to the already too-long trial in the Senate. Should the Senate approve witnesses from his inner circle of advisors, the president will rightly assert executive privilege to protect confidential communications. The House already should have fought these protracted court battles before dumping the matter on the Senate. These fights will further delay a return to normal in both the Senate and in the 2020 election process.

Remember, Schiff is holding at least three Democratic candidates hostage in the run-up to next week’s critical Iowa primary. And because we can discern between the “cocaine” and “sugar” scenarios without ripping up the executive privilege floorboards, the president will likely prevail in court on his executive privilege claims—that is, provided turncoat advisors don’t dishonor their sacred constitutional duty to keep confidential their conversations with the president. (I’m looking at you, John Bolton.)

But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Before we tear up executive privilege, Schiff should first be required to prove that the original prosecutor was “corrupt” and that the inquiry into Biden’s involvement in his removal was “baseless.” If he can’t produce evidence that unambiguously proves both of those contentions, he shouldn’t be allowed to shred executive privilege. Just as in the cup of sugar example, the Constitution places the burden on the accuser to justify trampling the rights of the accused to privacy.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has demonstrated exemplary leadership. He has so clearly appraised the House impeachment effort for the political dirty trick that it is. There’s reason to hope that “Cocaine Mitch” will promptly restore order as he easily differentiates between the cocaine and sugar scenarios.

[soonernvolved]

thefederalist.com/2020/02/03/impeachment-protestors-call-for-nonviolent-revolution-to-end-u-s-fascism/

Impeachment Protestors Call For ‘Nonviolent Revolution’ To End U.S. ‘Fascism’
A lot of the people who have gathered day in and day out to protest against the Trump administration don’t just hate Donald Trump, they hate America.

Krystina SkurkBy Krystina Skurk
FEBRUARY 3, 2020

A lot of the people who have gathered day in and day out to protest against the Trump administration don’t just hate Donald Trump, they hate America. It is unclear whether they hate America because almost half of the population voted for Trump or if they hate Trump because he loves America. The most offensive words to them are “America first” or “Make America Great Again,” because they don’t believe America was ever great or ever can be.

On January 31, the Senate voted 49-51 not to call additional witnesses, effectively spelling out the end of the Senate’s impeachment trial. Outside of the Capitol Building 150-200 protestors assembled despite the rain. While some protestors called for a “fair trial,” others called for a destruction of our entire system of government. All were angry.


As senators began to vote on witnesses, about 45 police officers formed a wall between the protesters and the Capitol Building. When the Senate’s decision was announced, the protestors moved towards the wall of officers as if one unit. They shouted, “Shame, shame, shame.” They were so loud that the chant reverberated off of the East side of the Capital Building and echoed back at the crowd.

After the initial shock of defeat, a few protestors stood silent, tears in their eyes. One young woman began singing into a megaphone, “Can you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men,” others ranted at senators, and one silver-haired woman froze for several moments with her middle finger up in the air and her face raised towards the sky.

Refuse Fascism With…Communism and Anarchy
After several minutes of chanting, “This is a cover-up,” members from the group Refuse Fascism picked up a megaphone and began preaching. What they said, I’d heard before. This group is dedicated. They have been at every rally and protest I’ve covered for the past month, from the Women’s March and the March for Life to daily impeachment protests at the Senate buildings and the Capitol.

Group members told me they are primarily a grassroots organization. None could name a leader, although I noticed three people consistently running their events. The group seems to be funded via donations. One young woman quit her job in California to attend impeachment protests in D.C. To support herself, she set up a GoFundMe page.


Another protester said she also quit her job and is staying in a youth hostel. A retired woman walked around with a container around her neck, collecting donations and email addresses. She informed me that I could contribute online. One man said he drove from Indiana to join the protests. He said that he hadn’t slept in two days and had barely eaten. He shared that he walked away from his life to join the movement.

One member of the group named Chantel, who I’d seen at the Women’s March as well as several impeachment protests, said Refuse Fascism began right before Trump’s inauguration with a call to action by the Revolutionary Communist Party. Chantel said that although the group doesn’t support particular policies, they are collectively against fascism, which she described as a different form of rule, a rule that is openly nationalistic, xenophobic, militaristic, and antagonistic to dissent.

