I linked to a striking video showing the disparate reactions of a biological boy who identifies as transgender and a biological girl after the board’s decision was announced. The boy, Nova Maday, gloats over his victory while showing no regard or concern for the girls whose privacy has just been obliterated. The girl, Julia Burca, tearfully worries that she will now have to get naked every day around boys as she gets changed for swim practice.
As I argued in my piece, only the most deranged sorts of people could possibly watch that footage and feel sympathy for the boy over the girl. All sane and decent people understand that girls deserve privacy and protection when they are getting changed and using the bathroom. Am I implying that everyone on the opposite side from me on this issue lacks sanity and decency? Yes, I certainly am. I will go even further and say that what they support is abject evil, and they are without excuse. There is no good argument for allowing boys into the girls locker room. There is no compelling reason for such a policy. All of the good arguments and compelling reasons belong to the side that seeks to protect young girls from this kind of abuse.
As my piece on this case has gotten a big reaction and been widely circulated, I’ve heard from a number of students at the school. They tell me that the environment has been tense and awkward, and many of the girls are now fearful about their lack of privacy and security. These messages raise an important question: Why the hell are the students even attending class at all? Nearly 500 people showed up at the school board meeting last week, many of them in opposition to the board’s decision. There’s obviously a lot of outrage among the parents of the children at the school. So, again, why are those parents still sending their kids? Why are parents who are (rightly) concerned about their daughters’ safety still choosing to send their daughters into that environment?
This is what I find so endlessly frustrating. The parents in these situations have an immense amount of power. They could put an end to the madness immediately — literally overnight — if they simply got together and agreed to withhold their children from class until the policy is reversed. This would force the school’s hand. They can’t operate without children to teach. They would need to come back to the table and make concessions. This is exactly the strategy that teachers use when they want some kind of institutional change to be made, and generally the tactic works for them. Why don’t parents do the same? If you’re angry and worried that the school is putting your child in jeopardy, the only reasonable, not to mention effective, response is to keep your child home. If every parent who felt the same way did the same, changes would be made in a hurry.
The same applies when boys intrude into girls sports teams. Rather than participating in the farce of a “girls” track meet where boys take home all the medals, why not pull your daughters out, collectively, and refuse to participate until those boys are sent back where they belong? Again, if every parent did this, the school would have no choice but to surrender. Or at least there’s a pretty good chance they surrender. Whereas there is no chance if you obediently go along with the program.
Would it be inconvenient to keep your kid home from school? Yes, sure, you probably have a job to worry about. Are there maybe some risks involved? Yes, I guess the school could send the cops after you if they wanted to play hardball. But if we aren’t willing to take on a little risk and inconvenience for the sake of protecting our children from this lunacy, then what’s the point? Why complain? Why object? Just shut up and do as your told. If you don’t like that plan, then stand up for yourself and your family. Fight back. Do something. Do something, for God’s sake.
Another day brings with it another impeachment inquiry hearing in the House. One of the people providing testimony is former NSC official Fiona Hill, who explained that it’s her position that Russia’s goal wasn’t to get Donald Trump elected, but rather to create doubt in the system no matter who won the election:
For most of the last three years, Donald Trump’s critics have scoffed at supposed “conspiracy theories” that claimed a “deep state” of bureaucrats were aborting the Trump presidency.
We have been told the word “coup” is hyperbole that reveals the paranoid minds of Trump supporters. Yet oddly, many people brag that they are proud members of a deep state and occasionally boast about the idea of a coup.
Recently, former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin proclaimed in a public forum, “Thank God for the deep state.” Former CIA Director John Brennan agreed and praised the “deep state people” for their opposition to Trump.
Far from denying the danger of an unelected careerist
bureaucracy that seeks to overturn presidential policies, New York Times
columnists have praised its efforts to nullify the Trump agenda.
On the first day of the impeachment inquiry, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff called his initial two witnesses, career State Department diplomats William Taylor Jr. and George Kent.
Far from providing damning evidence of criminal presidential behavior, Taylor and Kent mostly confined themselves to three topics: their own sterling resumes, their lack of any firsthand knowledge of incriminating Trump action, and their poorly hidden disgust with the manner and substance of Trump’s foreign policy.
