On the current state of Whistlegate
Mark Levin is not a favorite of mine. Not that I tend to listen to talk radio or to cable news very often, but his voice in particular grates. I always chuckle when I see him referred to (I think it’s at Ace’s) as “Ol’ Yeller,” because it’s such a perfect description of his one-note style of angry yelling.
But sometimes yelling seems appropriate. And Levin’s very smart and knows his legal stuff. I happened to catch this appearance of Levin’s last night, and I thought I’d post it:
Any corrupt official who wants to evade investigation need only run for president on the Democratic side and he’s immune, apparently. Who knew?
Here’s a quieter statement from David Marcus at The Federalist [emphasis mine]:
Asked about what he wants Ukrainian President Volomydyr Zelensky to do about Hunter Biden’s business dealings there Trump said, “I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens.” He also suggested that China should open a similar investigation. But what Trump was mostly saying is that he is the president and there is nothing wrong with saying such things to foreign leaders.
The issue of whether the president may urge foreign leaders to conduct investigations of American citizens running for office has now become the crux of the impeachment inquiry. Long gone now are allegations of any quid pro quo with Zelensky. That ship sailed when the transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian leader offered no evidence that the president was offering military aid as a carrot, which was the initial allegation…
Trump clearly feels that something untoward and perhaps illegal occurred regarding Hunter Biden in Ukraine and China…So the question is, is it illegal for Trump to ask foreign leaders to look into it?
The answer to this question seems to almost certainly be no. In fact, the closest thing the Democrats can pin to the president is a vague campaign finance violation. Is it tacky? Does it violate norms? Yes, probably, but it is just as plausible that Trump wanted answers about family members in the Obama administration getting sweet deals from foreign governments as it is that he was trying to damage a potential political rival.
And what if both things are true? What if Trump is genuinely concerned about corruption in our foreign affairs, and the fact that Joe Biden might be mixed up in it is a just a bonus? If there are cases, which there certainly are, when it is appropriate and legal for a president to urge foreign leaders to investigate potential wrongdoing by Americans, then the Democrats have to prove why in this case is [sic] wasn’t.
Their answer is that Joe Biden is running for president. Their entire argument for impeachment now rests on the idea that Biden’s candidacy makes him immune to such calls for scrutiny. But they will not and can not point to an actual law that Trump violated in the conversation. Rather, they make vague arguments about courting foreign interference in an election and potential campaign finance violations.
Oh, and then there’s this:
BREAKING: The whistleblower is a registered Democrat & CIA analyst who was detailed before the 2016 election to the Obama White House,where he worked on the NSC's Ukraine desk & met w anti-Trump Ukrainian officials before being sent packing by the Trump NSC & becoming disgruntled
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) October 4, 2019
Hiding behind the “whistleblower” fiction. How long can that go on, I wonder? The MSM and the Democrats would like it to go on forever, or at least long enough to impeach Trump.
More from Andrew C. McCarthy at The Hill. McCarthy’s no yeller, but he has a lot to say:
What is portrayed as an “impeachment inquiry” is actually just a made-for-cable-TV political soap opera. The House of Representatives is not conducting a formal impeachment inquiry. To the contrary, congressional Democrats are conducting the 2020 political campaign…
When the Framers debated whether to include an impeachment clause in the Constitution, they had serious concerns. They were designing a separation-of-powers system that endowed the coordinate branches with checks and balances to police each other. They understood that impeachment authority was necessary, but feared it would give the legislature too much power over the executive.
They also worried that impeachment could be politicized. If it were too easy to do procedurally, or it could be resorted to for trifling acts of maladministration, factions opposed to the president would be tempted to try to overturn elections and grind the government to a halt.
To address these concerns, the Framers adopted a burdensome standard — high crimes and misdemeanors (in addition to treason and bribery) — that would restrict impeachable offenses to truly egregious abuses of power. Then they erected an even higher bar: a two-thirds supermajority requirement for conviction in the Senate.