According to the group’s website, they are concerned with a “re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values’” and with the elimination of “traditional democratic rights.” One example the group points to of Trump’s fascist tendencies is his treatment of the media and his use of the term “fake news” as well as his habit of calling people names.

The group’s primary goal, Chantel explained, is to drive Trump and his fascist allies out of office through mass mobilization. She said the group’s models are the protest movements in Lebanon, Chile, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico. She does not believe that impeachment is the complete answer, because that would leave Vice President Mike Pence in the White House. She believes he is a Christian fascist, threatening the separation of church and state.


RefuseFascism.org states, “[O]ur single, non-negotiable demand must be that the entire regime – Trump, Pence and all their henchmen (Bannon, Sessions, Mattis, Devos, Pruitt, etc.) – must be driven out.” The group has been organizing protests in cities around the nation since Trump’s inauguration. They repeatedly call for people to “get off the couch.” I heard several themes from Refuse Fascism protestors.

Calling the Electoral Process into Question
“On Tuesday when the Senate Trial begins, we need to be there to bring the power of the people,” hundreds of Women’s March protestors repeated after a woman holding a megaphone and wearing an orange “Out Now- Refuse Fascism” T-shirt. The woman’s name is Sunsara Taylor. According to her Twitter page, she writes for revcom.us and is an activist working with RefuseFacism.org.

Taylor said to the crowd, “We cannot rely on the Democrats, we cannot rely on the election, we cannot rely on the normal channels, because Donald Trump is a fascist who does not respect the normal channels.” I heard this assertion at every protest I attended with Refuse Fascism members in attendance.

At Friday night’s protest, a man who ran the megaphone said to the crowd, “You can’t rely on the elections that they are rigging.” After the announcement of no witnesses, he led the crowd in the chant, “Donald Trump is guilty, the whole system is guilty…Republicans are fascist collaborators…”


One woman said to the crowd, “We have to cast aside the illusion that the normal processes are going to take care of this… it was through the elections [with its] racist electoral college and gerrymandering, that Donald Trump came into power.”

RefuseFacism.org states, “We recognize that the Trump/Pence Regime is illegitimate because it is fascist, that fascism must be stopped before it is too late, and that this means that the masses of people in their millions must be led to rise up and drive it from power.” The protestors gave mixed messages, one minute claiming that the electoral system was corrupt and the next telling people to get off the couch and vote or volunteer to register voters.

Many of the protestors talked about a communist constitution written by Bob Avakian, leader of the Revolutionist Communist Party. This constitution would form a new nation called The New Socialist Republic in North America. Its legislators would be elected by popular vote, and a majority of votes in the nation’s single legislature could pass laws. Members of this legislature would serve as an executive council. Notice there are no separation of powers, something many of the protestors complained Trump was eviscerating.

America Is Racist
Another theme was America’s innate racism. A young African American woman said at Friday night’s protest, “Not that long ago 20,000 armed white supremacists marched in the capitol of the confederacy and Donald Trump… is on the path to being acquitted, what does this say about this house, a white house, built by enslaved people, what does this say about this country that parades around as a land of so called freedom and democracy? I want people to confront the truth: America was never great.”

Standing across the street from the Supreme Court, one Refuse Fascism protestor yelled at marchers passing by. He said, “Hey, MAGA, when was America actually great—when they dropped bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, when there was slavery? America was never great.”

In an impeachment protest on Jan. 29, Taylor said, “We are living in a country… ruled right now by a fascist regime. Donald Trump and his regime are intensifying the horrors that this country was founded on, white supremacy [and] the genocidal extermination of the native peoples… There is a direct line between the Confederacy and the fascism [of] today. Donald Trump is… doing damage to the democratic and civil rights we’ve been told we have.”

The Avakian solution to racism in America is two-fold. All discrimination would be outlawed (if only it were that easy). Secondly, African-Americans would be given the opportunity to decide whether to form autonomous territories, something akin to Indian reservations. The same is true for Hispanics in the Southeast. Alternatively, the new government may consider giving Mexico back the land taken by the “Imperialist United States” in the Mexican American war.

