Misguided Politics Drives Impeachment
The phony impeachment campaign by Democrats is boosted by an underlying hostility harbored within the Deep State against President Trump’s foreign policy. Long gone are the days when Democrats were the anti- war party, as their own presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) laments.
Democrats and entrenched D.C. bureaucrats are united in wanting to send more aid to foreign countries and to perpetually station our troops in distant lands. The push to impeach President Trump gained steam after he brought our soldiers home from Syria.
“The senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified” in wanting President Trump to send military aid to Ukraine, declared impeachment witness Deputy Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper. When the money stopped flowing for the globalists, they falsely alleged wrongdoing by President Trump.
“It’s in our interest to deter Russian aggression elsewhere around the world,” Deputy Secretary Cooper opined. But that is an opinion for the President, not the Deep State.
The American people elected Donald Trump to repudiate the globalist mindset that has dominated nearly every president since Woodrow Wilson. It is not an impeachable offense to stop sending money to foreign countries.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), the youngest member of the U.S. Senate, is a rising conservative star who echoes the America First positions of President Trump. In a speech on November 12, Senator Hawley provided compelling arguments against the globalist agenda of the Deep Staters.
“The American public is rightly skeptical of open- ended commitments and rightly tired of endless wars,” Sen. Hawley declared. “We find ourselves embroiled in the longest war in our nation’s history, with no discernible end in sight.”
Our “commitments have been paid for in the dearly earned dollars of the American working class, and in the dearly precious lives of American soldiers. … We cannot remake every nation in our image.”
But there are many enemies of Trump’s America First policy. A high concentration of those enemies are in the Deep State, the bureaucracy in D.C.
The Democrats’ central witness against Trump could be Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, but his deposition was more opinion than fact. Vindman has become the new front man for the Democrats as they decided not to rely further on the secret whistleblower who did not have any firsthand knowledge of any relevant facts either.
An accused person has a due process right to call witnesses. The President should have rights at least as great as those guaranteed to criminals in our courts of law.
Yet Democrats are refusing to allow Republicans to call as witnesses the whistleblower or Hunter Biden, the son of presidential contender Joe Biden. What are Democrats afraid of?
Democrats want to avoid full display of their political motivation behind the impeachment proceedings. The common denominator among the Deep State witnesses against Trump is their disagreement with his America First policy and their disdain for Trump as our Commander-in-Chief.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, earlier rebuffed a scheme by John Kelly and Rex Tillerson to work against Trump from within his administration. She sets an example for others to defend our president.
“There’s no insistence on that call, there are no demands on that call, it is a conversation between two presidents that’s casual in nature,” Haley stated on the Today show in reference to the call between Trump and the Ukrainian president which is at the center of the planned impeachment.
Democrats allege that Trump tied military aid for Ukraine to a request that it investigate corruption concerning Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden. On July 25, Trump merely asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a favor, but there was no quid pro quo.
Haley observes that it was proper for Trump to ask the Ukrainian President to probe corruption. If the
Bidens were not involved in any wrongdoing, then they should have nothing to fear from such an inquiry by the distant Ukraine.
When Joe Biden was vice president, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless it fired Viktor Shokin, its top prosecutor. Shokin had been investigating wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company which paid Biden’s son Hunter at least $50,000 a month to serve on its Board of Directors despite his lack of experience.
Nikki Haley points out that “an American should want to know the answer of, ‘Did Biden pressure the prosecutor to, you know, to do what he did?’ And I think there’s a real question there.”
Haley added that “you can question the president, but you also have to question what Biden did.” Yet Democrats refuse to allow Republicans to call Hunter Biden or the whistleblower to testify, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says this failure would render any impeachment “dead on arrival.”
Impeachment Hearings Are a Bust
Television ratings for the impeachment hearings have been a bust, far less than the viewership during Watergate or Clinton-Lewinsky. Even the testimony of ex-FBI director James Comey and future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh drew higher ratings than the Democrats’ latest show trial.
Barely 13 million people watched the first day of impeachment hearings, which is only a tiny fraction of the audience for big football games. Polling shows that Independent voters, who will decide the next presidential election, are unplugging this in large numbers.
It does not help the Democrats that their star witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, has been discredited by his own supervisor, Tim Morrison. According to Morrison, Vindman is not reliable and his boss Morrison even doubts his judgment.
Morrison, the far more credible witness, found nothing improper on the telephone call held between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In contrast Vindman appears politically biased by his own disagreement with President Trump’s foreign policy, which further undermines Vindman’s objectivity.
The opinionated views of Vindman and other anti-Trump witnesses hopelessly distort the hearings. Democrats have delayed testimony by those who are willing to stick to the facts, which vindicate our president.
Morrison listened in on the July 25th call and has first- hand knowledge which several of the other informants, including the so-called whistleblower, lack. Morrison and other witnesses who support Trump’s statements have not yet been allowed by the Democrats to testify publicly.