All this was to ensure that the electoral will of the people must never be overturned in the absence of misconduct so severe that it results in a broad consensus that the nation’s well-being requires removing the president from power.
Although the House has the raw power to file articles of impeachment based on frivolous allegations and minor abuses, the Senate supermajority requirement for removal is designed to have a sobering effect on the lower chamber. Impeachment should not be sought out of partisanship. There must be misconduct that would convince objective Americans, regardless of their politics, that the president must be ousted — not merely criticized or censured, but stripped of authority…
Every presidential impeachment inquiry, from Andrew Johnson through Bill Clinton, has been the subject of bipartisan consultation and debate. The House has recognized that its legitimacy, and the legitimacy of its most solemn actions, must be based on the consideration of the whole body, not the diktat of a few partisan bosses.
Not this one. This one is a misadventure in exactly the bare-knuckles partisanship the Framers feared. To be sure, no one has the power to prevent willful House leadership from misbehaving this way. But we’re not required to pretend the charade is real.
[NOTE: I wrote most of this post late last night. I realize, on looking at the word “current” in the title, that it’s nearly impossible to actually stay current with this story, since facts are emerging at such a rapid pace.]
I like Mark Levin. He is a brilliant commentator and his content is wonderful. But his voice is just so shrill at times I can’t listen too him.
” I realize, on looking at the word “current” in the title, that it’s nearly impossible to actually stay current with this story, since facts are emerging at such a rapid pace.”
So true, and our difficulty is poised to grow exponentially worse as the Horowitz reports, Durham investigations and indictments regarding years of President Pseudonym’s abuses are rolled out for public viewing. Gonna be bonkers for people who haven’t kept themselves abreast of information as it has dribbled out these last three years. But this is why the wheels of justice grind slowly: to keep from fouling the digestion.
According to reports, there are fairly recent treaties ,with both the Ukraine and China, on criminal activities which, it is alleged, make it his duty for a President to inquire of foreign officials about whether any Americans are carrying out such illegal activities in their respective countries.
Nancy Pelosi says that she wants to get “impeachment” done THIS YEAR. That can be done; the House passes articles of impeachment, Mitch McConnell brings it to the floor for a vote, and it’s rejected out of hand.
That way, she has 11 months to make the voters forget it ever happened, before Election Day.
But I think Trump and McConnell would _LOVE_ to keep Nancy hanging and twisting in the wind.
I like this mornings article about the modern CIA by a former insider. No whistlegate relevant hard facts, but it gives us a flavor.
Just another bloated government leviathan that can keep its dealings secret if it feels like it.
Today we learn:
1) Wishyblower did not divulge contact with Schiff/Committee/Staff to ICIG
2) Wishyblower application to ICIG requires applicant to reveal all contacts regarding his complaint [sworn in application — subject to Federal criminal penalties if falsified]
3) ICIG testifies he has no knowledge of wishyblower’s contact with HPSCI/Schiff/staff
Whoopsie!
Eisenhower was partially right. He warned of the military industrial complex. What he failed to predict was how the government at large would expand. According to Pournelle’s law of bureaucracies: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.” Bureaucracies also tend to grow inexorably as the bureaucrats seek ever more personnel to solve ever more problems that they identify.
Eisenhower also didn’t see that the power that bureaucracies wield attracts sociopaths. When a sociopath is in a bureaucracy he/she will seek power by any means, and many rise to places of power. (Brennan and Schiff as two examples.)
The U.S. is reaping the biter harvest of these facts. Along with the truth that the Obama administration succeeded in transforming the Federal Government into a power base for the Democrat party. With that power base, the MSM, Hollywood, and academia the Dems were very close to securing total control of the government and all non-Democrat citizens. That Trump has foiled their plans is quite obvious. The constancy, viciousness, and mendaciousness of their attacks show their frustration and desperation.