Christianity Is Fascist
Several protestors mentioned the fascist nature of people like Pence and Betsy Devos, whom they claim take the Bible literally and thus advocate for teaching creationism and persecuting homosexuals. Many were very concerned that policies have been enacted by the Trump administration that have weakened the separation of church and state.

One young protestor named Christian spoke against pro-life policies: “This is 1984 sh-t, this is Handmaid’s Tale sh-t,” he said. A protestor with the mustache commented that the March for Life was really a march for female enslavement.

In Avakian’s constitution, freedom of religion is protected just like freedom of speech. There is also a strict separation of church and state, meaning there are to be no religious symbols or ceremonies within government. Further, religion would receive no special exceptions or exemptions under the law.


In this new communist paradise all education would be centrally administered by the state and mandatory. The educational system would be dedicated to teaching “the dialectical materialist understanding that all of reality consists of matter in motion… and nothing else.” The cultural and historical effects of religion may be discussed, but that is it.

Further, the state would “vigorously propagate” the “communist worldview” founded on the idea of historical materialism. Part of this involves promoting atheism, the socialist constitution says.

Lastly, the right to an abortion and to contraception would be constitutionally protected. There are no religious exemptions, so Christian doctors would either be forced to perform abortions against their conscience or to quit.

America’s Relation to the Rest of the World Is Fascist
“What part of this world does the military not have a base terrorizing people in Yemen, Syria, and Iran?” asked one young protestor. She argued that America is a system whose function is to cause terror to black people, immigrants, and women all over the world. She said she believed imperialism, capitalism, and fascism go hand in hand.

The protestors conveyed that America is an international bully and that countries around the world are its victims. I heard sympathy and even admiration for countries like Iran and Cuba. Protestors derided America for the wars in North Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.


Further, the Trump administration and those in agreement with its immigration policies were criticized for believing in borders. Instead this group believes the nation state has outworn its welcome. “We can get to a world without borders…The bridge to that world is an overthrow of this system,” one protestor said.

The group’s pledge that they often say with firsts raised starts with, “In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.” One girl who spoke at the Jan. 29 rally said she considers herself more of a member of humanity than an American. As the Avakian constitution states, “The orientation and principles of this state, as embodied in this Constitution, are internationalist…” The Avakian constitution says its goal is the spread of communism throughout the world and thus domestic policies must keep that goal in mind.

Decrying Capitalism in Favor of Communism
Most of the leaders I heard speak lauded Avakian’s constitution. Of this constitution, one protestor said, “There is a constitution for a new socialist republic of North America… A blue-print of how we can rebuild society on a better foundation.”

The constitution states: “In order to bring this new socialist state into being, it would be necessary to thoroughly defeat, dismantle and abolish the capitalist-imperialist state of the USA; and this in turn would only become possible with the development of a profound and acute crisis in society and the emergence of a revolutionary people, in the millions and millions, who have the leadership of a revolutionary communist vanguard and are conscious of the need for revolutionary change and determined to fight for it.”

Chantel said not everyone in Refuse Fascism is a revolutionary or an Avakian supporter, although all three people who appeared to lead the protests called for mass non-violent revolution to overturn our system of government.

This Doesn’t Make a Lot of Sense
There are many contradictions in the ideology of Refuse fascism. The group simultaneously rejects fascism while embracing communism, a system of government that has often devolved into fascism. Although different ideologies, they often produce the same results: oppression, poverty, and ultimately massive loss of life.

Refuse Fascism claims to want an American Spring, but they talk little of how the Arab Spring turned out for many countries in the Middle East. They point to Hong Kong as an example of a political uprising they’d like to emulate, but don’t mention that the people of Hong Kong are fighting against a communist government, the same type of centrally controlled government their hero Avakian wants to implement.

They decry capitalism because it oppresses the poor, but don’t consider the millions capitalism has lifted out of poverty. They naively turn a blind eye to the horrors communism wrought in Russia, China, and Cambodia, convinced they can do it better. One minute they decry Trump as fascist because he calls people names, and the next they shout over a megaphone “F-ck Trump.”


Further they can’t point to a single piece of U.S. legislation that has actually curbed anyone’s freedom of speech, forced a single child to learn creationism, or prohibited any journalist, much less all journalists, from criticizing Trump as much as they please.