The Democrats’ game plan is to try to turn the public against President Trump before the most knowledgeable witnesses testify in his defense. Democrats relied heavily on their witness Marie Yovanovitch, the Former Ambassador to Ukraine who was replaced by President Trump and who hasahistoryofforeignpolicyfailures.
But Yovanovitch had an underpublicized zinger against the Democratic frontrunner for president, Joe Biden. She testified that it was improper for Hunter Biden to take a large salary from a corrupt Ukrainian company while his father Joe Biden was vice president.
Committee member Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) astutely followed up by asking Yovanovitch if she ever raised this potential conflict-of-interest by the Bidens with officials at the State Department, such as George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs who testified two days earlier. “I don’t believe so,” Yovanovitch replied.
“No one did anything? You see why the president was a little concerned about what happened in Ukraine?” Ratcliffe quickly pointed out rhetorically.
Yovanovitch did not admit the obvious, but it was unnecessary at that point. The failure by her and other anti-Trump diplomats to flag the Bidens’ improper conduct is reason enough for Trump to raise the issue earlier this year.
Impeachment hack Adam Schiff, the Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, strained to portrayYovanovitchasavictimofbullyingbyTrump.Schiff even interrupted the hearing to read a tweet by President Trump critical of Yovanovitch, and Schiff pretended that it was a crime for Trump to tweet against a witness.
But it was Schiff, not Trump, who interjected the tweet into the hearing and potentially influenced the witness by reading it to her. Schiff was playing to the media, rather than attempting to ferret out the truth in a fair way.
Schiff further distorted the hearing for the purpose of the television cameras by refusing to allow Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) to release his time for questioning the witness to a female colleague, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). Schiff apparently thought the optics would be better for his side if a Republican male rather than a female questioned the anti-Trump female witness.
But the staged impeachment hearings are failing to hold the attention of a television audience. Even former Trump attorney Michael Cohen attracted higher television ratings when he testified before a congressional hearing earlier this year.
How long the Democrats pursue impeachment amid pitiful television ratings remains to be seen. Most of the public thinks we should not be sending millions of taxpayer dollars to a foreign country with a history of rampant corruption.
There is no precedent for this bizarre inquisition into foreign policy decisions which are properly for a president to make. Another poll shows that 90% of evangelicals, the voting bloc pivotal to the election of President Trump in 2016, view the impeachment hearings as a witch hunt.
The proverbial national spotlight that Democrats hoped to shine on their impeachment show trial is dim and ineffective. Its greatest achievement may be to force the Democratic senators who are running for president to be in D.C. during the month of January, to sift through the non-evidence rather than campaign against Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In less than a year these impeachment proceedings will be rendered moot by the real jury: American voters.
Democrats: Where’s the Diversity?
After a nearly 70-year-old northeastern white woman senator was nominated by the Democrats for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton then went down to a stunning defeat at the hands of Donald Trump. This time liberals promised to turn to their imaginary strength, namely their diversity, in picking their nominee for the upcoming presidential election.
So here we are. Yet the Democrats are rallying behind another 70-year-old dishonest northeastern white woman senator as their nominee, this time Elizabeth Warren.
“When did you first find out you were white?” was the essence of a hilarious question put to Warren earlier this year. After exaggerating her Native American heritage in order to boost her legal career and get on the faculty of Harvard Law School, Warren released a DNA report showing that she has very little Cherokee Indian ancestry.
For Democrats this was supposed to be the year of the African-American candidates, such as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. Kamala Harris was poised to give us an extra bonanza in diversity, because her mother was from India and her father is from Jamaica, but she has fallen flat as a presidential candidate.
None of these candidates is getting any traction in the Democratic presidential primary. After multiple debates, it appears that Democrats do not really want to nominate a diversity candidate after all.
Atop the polling and ahead in fundraising is nobody but white candidates: Warren, Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg. The diversity candidates for the Democratic nomination have all floundered.
Warren’s lack of diversity is not the only thing that she has in common with her failed predecessor, Hillary Clinton. Both apparently also have difficulty telling the truth.
Warren has bragged that she climbed her way up from an underprivileged background, describing her father as merely a janitor. But his death certificate lists him as a flight instructor in the U.S. Army, and his obituary said he was a self-employed businessman.
Elizabeth Warren has made up other things about her background. As candidate Warren she pretends that she lost her job as a public school teacher because she became pregnant.
But in 2008, in a statement captured on video, Warren told a completely different version of why she quit as a teacher. Then she said she wanted to spend a few years at home, and to return to graduate school.
On October 7 the Washington Free Beacon ran a story which uncovered the minutes for the Riverdale Board of Education, which show that it unanimously approved an additional two-year contract for Warren. Two months later, the minutes reflect that it was Warren who resigned, which the Board “accepted with regret.”
Ultimately she migrated to the ultra-Left culture of liberal law professors, railing against capitalism and free enterprise. Democrats on Wall Street are so uncomfortable with her that they have signaled they will not support her as the nominee.
Meanwhile, some experts have been predicting that Hillary Clinton will reemerge on the grand stage for a rematch of 2016. After all, why settle for the cheap imitation when liberals can have the real deal, Hillary herself?