For an excellent run down of what has transpired in the Russia collusion scheme I recommend both of Dan Bongino’s books, “Spygate” and “Exonerated.” For ongoing coverage of the new accusations and impeachment I follow Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Instapundit, Ace, and the Federalist. There are others providing good coverage, but I just have a few hours a day to devote to this. Yes, I’ve got a real life that has nothing to do with politics. But I do what I can. 🙂
I wonder if this isn’t why the whole anti-Trump crowd has lost their damn minds on impeachment. The idea one of them might actually be held accountable for the casual corruption they all either tolerate or indulge in has to be absolutely terrifying.
Mike
The Federal Government Bureaucracy, consisting of people who were never elected, is convinced that it is in charge, not the President. They believe that the President serves at the pleasure of the Bureaucracy, not the reverse.
Read the following article from the LA Times which is written completely from the perspective of the “Deep State”…
https://t.co/VsxyNbdHXZ
And it looks like the WH is answering the question I posed a few days ago: there are no subpoenas, just letters. And, until the House votes, there are no teeth to any committee’s inquiries. Go pound sand Dems!
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2019/10/04/white-house-we-arent-playing-the-fake-impeachment-game-n2554205
Neo, thanks for keeping up with this. I’m not even commenting much, because things are changing so rapidly.
“There is no spoon”
physicsguy, there’s an emerging confluence of themes, or crossing of streams maybe: neo is taken for a character from the Matrix flick and Congress Dems are issuing spoons that don’t exist as Andy McCarthy sits on the floor floating sheets of paper in the air with only his mind.
Levin’s suggestion that the Senate dismiss any impeachment charges by using the nuclear option to reduce the current required supermajority to a simple majority… concerns me.
As, if a future democrat President was undeniably guilty of gross “high crimes and misdemeanors” and they were impeached, a simple majority of Senate democrats could easily dismiss the charges.
Levin’s understandable frustration is apparently leading him to forget that pesky law of unintended consequences.
I have decided the CIA needs to be shut down and a new agency created. The CIA today is 10,000 Valerie Plames reading foreign language newspapers.
I generally refuse to watch videos, so thanks, Geoffrey Britain, for that summary of Levin’s proposal. Sounds like a bad idea. It would take two-thirds to convict. That’s fine as it is. On the current very questionable charges that number will not be reached. And as you say, changing it is really risky for the future.
Mike K.; ” The CIA today is 10,000 Valerie Plames reading foreign language newspapers.”
Exactly. They rely heavily on signals intelligence. (Listening to phone calls, viewing satellite feeds, and reading newspapers) They analyze all this and come to conclusions about our enemies’ and allies’ intentions. They have been so wrong, so many times it is embarrassing. You would think that at some point they would reflect on how many big intel failures they have had and try to do better. Instead, the CIA and many other intel agencies (There are now 17 – way too many.) have become politicized. Real spying – gathering intel on the ground by skilled operatives – is a minor part of what they do now. When the Dems got stressful interrogation techniques banned, they got rid of a useful intel gathering tool used by the CIA. The fear of offending the Islamists allowed people like Brennan and other politicized bureaucrats to rise in Obama’s administration.
The DOD can do the signals intelligence gathering as well as the CIA. The CIA should become a small, clandestine agency that only a few people at the top of the Executive Branch know what they are doing. We should seldom ever hear about them or what they are doing. Well, I can dream can’t I?
The CIA should become a small, clandestine agency that only a few people at the top of the Executive Branch know what they are doing. We should seldom ever hear about them or what they are doing. Well, I can dream can’t I
Yup. The days described by Bob Baer and Gary Berntsen are gone forever,. I think.
The CIA doesn’t do much SIGINT. The people that do the SIGINT is NSA and their service elements which are the Navy Fleet Cyber Command, the Marine Corps Director of Intelligence, the Army Intelligence and Security Command, the 25th Air Force, and the US Coast Guard Deputy Assistant Commandant for Intelligence. NSA is a military organization headquartered at Fort Meade, MD, and that is why the person in charge of NSA is always a general or admiral. The reason NSA does the SIGINT is because they are supposed to crack our opponents encryption so we can read their communications, and keep our communications secure.