Groups like Refuse Fascism act like the entire country is simultaneously living under 1960s era Jim Crowe and an Atwood-esque dystopian nightmare. In reality, things in America are pretty good. For example, black unemployment is at an all-time low and the number of black women in the workplace has increased, reports CNN.

Facts like these are very inconvenient for those who want to claim the sky is falling. After all, who would agree to a communist revolution if capitalism is working out just fine?

Krystina Skurk is a research assistant at Hillsdale College in D.C. She received a Master's degree in politics from the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College. She is a former fellow of the John Jay Institute, a graduate of Regent University, and a former teacher at Archway Cicero, a Great Hearts charter school.

[soonernvolved]

An investigative report revealed that $90 Billion in US Taxpayer money has been funneled to overseas organizations in the name of helping those with HIV AIDS. In reality the funds are distributed to organizations including the Clinton Health Access Initiative and George Soros’s Open Health Institute.
Corey Diggs put together a report that shows that efforts to combat HIV AIDS may just be fronts for money laundering schemes ran by the Clintons and George Soros. The story begins in August 2000, a few months before Bill Clinton’s second term ends. On August 19, 2000:


Bill Clinton signed a bill establishing the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, intending to locate it inside the World Bank in Switzerland.

The Washington Post reported “Clinton, who will travel to Nigeria and Tanzania, is directing Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers to begin negotiations with the World Bank to set up the trust fund.”

In her efforts to unfold the truth, Diggs uncovered that money sent from the US to help fight AIDS actually ends up in the hands of the likes of George Soros:

In 2003, The Global Fund issued [with funds from the US and others] its first grant to the Open Health Institute (OHI), an Open Society Foundation affiliate (George Soros) operating in the Russian Federation, to the tune of $88 million. Yes, Russia. Grants continued through 2018. But this wasn’t the only involvement George Soros had with the Global Fund. More on this in subsequent chapters.

• The ANTIAIDS Foundation was founded by Elena Franchuk and husband Victor Pinchuk in the Ukraine, who went on to work with the Clinton Health Access Initiative in 2004. Of course, the Pinchuks also partnered with Coca-cola, George Soros, Kofi Annan, Elton John, and others. Victor Pinchuk was also a big donor to the Clinton Foundation. More on this in subsequent chapters.

In 2002 the Clintons inserted themselves into the global initiatives with AIDS:

Enter Bill and Hillary Clinton, who had nicely set this into motion back in 2000 just before Bill’s exit from the White House, and with the Clinton Foundation already established, why not create an illegal offshoot called Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and say it’s part of the foundation? Despite the fact it’s totally illegal to claim another non-profit within a non-profit without filing separate tax returns or registering it as a separate entity, but hey, this is par for the course for the Clintons. In fact, they went on with this charade for 7 whole years from 2002-2009 when they finally decided to separate it out as its own entity and begin listing their donors. This donor list is quite an eye opener and very extensive to say the least, including such donors as UNITAID, the Clinton Foundation, the CDC and CDC Foundation, WHO, The Global Fund, the World Bank, governments, universities, and hundreds more. Surely there is no pay-to-play action taking place in this upstanding organization.

Diggs uncovered a 2011 email from Cheryl Mills to Hillary Clinton, where Mills provides “talking points” for Hillary when discussing with Ellen DeGeneres her promoting Hillary’s HIV/AIDS speech:

Background: I spoke with Ellen DeGeneres’ manager, David McGuire, today about Ellen serving as a Special Envoy for Global HIV/AID Awareness. OGAC is developing a concept paper for consideration, but David agreed that there will be some sort of arrangement for Ellen to promote both your speech and World AIDS Day through social media or perhaps you phoning into her show at some point.

In conclusion, Diggs reports the following:

www.coreysdigs.com/health-science/is-aids-us-90b-taxpayer-dollars-a-global-slush-fund/

In short, U.S. taxpayers are forced to give their hard-earned money to the government, who has funneled $90 billion dollars of it to NGOs with a substantial amount to the Global Fund. Meanwhile, big pharma is lining the pockets of politicians. The Global Fund is in charge of distributing the funds to numerous organizations and NGOS, many of which are located in the US, as well as health ministries throughout developing countries. And yes, Clinton Health Access Initiative is one of the recipients, in addition to George Soros’ Open Health Institute, among many other familiar faces.