Trump is trouncing Warren in a recent independent poll of independent voters. It shows Trump leading Warren by 49% to 43%.
This is a marked improvement for Trump over a similar poll a month previously, when Warren was ahead of Trump by two points among independent voters. Warren does not run as well as Sanders does among independent voters, but Trump now has a comfortable advantage of 4 points over Sanders among this key demographic, too.
Warren, as a liberal law professor from Massachusetts, is not the type of candidate who could pull working class voters away from Trump. He would have a field day at his massive campaign rallies ridiculing Warren’s duplicity and her many nutty ideas.
Also, the threshold for the tax would be lowered and lowered, such that before long the middle class would be paying a tax on their assets, too. That would deter savings, discourage investment, and induce Americans to carry more debt.
The biggest appeal of Warren to Democrat voters is her potential electability, but if she is not more electable than Hillary then they would prefer Hillary. The media, too, would like nothing more than a rematch to redeem themselves.
Then we would have a replay of the election of 1956, when stubborn Democrats nominated the very same person who had lost in the prior presidential election, Adlai Stevenson. The Republicans won that rematch just as they had won the first time.
Respect Needed for Trump’s Pardons
The Constitution expressly grants the authority to the president to issue pardons, and this power has been repeatedly invoked by presidents beginning with George Washington. The lack of respect given to President Trump in connection with his relatively small number of presidential pardons is a disgrace.
This presidential prerogative is particularly important when the President, as Commander-in-Chief, pardons a military officer under his direct chain of command. Presidential pardons of servicemen who put their own lives on the line in defense of our freedoms should receive heightened respect by all.
Reports are that Navy SEAL Special Chief Eddie Gallagher’s platoon mutinied against him and prompted the overzealous prosecution of him for crimes he did not commit. He was nearly fully acquitted by a military jury in a system that rarely sides with an accused soldier or sailor.
A blizzard of allegations were made against Gallagher in an apparent attempt by some of his subordinates to destroy him. When it came to testifying in a court of law, however, the allegations virtually disappeared and the prosecutors should have dropped their case.
Gallagher’s acquittal at trial on all of the serious allegations against him vindicated the sailor, and embarrassed the prosecutors. But instead of backing off from their mistake, the Deep State doubled down against Gallagher.
The Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, is a former Wall Street banker lacking in combat experience. His skills are not in hand-to-hand fighting against the enemy, but in navigating the bureaucracy of the Pentagon.
Spencer resisted the order by his Commander-in- Chief, President Trump, to restore Gallagher to his full rank, and to move on to more important issues. But in a textbook example of intransigence by the Swamp, Secretary Richard Spencer persisted in defying Trump’s commands concerning the Gallagher case.
Underlings, particularly in the military, should not be trying to negotiate around their superiors. Trump did not command the Navy to do anything immoral or contrary to the Constitution, and Spencer should have complied with his duty to obey orders.
After he was fired, Spencer appeared on television to criticize our President. When asked the obvious question on CBS to explain “what’s wrong with following a lawful order from the commander in chief?”, Spencer admitted, “Nothing.”
But then Spencer added that “I could not, in my conscience, do this.” His “conscience” somehow prevented him from honoring the equivalent of a presidential pardon?
Spencer and other Trump critics need to take a close look, perhaps for their first time, at Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution: “The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
President Trump’s first pardon as a president was issued to Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who fought for years on the front lines against illegal immigration. Yet the ACLU persuaded a Clinton-appointed federal judge to ignore the pardon, and the Ninth Circuit is now considering Sheriff Joe’s appeal.
It is a bit mystifying that liberals would be so resistant to presidential pardons when they were used so often by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton famously pardoned a long list of his friends during his last evening in the White House, and his supporters did not protest.
The soldiers whom Trump has pardoned are not his buddies or donors, as some of the recipients of Clinton’s pardons were. In addition to restoring Navy SEAL Chief Gallagher to his rank, Trump issued pardons to two Army officers, 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Major Mathew Golsteyn.
Maj. Golsteyn had been awarded the Silver Star for heroism that included enduring enemy fire and assisting a wounded Afghan soldier, but was charged with murder of a suspected bombmaker based primarily on an interview Golsteyn gave on Fox News.
The notion that armchair lawyers should be prosecuting our servicemen for being supposedly too tough on the enemy lacks the support of the American people.
Yet the knee-jerk resistance by the Deep State to Trump began with his very first days in office. Sally Yates, an Obama-appointed holdover in the Justice Department, was fired for defying another policy set by the President because she disagreed with it.
Navy SEAL Special Chief Eddie Gallagher served in combat with valor, fighting hard against some of the fiercest terrorists in the world. The allegations made against Gallagher of violent wrongdoing were evidently false and never proven in court.
Trump tweeted, “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin. This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business!”
The disrespect for Trump’s pardons smokes the Never-Trumpers out. Let’s hope they at least refrain from criticizing another long-standing presidential tradition, the ceremonial pardon of a live turkey for Thanksgiving.