Being an old ditty bopper (morse intercept spook) in the good old ASA Army Security Agency in the late 1960’s I know what SIGINT was and probably still is. Not too much to do with the political discourse at the Foreign Service level. All this stuff bubbling up makes my head spin and I am ready for some real reporters to start writing about the real state of the nation.
Old Texan,
In the early 1980s I worked as a contractor at Army Field Station Berlin. Lots of ditty boppers there. Also spent some time at Augsburg and Wobeck. Augsburg had a Wullenweber antenna, AKA elephant cage.
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/USASA_Field_Station_Augsburg
”The CIA today is 10,000 Valerie Plames reading foreign language newspapers…”
It’s hard for me to keep the secrets that I promised the government I would keep when I became a Naval intelligence officer.
Many of the secrets I have to keep have to do with all the reasons I have utter contempt for the CIA.
Hopefully you can have some respect for me because I don’t give anything away. Not even if you skin me alive with vice grips (and no I can’t make this **** up.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/01/plame200401
Valerie Plame disgusts me. I wish I could tell the world why she disgusts me. But I made a promise and I have to keep it for 99 years starting from when I graduated from the basic Opintel course at the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligenc Training Center (NMITC) or the end of my life. Whichever comes first.
Valerie Plame gives us all a bad name.
Ray’s comment above is 100% correct. CIA does human intelligence, not SIGINT.
Am I a misogynist for expressing the fact that If I ever ran into Ms. Plame I would beat her like any man I ever ran across? And her husband, Joe Wilson.
So I’m an equal opportunity deliverer of pain.
My drill instructor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=415HQ1t2ZNI
The Gunny cleaned up his act for the video.
Ms. Plame and Joe Wilson divorced a couple of years ago, and Joe Wilson died last month.
I was taught from an early age by my parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts to never ever trust politicians and government employees to have my best interests in their minds. I was taught to view 99% as self interested whores and thieves. They are 99% corrupt grifters. Nothing I have witnessed in 74 years has contradicted what I was taught as a child.
Aim small miss small. I have retained 20/10 eye sight. Come and take me for my blasphemy against the statists. Burn you up andburn you down.
“The CIA today is 10,000 Valerie Plames reading foreign language newspapers…”
That is funny because Navy intelligence had an operation in the consulate in Berlin that did just that. They obtained newspapers from all the eastern bloc countries and looked for intelligence information. The eastern bloc countries loved to brag about their latest accomplishments, like a new factory that produced trucks. We were delighted that they told us.
“Ray’s comment above is 100% correct. CIA does human intelligence, not SIGINT.”
In my admittedly limited experience the CIA by and large doesn’t do much of anything except make life more complicated.
It isn’t like there aren’t good people at CIA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Micheal_Spann. But for every single Johnny Spanns doing the heavy lifting there are a thousand no loads like Valerie Plame. Who apparently have no other function in life than going to inside the beltway parties and bragging about how they are CIA.
I haven’t reviews the Vanity Fair article I linked to. I’m just not really interested in reading about Valerie Plame.
But in general, in the world of intelligence, the CIA is a bunch of fifth graders competing with PHDs.
I think what makes the difference is when I served as an intel officer in the USN, If I got things wrong I would be swimming among the sharks along with everyone else.
This was an incentive for me to get things right.
Ray, you are a very intelligent man and I would like to buy you dinner or at least a drink. If you don’t drink it can be a cup of coffee.
Steve57,
I was in the Navy too and was the DCA on a destroyer. If I got things wrong we could all be going for a swim. That really got my attention. It’s like the old saying.
“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”Samuel Johnson
Geoffrey Britain; Kate:
If a simple majority is willing to dismiss the charges at the outset, it is clear that there is no hope of a 2/3 vote for conviction with that particular Senate. So there is no contradiction between the requirement of a 2/3 majority to convict and the possibility of a simple majority dismissing the charges before it ever comes to a trial. And it is always true that if a Democrat were impeached and the Democrats controlled the Senate, than “a simple majority of Senate democrats could easily dismiss the charges.” That is true, and would remain true whatever the GOP does now in the case of Trump.