Yet, the drugs repeatedly have issues with making it to the alleged victims of HIV, some have been watered down, millions in funds have mysteriously vanished, and the founding board member and chairman of the Global Fund did a 2-year stint in prison for securities fraud. Simultaneously, U.S. patients who are suffering from HIV cannot afford the $39,000/year treatment that is only costing $75/year for nearly the same treatment in developing countries. This is how your hard earned money is being spent – all $90 billion dollars worth.

How many billions left the US and landed in the pockets of individuals like the Clintons, Soros and others?

[soonernvolved]

www.zerohedge.com/political/senate-call-whistleblower-part-three-pronged-investigation-impeachment-origins

Senate To Call 'Whistleblower' As Part Of Three-Pronged Investigation Into Impeachment Origins

Senate Republicans are gearing up for a three-pronged investigation into the origins of Congressional Democrats' impeachment of President Trump, according to the Washington Examiner.

"I want to understand how all this crap started," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures, who added that the Senate would begin their investigations "within weeks."

"The Senate Intel Committee under Richard Burr has told us that they will call the whistleblower," said Graham.



Whether it's a legitimate search for the truth or a convenient way to assuage frustrated Republicans who wanted fireworks during the Senate impeachment trial has yet to be seen.

Let's recall what Senate Republicans plan to unravel;

The Whistelblower, outed by investigative reporter Paul Sperry as Eric Ciaramella, is a registered Democrat who worked for then-VP Joe Biden, former CIA Director John Brennan, and was appointed by former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in June, 2017 as his personal aide according to RedState. Ciaramella, who radio host Rush Limbaugh called "essentially a spy for John Brennan," was also a frequent visitor to the Obama White House.

In November, the Washington Examiner reported: "It is likely that the whistleblower traveled on Air Force Two at least one of the six visits that Biden made to Ukraine."

"If the whistleblower is a former employee of — associate of Joe Biden, I think that would be important. If the whistleblower was working with people on Schiff’s staff that wanted to take Trump down a year-and-a-half ago, I think that would be important. If the Schiff staff people helped write the complaint, that would be important. We’re going to get to the bottom of all of this to make sure this never happens again," said Sen. Graham.



After hearing second-hand about a July 25 call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky in which Trump asked for investigations into the Bidens, Ciaramella approached impeachment chieftain Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)'s office (which hired two of Ciaramella's colleagues last year, including Sean Misko, who was hired in August).

Schiff's team directed Ciaramella to "Coup has started" Democratic operative attorney Mark Zaid (who vowed to "get rid of" Trump in July of 2017), who helped the CIA 'whistleblower' file a complaint on a form which had been altered to allow hearsay.

What's more, at least two of Ciaramella's colleagues from the National Security Counsel were hired by Schiff's office last year - including Sean Misko, who was hired in August.

And Schiff continues to deny knowledge of the whistleblower's identity.

Democrats, pointing to the Trump administration placing a hold on US military aid to Ukraine, unbeknownst to Zelensky, argued that President Trump abused his office and obstructed Congress' investigation. During last week's Senate trial, Trump's attorneys argued that his actions fell far short of impeachable offense.

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www.dailywire.com/news/will-the-house-subpoena-bolton-adam-schiff-wont-say

Will The House Subpoena John Bolton? Adam Schiff Won’t Say

House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) won’t say whether he’ll issue a subpoean to former national security advisor John Bolton to have Bolton testify in front of a House panel, even though he pressed the Senate to force Bolton to testify in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.


The Democrats had played with subpoenaing Bolton even during the Senate trial, suggesting, repeatedly, that Bolton could be forced to testify in the House and, if his testimony yielded any new and interesting information, that could bolster the Democrats’ argument for further witnesses in the Senate. That opportunity, though, has now come and gone, and a draft of Bolton’s tell-all book about his time in the White House, which includes a passage about Trump’s discussions with Ukrainian leaders, was not enough to convince Republicans to open the floodgates.

Democrats have also threatened to continue to hold hearings in the House, seeking a possible second attempt at impeaching the president.