Oddly, both had little clue that their demeanor and thinly disguised self-importance were a perfect example of why Trump got elected—to come up with new ideas antithetical to the conventional wisdom of unelected career bureaucrats.
Taylor and Kent announced that they are simply high-minded
civil servants who serve the presidential administrations of both parties
without bias.
But by nature, the huge federal bureaucracy counts on bigger
government and more taxes to feed it. So naturally, the bureaucracy is usually
more sympathetic to big-government progressives than to small-government
conservatives.
Taylor and Kent cited their anguish with Trump’s foreign policy toward Ukraine—namely that it did not go through official channels and was too unsympathetic to Ukraine and too friendly to Russia.
If so, one might have thought the anguished bureaucrats would have similarly gone public during the Obama administration.
After all, Vice President Joe Biden took over the Obama administration’s Ukrainian policy at a time when his son Hunter Biden was knee-deep in Ukrainian affairs. As a consultant for a Ukrainian natural gas company, Hunter Biden made a reported $80,000 a month without expertise in either the energy business in particular or Ukraine in general.
Also, Trump’s policies have been more anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian than those of the Obama administration. Trump armed the Ukrainians; Obama did not. Trump imposed new sanctions against Russia, used force against Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefed up NATO defenses, pulled the U.S. out an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia, and pumped more oil and gas to lower world prices—much to the chagrin of oil-exporting Russia.
In contrast, Obama was the architect of “reset” with Russia that reached its nadir in a hot mic exchange in which Obama offered a quid pro quo, vowing more flexibility on issues such as U.S.-sponsored missile defense in Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia giving Obama “space” to concentrate on his reelection.
Trump’s critics have also radically changed their spin on
“coups.” To them, “coup” is no longer a dirty word
trafficked in by right-wing conspiracists. Instead, it has been normalized as a
possibly legitimate means of aborting the Trump presidency.
Mark Zaid, the attorney representing the Ukraine
whistleblower, boasted in two recently discovered tweets of ongoing efforts to
stage a coup to remove Trump.
“#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow,” Zaid tweeted in January 2017.
Retired Adm. William H. McRaven recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times all but calling for Trump’s ouster—”the sooner the better.”
No sooner had Trump been elected than Rosa Brooks, a former
Defense Department official during the Obama administration, wrote an essay for
Foreign Policy magazine discussing theoretical ways to remove Trump before the
2020 election, among them a scenario involving a military coup.
In September 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed
from an anonymous White House official who boasted of supposedly widescale
efforts inside the Trump administration to nullify its operations and subvert
presidential directives.
Such efforts to oppose Trump are often self-described as
“The Resistance,” a reference to the underground French fighters
resisting the Nazis in World War II.
Trump’s opponents often have praised the deep state
precisely because unelected career officials are seen as the most effective way
to sabotage and stymie his agenda.
A “coup” is no longer proof of right-wing
paranoia, but increasingly a part of the general progressive discourse of
resistance to Trump.
In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as
removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election.
“They are searching for every haystack they can possibly find in hopes that there’s a needle somewhere that they can bring forward and say, ‘A-ha, we have something to impeach him,’” says Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga. “And the American people are seeing it for what it is.” Read the lightly edited transcript of the interview, posted below, or listen on this bonus episode of the podcast:
Rachel del Guidice: We’re joined today on The Daily Signal Podcast by Congressman Jody Hice, who represents Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. Congressman Hice, thank you so much for being with us today.
Rep. Jody Hice: Always great to be with you. It’s an honor. Appreciate you having me.
Del Guidice: Well, we love having you. So, last week, House Democrats finished holding their first impeachment hearings on impeaching the president. We heard from Bill Taylor, he’s the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine; George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs; and Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
So, looking at last week’s hearing, what all did you see from those hearings, and has any kind of information or answers been gleaned? What are your takeaways?
Hice: Yeah, I mean, [there’s] two things really that stand out to me from last week. No. 1, again, it’s all hearsay. No one had direct communication with the president. And that’s really what this whole thing is being built on.