Custom has meant that the Senate has had a trial in previous impeachments, but the Constitution does not require it:
I watched Alex Jones talk to Eddie Bravo and David Weiss a few days ago. First time watching this Alex Jones character persona on video.
He has a lot of conspiracy sources but he himself seems to be more in it for the entertainmoney side of things.
Thanks to Ray for correcting my mistake about the CIA doing SIGINT. I was under the impression that they were in that business as well as being spooks. I knew SIGINT was collected by NSA and the military, but believed that the CIA was also in that business or at least privy to much of the info.
Now that we have 17 intel agencies there must be a lot of overlap in what they do. DNI was set up to coordinate all these activities but my impression is that it hasn’t been that successful. Turf wars over money, staffing, and all that. IMO, intel should be available to all with a need to know. With 17 agencies that’s quite a chore figuring out who needs to know what.
I spent some time doing passive electronic collection in Navy aircraft during Vietnam. The gear we had then was Stone Age compared to what is available today, but we still learned a lot about the enemy electronic order of battle. In those days the turf wars were severe and we sure didn’t share our intel with the “real enemy,” the Air Force. Don’t know if that remains as big a problem today.
I don’t want a quick dismissal by the Senate. I would like to see a long, slow trial. And since the President and Republicans are being denied any opportunity to provide a defense in the House they should be granted every opportunity to provide a vigorous defense in the Senate with generous Power of Subpoena. I want to see Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe testify under oath. And I especially would like to see Biden being grilled by an effective defense attorney. This will probably be the only opportunity to get the President’s story in front of the public without the usual MSM biased filter.
For a quieter version of Mark Levin, see his interview last year with Victor Davis Hanson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDdSsA9ZcrQ
Likewise with Brandon Straka:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIuTyNut6mU
Americans have the right to due process of law.
Ergo, as Paul Mirengoff pointed out early in this scandal, “…asking a foreign leader to conduct an investigation — is wrong under almost any circumstance.”
No American should be singled out by his own government for an investigation by a corrupt foreign one.
Thanks, Neo, I see your point.
Manju, the point seems to be that the previous Ukrainian administration was corrupt. The current one is investigating for its own purposes. Whether this one will be much better remains to be seen, of course. If an American government official is engaging in corrupt practices outside the country or with foreign entities at home, I see no reason why that cannot be investigated. I think Mirengoff is wrong here.
I called into Levin’s Show one time and he misunderstood my comment and thought I was a liberal. He went off on me and started yelling. Bizarre.
Valerie is a single woman? I’m moving to NM.
Which Americans seeking due process, I wonder, should sit on a stage at a public forum and declare their pride [in a corrupt quid pro quo] at successfully having used a $1.5 billion foreign aid loan guarantee to arm-wrench the recipient nation to cease it’s own investigation of corruption and fire the prosecutor who brought the case, a case involving that American’s own son?
Answer?: Why, Son-of-a-Bitch!, all of them of course!
Who doesn’t expect to be the Judge at his own trial? That’s the due-est of due process.
No American should be singled out by his own government for an investigation by a corrupt foreign one.
VP Joe Biden, on a public video, bragged about getting a prosecutor fired, by threatening to withhold money. That was exactly the quid pro quo kind of deal Dems say they are against. Fire Shorkin and get the money, or don’t fire him and don’t get the money. That’s what VP Joe Biden did.
I’m so outraged that such rank hypocrisy isn’t said, over and over, that it was wrong for VP Biden to push one corrupt Ukraine gov’t to fire a (probably) corrupt prosecutor over the investigation, or lack of, some (almost certainly) corrupt Ukrainian rich energy company, Burisma.
Maybe you noticed – lots of alleged corruption involved.
Actually, it’s not even clear to me that this form of diplomacy is wrong — if you want our money, you have to do some things our way. There are always strings. What’s outrageous is that the Dems defend Biden doing this, but attack Trump as if he did it in reverse, which is hypocritical, but he didn’t even do it, so it’s also a dishonest attack by the Dems.