But according to Schiff, who appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, there are no concrete plans to have Bolton as a guest of the House Intelligence Committee any time soon.

‘I don’t want to comment to this point on what our plans may or may not be with respect to John Bolton,” Schiff said. “But I will say this: whether it’s before – in testimony before the House or it’s in his book or it’s in one form or another, the truth will continue to come out.”


Schiff also accused the White House of engaging in a coverup — an effort he says has “failed,” despite the fact that the president is likely to be acquitted on all charges come Wednesday.

“That shows you the lengths to which the President’s lawyers are going to cover this up,” he said, referencing a series of emails released Friday showing communications between Trump and Ukrainian officials on the subject of foreign aid. “But they’re going to fail. Indeed, they’ve failed already.”


The impeachment trial will likely end this week; the Senate voted on Friday to outline the rules for a final vote, setting the trial’s conclusion for Wednesday.

For Schiff, though, an acquittal vote will simply mean a return to further, different investigations into the White House and the president. The Ukrainian issue may be exhausted, but Democrats have more than 85 separate targets on their “hit list,” per an Axios report from 2018 when the investigations were just kicking off, and most have yet to kick off, let alone conclude.


Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), for example, is still waiting on Federal courts to decide whether she can subpoena President Trump’s financial records from before he was president, and whether she can force Deutche Bank to turn over information about the Trump Corporation’s dealings with Russian financiers before and after the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s tax returns are also still on the table, as is whether he’s earning profits from his hotel chain while in office in violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

House Democrats may want to spend time on Bolton, but there are also at least 64 outstanding subpoenas for Trump Administration officials, and members of the House Democratic caucus have suggested at least two dozen additional investigations since the House impeachment hearings began.

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www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/03/live-updates-trump-impeachment-trial-closing-arguments/

12:01 PM: After Schiff defends him staff from “attacks,” he quotes Elijah Cummings about standing up to “lawlessness” and “tyranny.” He claims the managers are not there representing just themselves and the House. Schiff, like other Democrats who are speaking to future liberal historians, quotes Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech and urges the Senate to convict Trump on both articles and remove Trump.

The Senate will take a 30-minute lunch break after Schiff reserves the balance of their time.



11:45 AM: Jeffries warns Senators of the “new normal” if they acquit Trump like he has done throughout the trial over and over and over again. He says with Trump, “past is prologue,” and asks the Senators what message acquitting Trump will send to America’s allies around the world. He says they will be telling them that “America’s national security is for sale” and brings up John McCain and “moral courage.”

11:26 AM: Demings now up to rehash all of Trump’s “abuses of power” and the timeline. She says Trump “ordered a massive cover-up unprecedented in American history” after his “scheme” got exposed. Demings says Trump remains unapologetic, and Trump’s “constitutional crimes” against the American people “remain in progress.” She now goes over the “totality of the president’s misconduct” all of the ways Trump, with Giuliani’s help, tried to “cheat” to win in 2020 by pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

Demings claims the managers have presented “overwhelming” evidence that Trump has committed “grave” abuses of power then throws in a reference to Bolton’s upcoming book. Demings also says only a “guilty” person like Trump would want to prevent witnesses from testifying and withhold documents.

11:09 AM: Crow will lead off for the House managers. McConnell says Senate will take a break after they are done.

Crow begins by speaking about Daniel Webster’s March 7th speech and the Compromise of 1850. Crow says Webster was wrong about the Compromise not leading to secession but right about putting trust in the Senate. Crow again says impeachment will not overturn the last election and interfered in the next. He again rips Dershowitz for arguing that “if something is in the president’s interests, it is in the interests of the American people.” He says you don’t have to be Constitutional scholars to know this argument (the president is the state) is at odds with democracy/history.

11:01 AM: Chief Justice John Roberts should soon gavel in the Senate.

10:55 AM: Dem. Senators would rather be doing retail politics in Iowa.

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1:38 PM: Sekulow says he wants to emphasize that both articles fail to allege impeachable offenses and must fail. He rips the partisan impeachment process that should never happen again. He says the push for impeachment came from the president’s opponents for the last three years and has put the Senate in a horrible position. He plays video of House Democrats calling for impeachment even before Trump was sworn into office.

1:25 PM: Philbin says the House is also not above the law and Pelosi cannot give the sole power of impeachment to committees by holding a press conference. He says the House, by denying Trump his due process rights, “fundamentally skewed” the proceedings. He says those proceedings were not designed to seek the truth. Philbin says Schiff should have been a witness and his staff were in talks with the whistleblower and guided the testimony/investigation. Philbin says the House produced a record that the Senate cannot rely on because of so many procedural defects.

He says what’s unprecedented is that the House issued 23 subpoenas without authority and Trump did not engage in “blanket defiance” because the executive branch had three different legal rationales explaining the defects of the subpoenas.

Philbin says there are so many defects and and the House is asserting privileges that are not in our system of jurisprudence because the process was purely partisan and political. Citing Federalist 65, Philbin says this is what the framers foresaw.

1:20 PM: Purpura says the House managers’ case is “not overwhelming and not undisputed” and have not met their burden of proof. He says the House managers’ witnessed have “undermined” the case and the first article does not even allege an impeachable offense.

1:07 PM: Purpura emphasizes that Trump did not condition security assistance on anything during the July phone call and witnesses confirmed. He emphasizes that Trump sets foreign policy and unelected bureaucrats implement it. Purpura notes witnesses testified that they did not hear anything “improper,” “unlawful,” or “otherwise troubling” on the phone call.

Purpura says even Zelensky and his top advisers have said they felt no pressure from Trump and notes the meeting with Zelensky in Warsaw took place days after the Politico article that informed Ukrainian officials of the pause in foreign assistance. Purpura also says Trump told Sondland and Sen. Johnson there was no quid pro quo.

1:05 PM: Media not happy Ken Starr quoted MLK:

12:53 PM: Ken Starr, in speaking about fundamental fairness, bizarrely brings up Deflategate and sign-stealing. He makes references to Irving Berlin, Martin Luther King, Justice Cardozo and accuses the House managers of saying they didn’t have enough time to conduct a full investigation and follow all of the rules. He asks the Senators why the House managers didn’t tell them so much while cherrypicking testimony.

12:52 PM: Cipollone says Trump’s team will complete their arguments in an “efficient” manner because the Senators already know their arguments. He says at the end of the day, this is an effort to overturn one election and interfere in another that starts today. He says the only appropriate result is to acquit the president and leave it to the voters to decide.

Starr will make the first presentation.

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1:53: Sekulow emphasizes the House tried to usurp the president’s constitutional powers with the first article of impeachment and tried to control the constitutional privileges and immunities of the executive branch with the second while “disrespecting” the framers’ system of checks and balances.

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www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/why-impeachment-failed/

Why Impeachment Failed
By DAVID HARSANYI
February 3, 2020 1:16 PM

House Democrats rushed through a botched process and then complained bitterly and endlessly that Senate Republicans wouldn’t do their work for them.
Unless more incriminating evidence emerges to dramatically alter public perception, the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is effectively over.

It’s comforting, no doubt, to believe that Trump has survived this entire debacle because he possesses a tighter hold on his party than Barack Obama or George W. Bush or any other contemporary president did. But while partisanship might be corrosive, it’s also the norm. In truth, Trump, often because of his own actions, has likely engendered less loyalty than the average president, not more.


It’s difficult to recall a single Democratic senator throwing anything but hosannas Obama’s way, which allowed the former president to ride his high horse from one scandalous attack on the Constitution to the next. In 1998, not a single Democrat voted to convict Bill Clinton, who had engaged in wrongdoing for wholly self-serving reasons, despite the GOP’s case being methodical and incriminating. Attempting to impeach a president for lying under oath to a federal grand jury in a sexual-harassment case in an effort to obstruct justice was, as Alan Dershowitz and many others argued, “sexual McCarthyism.” Few Democrats, though, claimed Clinton was innocent, because no one could credibly offer that defense; they merely reasoned that the punishment was too severe for what amounted to a piddling crime.

The chances of any party’s removing its sitting president without overwhelming evidence that fuels massive voter pressure are negligible. It’s never happened in American history — unless you count the preemptive removal of Richard Nixon — and probably never will. Democrats are demanding the GOP adopt standards that no party has ever lived by.