With or without Trump pressure, the (corrupt) Burisma should be investigated. Including the phoney-baloney $50k/ month “job” / bribe that Hunter Biden was receiving. Maybe Romney has a son also getting cash from them. Maybe lots of kids of politicians are getting huge amounts of cash from corrupt foreign governments for phoney-baloney jobs.
It is Burisma that should be investigated by Ukraine, not a singled out American — but Hunter Biden is a singular citizen that bears higher scrutiny. And when it looks like a bribe, it should be investigated.
It looks like a bribe. It was a bribe. Even if it can’t be proven in court, the truth is that it was a bribe. Just like the $200 million donation by Russians to Hillary’s Bribery Foundation, before getting ownership control of 20% of US uranium production.
Quit complaining about the grating.
Greg Guttfeld interviewing Gilbert Gottfried – that’s grating.
Ergo, as Paul Mirengoff pointed out early in this scandal, “…asking a foreign leader to conduct an investigation — is wrong under almost any circumstance.”
He’s not pointing out anything. He’s making an arbitrary statement of opinion, likely informed by a lawyer’s sensibility. Lawyers are great ones for favoring ‘professional ethics’ over the real kind. There’s no reason to take Miringoff or Jonathan Turley seriously. Their actual complaint is that Trump as a non-lawyer did something that only a lawyer (e.g. Wm. Barr) should be permitted to do. Scroom.
Who knew?
I did and said so a while back… tired of cut and paste for nuttin
in the future i will just hold the information till everyone is getting it
being ahead of the curve is not a pleasant place to be… one many levels
in the abstract its like having farsighted in a room of nearsighted people you cant convince anything till the blurs get better.
Visual Acuity For those individuals with better than normal vision, the visual acuity may read 20/15. In other words, they can read at 20 feet what most people can only read at 15 feet.
When such people make things for us, or create art, we say ‘visionary’, when they notice things are hinkey before others do, and try to warn, they get the ‘Cassandra effect’…
Leo Szilard
The war started September 1, 1939
one can argue that without that far sighted view, we would not have made nuclear anything with the speed in which we did… whether at all, no one can say given its an eventual idea once you understand the numbers the right way (among other interesting things… like the stuff i did for spacetime cavitation through quantum tunneling allowing.. nevermind)
“Ms. Plame and Joe Wilson divorced a couple of years ago, and Joe Wilson died last month.”
The time I wasted debating what those two egocentric political hacks had done.
Hours, spent looking at timelines and then comparing dates on those declassified CIA internal memoranda relating to the issue of her involvement in bringing Wilson into the picture; dozens of articles read in order to finally come across the fact that they had worked out what they were going to do with political journalists on timing before Wilson’s release; reading through that hack Wilson’s book (bought from a remainder bin when virtually new, fortunately), and finding him peddling outright lies denying his wife’s involvement; pointing out to no effect that it was (the infamously gossipy according to Washington sources) Richard Armitage who was responsible for Plame’s “outing”, and not Dick Cheney.
And, it didn’t matter to the crazy chorus: a careful and dispassionate examination of the facts in context, never does.
Now, the son-of-a-bitch is dead of “organ failure”. Which organ(s) and why, one naturally wonders in the face of such a deliberately vague release.
Unless she divorced him for secret bathhouse activities, I’d bet 20 bucks against a gain of ten, that it was the liver.
The man traipsed through the divorce courts 3x, and his schemer wife 2x. Peaches both, I’m sure.
Now, the son-of-a-bitch is dead of “organ failure”. Which organ(s) and why, one naturally wonders in the face of such a deliberately vague release.
I agree with you, it’s a polite way of saying ‘consequences of alcoholism’. Needn’t be the liver exclusively or primarily. Pancreatitis can be fatal.
Unless she divorced him for secret bathhouse activities,
The man was almost continuously married for 43 years and had four children. He’d also retired to a small city in New Mexico. The smart money’s not on the proposition that he was on Grindr.
Biden was not singled out to be prosecuted. The entire fact situation regarding Hunter Biden had already started to be prosecuted by Ukraine long before Trump was president, and it was dropped by a prosecutor who replaced the prosecutor Biden as VP had fired (with a direct quid pro quo threat to withhold foreign aid if that prosecutor was not fired). Biden says it was for other reasons, but it has the appearance of tremendous impropriety and corruption. It is perfectly proper to ask for help in investigating that.
In the entire transcript of the phone call there is one sentence about the Bidens. This is it:
Absolutely nothing wrong with that as far as I can see. It is irrelevant that Biden is running for the Democratic nomination. Are all 18 (or however many there were or still are) candidates immune from any investigation into what they actually may have done, as long as it involves that person’s interference in a foreign country’s investigation of their own child? And in a way that already is on record? That would be a ludicrous rule, made up just recently for the purpose of hurting Trump.
He did not manufacture evidence or get anyone in any foreign country to manufacture evidence against Biden. And yet that is exactly what the Dems and Hillary’s campaign did re Trump, and no one has ever been prosecuted for it. And the very same people that say Trump can’t say what he said defend what Hillary did.
There is no mention of Joe Wilson either drinking alcohol nor showing any visible effects from it in the following quote. Nor, in the larger article.
But this 2006 Der Spiegel article, written from a supportive standpoint toward Wilson and a hostile and polemical stance toward the Bush administration, nonetheless describes the exquisite justice the universe sometimes manages to mete out to grandstanding, egocentric, and maliciously scheming BS artists.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/an-imperfect-hero-joseph-wilson-s-war-a-441697.html
Cornhead:
Ol’ Yeller gotta yell.
Many things trump does that used to be lawful have suddenly become unlawful. Republicans are reluctant to defend trump because somehow they hold this holier than thou self image that they would refuse to defend any actions that are perfectly lawful but somehow morally perceived to be ambiguous despite the fact that liberals believe republicans are eviler than lucifer hitler Stalin and mao all combined together times infinity regardless. Mormons like Mitt Romney and his descendants will all be sent to concentration camp if the progressives have total control of the country but somehow he think he will be spared because he dares to criticise trump, that is what the Chiang Kai shek opposing right wingers thought when they abet communists’ takeover of China, things didn’t end well for most of them to say the least
There is no mention of Joe Wilson either drinking alcohol nor showing any visible effects from it in the following quote. Nor, in the larger article.
Well, that wasn’t the narrative. (Or he may have held his liquor well).
Evaluating the continually accumulating mountain of the evidence so far, we aren’t just looking—as I had at first thought—at a piddly little conspiracy, one composed of just a handful of Obama holdovers at the CIA, DOJ, the FBI, the State Department, and NSA, plus some members of Congress, some holdover leakers in the White House, and a few leftist judges; all of their actions aided, abetted, and reinforced by the MSM.
No, we are talking about the increasingly revealed power of the Deep State at work; of a deep, large, well-organized, multi-faceted conspiracy that is international in scope, and reportedly involves conspirators in several foreign governments which are supposed to be our “Allies.”
This is the power, the methods, the procedures, the tools, and the law of the Federal government turned against this President, and the office of the Presidency.
You notice, don’t you, that—as far as I am aware of—there has been nothing in the way of even one substantial, publicly revealed leak of information that would work against this conspiracy coming from any of the government Department or Agencies that are involved?
What does that tell us?
This conspiracy, this attempted coup d’etat is the supposed “It Can’t Happen Here” stuff of spy novels become real.
Such an apparently intricate and wide-spread conspiracy, one would think, involved a lot of planning and coordination, and was probably hatched and initiated quite some time ago.
Thus, I’m thinking we’re not talking a couple of dozen, we’re much more likely talking about a hundred, or perhaps even more people, perhaps many more actors—with parts large and small.
Thus, rather than just a mere “conspiracy of shared values,” I would surmise that there had to be some sort of leader or leadership cadre, some headquarters, some sort of war room, or at least a series of clandestine meetings—electronic and/or in person—that—to one extent or the other—gamed, planned, orchestrated, and coordinated some, or all, of the actions and events that have occurred since President Trump announced his candidacy, and which have gnawed at him, blocked his way, and battered him like a gigantic shitstorm of a hurricane.