Perhaps if the public hadn’t been subjected to four years of interminable hysteria over the United States’ imaginary decent into fascism, it might have been less apathetic toward the fate of “vital” Ukrainian aid that most Democrats had voted against when Obama was president.

NOW WATCH: 'Trump Calls Impeachment Case 'Constitutionally Invalid''


WATCH: 0:30
Trump Calls Impeachment Case 'Constitutionally Invalid'
And perhaps if institutional media hadn’t spent three years pushing a hyperbolically paranoid narrative of Russian collusion — a debunked conspiracy theory incessantly repeated by Democrats during the impeachment trial — the public wouldn’t be anesthetized to another alleged national emergency.

You simply can’t expect a well-adjusted voter to maintain CNN-levels of indignation for years on end.

Beyond the public’s mood, the Democrats’ strategy was a mess. House Dems and their 17 witnesses set impossible-to-meet expectations, declaring that Trump had engaged in the worst wrongdoing ever committed by any president in history. (I’m not exaggerating.) When it comes to Trump criticism, everything is always the worst thing ever.

Even if Trump’s actions had risen to the level of removal, Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler were quite possibly the worst possible messengers to make the case. These are not the politicians you tap to persuade jurors; they’re the politicians you pick to rile up your base.


Despite all the fabricated praise directed at Schiff over the past couple of weeks, the man reeks of partisanship. Not only because he’s been caught lying about the presence of damning evidence against Trump on more than one occasion, but because he personally played a sketchy role in helping the whistleblower responsible for sparking the impeachment come forward.

Lots of Americans rightly believe that a large faction of Democrats has been looking to impeach the president from Day One. Nadler happened to be someone who was actually caught scheming to do it.

Even then, instead of spending the appropriate time building a solid case, subpoenaing all the “vital” witnesses, and laying out a timeline, House Democrats, by their own admission, rushed forward. They justified taking shortcuts by warning that the country was in a race to stop Trump from stealing the 2020 election just as he had allegedly stolen the 2016 election.

That wouldn’t have been a big deal if Nancy Pelosi hadn’t exposed the supposed need for urgency as a ruse, by withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate for weeks. She did so despite having zero standing to dictate the terms of the trial, no constitutional right to attempt to dictate them, and no political leverage. In the end, she got nothing from Mitch McConnell for her trouble.

Meanwhile, Democrats had spent most of the House hearings focusing on the specific criminal offenses of “bribery” and “extortion” — poll-tested words that were taken up after the House realized “quid pro quo” didn’t play as well with the public. If, as seems likely, it’s true that Americans are more familiar with the concepts of “bribery” and “extortion” than with the concept of a “quid pro quo,” that just means they have clearer expectations regarding the evidence needed to substantiate those accusations. And the Democrats didn’t have such evidence. They didn’t even bother including the former “crimes” — no, you don’t need a violation of criminal law to impeach, but the word was incessantly used by House Dems anyway — in their open-ended articles of impeachment, which were expressly written to compel Senate Republicans to conduct an investigation for them.

The House had no right to demand that, and the Senate had no reason to comply. So as soon as the upper chamber took up impeachment, Democrats began dropping one “bombshell” leak after the next — the same strategy they deployed during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — to try and drag out the spectacle and maximize the political damage. It didn’t work.


Some of us would certainly have preferred that more Republicans concede Trump’s call was unbecoming and, in parts, inappropriate, even if it didn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense. Those who did, such as Alexander and Pat Toomey, had a better case to make in dismissing the need for any witnesses. Trump’s actions, though not ethically “perfect,” fall under the bailiwick of presidential power. Voters can decide his fate soon enough.


Democrats, though, keep demanding that Republicans play under a different set of rules. The Constitution, a document that is under attack by the very people claiming to want to save it from the president, worked exactly as it should in this case. The House is free to subpoena all the “vital” witnesses Republicans have supposedly ignored, and then send a new batch of impeachment articles. Impeachment isn’t tantamount to a “coup,” any more than Senate acquittal is unconstitutional or corrupt.

Pretending that Republicans are motivated by historically unique strains of partisanship, acting like democracy is on the precipice of extinction simply because you didn’t get your way, though, is nothing but histrionics.