Find out who that leader is, who the members of that cadre are, or pinpoint those meetings and who attended them.
Neo, 10/5 at 2:29 pm: Exactly.
Ol’ Yeller gotta yell.
When I first heard Ol’ Yeller applied to Sanders, I jumped to the conclusion that it was because Ol’ Yeller in the book had become rabid and the poor boy, Travis, had to put Yeller down.
Not that I bear Sanders any personal ill will.
Trump was asked; “Have you asked foreign leaders for any corruption investigations that don’t involve your political opponents?”
He could not name any. Trump singled out Biden.
Manju:
As usual, you either have not read or have not understood what I wrote.
I wrote:
Such a request is “singular” only in that the entire fact situation is singular – that is, unique. Biden was NOT “singled out” in the sense of there being other people in the same fact situation who have not been asked to be investigated. Nor was he “singled out” in the sense that Trump brought up corruption that Ukraine was previously unaware of; au contraire, they had already done some investigating of the matter of Hunter Biden and possible corruption when Joe Biden got the prosecutor fired.
If there had been another fact situation like that involving someone else in high office using a threat of a foreign aid cutoff to dump a prosecutor investigating that politician’s son, in Ukraine or any other country, Trump (or I hope, any other president of whatever party) would do well to ask that both people be investigated.
Also, this is what Trump actually said:
That is the sum total of what Trump said about either Hunter of Joe Biden during that phone call, a call in which Zelensky had already talked about Ukraine stepping up its own attempt to end corruption in Ukraine.
Here is a quote from Zelensky earlier in the conversation:
What Trump said involved two things. The first was cooperating with the US investigation into 2016 election influence of the US by Ukraine, which had nothing to do with either Biden but had to do with corruption. The second involved Ukraine’s own concern with rooting out corruption and its own past corruption in Ukraine. It is in that latter context that the Bidens came up, and rightly so.
Sundance very clearly explains the legal chicanery being used in service of the Democrat’s phony “Impeachment,” as they construct a crime that isn’t.
See https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/05/nancy-pelosi-is-grubering-the-american-electorate-on-impeachment-committee-requests-aka-subpoenas-constructed-to-manufacture-obstruction/
Before we go much further, I would like to say that “whistlegate” is not the best term for this matter. It just sounds silly in itself, and it is not informative for the broader public who may be less familiar with what happened.
“Phonegate” may be a better term to use, as it shows that President Trump is under threat of impeachment for making a telephone call. That’s simpler and easier to understand, and it doesn’t sound stupid. It also places the action on Trump.
“. . . a crime that isn’t”
There’s been a lot of those out there the last three years. Here’s a beaut of a thread looking back at the corrupt FBI/MSM attempts to take down the Trump administration through the FISA on Carter Page: MonsieurAmerica, twitter: How 20yr Counterintelligence Asset Carter Page Mopped Up Peter Strzok’s “Leak Strategy”
For those who dislike reading straight twitter threads, the Threadreaderapp version.
Trump was asked; “Have you asked foreign leaders for any corruption investigations that don’t involve your political opponents?”
He could not name any.
* * *
All of the corruption involves Trump’s political opponents.
Thus, rather than just a mere “conspiracy of shared values,” I would surmise that there had to be some sort of leader or leadership cadre, some headquarters, some sort of war room, or at least a series of clandestine meetings—electronic and/or in person—that—to one extent or the other—gamed, planned, orchestrated, and coordinated some, or all, of the actions and events that have occurred since President Trump announced his candidacy, and which have gnawed at him, blocked his way, and battered him like a gigantic shitstorm of a hurricane.
Find out who that leader is, who the members of that cadre are, or pinpoint those meetings and who attended them.
An interesting line of thought, Snow.
I suggest you look up the Nazi founders of Never a Straight Answer, NASA, as well as the foundation of the Federal Reserve Act + Wilson + Titanic.