It’s a trial in search of a crime, and there’s no evidence to substantiate any of it at this point. And that’s totally what we had last week. And I thought one of the highlights from last week was when [Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas] specifically asked the witnesses, “Why are we here? What is the impeachable offense?” And none of them had an answer.
There’s absolute stunned silence. And that just reiterated the reality that the majority, the Democrats, are moving the goal post on even what the impeachable offense is. And of course, now it’s gone from “quid pro quo” to extortion to bribery.
And I mean, they’re bouncing all over the place themselves, trying to convince the American people of a crime that didn’t happen. And so they’re trying to fabricate a crime. And that was really what came out from last week to me.
Del Guidice: So, you’ve criticized this impeachment process as a sham. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you see it as a sham?
Hice: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, something as important as an impeachment inquiry impacts our entire nation. It’s something that, if we’re going to go down this path, then it needs to be done honestly. It needs to be done openly. It needs to be done with transparency, and with an authentic desire to find the truth.
That has not been the case in this sham. And that’s exactly what it is. For two months, we were in the basement of the Capitol with no transparency. No even attempt seriously to find the the truth.
[House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif.] only allowed individuals to come testify who he thought would have damaging testimony toward the president. The president was not able to defend himself.
We were not able to call forth any of our witnesses as the minority party. It was all a one-sided show. We were limited. Members of Congress were not permitted to participate unless you were on certain committees, and even then it was very difficult to get transcripts, and yet none of it was classified information.
What it ended up being is, really, two months of an audition for Schiff to determine who he thought would be the best witnesses to go public. Which is what he’s now trying to do. But again, it is an unfair process of not genuinely seeking the truth.
It’s all the left Democrats, who hate the president, who want to turn the 2016 election around, and they are trying to do everything they can to discredit and disenfranchise the voters of 2016.
Del Guidice: So, on Tuesday, House Democrats started the second week of open impeachment hearings. And so far we’ve heard from Lt. Col. [Alexander] Vindman. He’s the top Ukraine specialist at the National Security Council. He testified, as well as Jennifer Williams, who’s a foreign service aide in Vice President [Mike] Pence’s office who listened to a call between Trump and the Ukraine’s president.
What did you think of both of their testimonies, of Vindman’s testimony and Williams’ testimony?
Hice: Still, it’s nothing new. It’s more of the same old, same old. … Look, in this whole thing, there’s only one person who matters, and that is the president of the United States.
What did he say? And we have that transcript, that transcript is readily available for anyone and everyone to read. And it says what it says. And the president of Ukraine, President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, took it just the way the president, President Trump, said it was.
There was no quid pro quo, there was no conditions to the aid. Ukraine was not even aware that any aid was being withheld. And so how do you formulate an impeachable offense that didn’t happen?
And so what we have are individuals giving testimony of their opinion. We have people giving testimony who don’t like the foreign policy of the president. What is the president’s job, to submit foreign policy? And if they don’t like it, that’s their prerogative. But it certainly is not an impeachable offense if they don’t like the president’s foreign policy.
So it’s more of the same old argument that the Democrats continue to bring forth, … charges with absolutely zero evidence to substantiate the charge.
Del Guidice: So, you mentioned the fact of zero evidence. … Looking ahead to hearings later this week, we’re hearing a lot of the same old, same old, as you mentioned, and nothing impeachable has been raised so far. So what do you foresee as happening if none of that evidence actually surfaces?
Hice: Well, this thing is collapsing day by day, literally moment by moment, as they continue to proceed forward with it, because there is no evidence there. And the American people, as this is becoming public, as people are watching it, they’re getting fatigued, quite frankly, from a hearing that has nothing to support the so-called impeachable offenses, which even the Democrats themselves can’t even define what that offense might be. And so, the American people are seeing firsthand that this is a hoax.
It is a continuation of a witch hunt that began three years ago, when the president was inaugurated. Within days after his inauguration, there were [some] saying already that they were going to impeach him. And he hadn’t even had time to get in the office and get started. Yet, this has been an undertaking of the Democratic Party for three years.
They are searching for every haystack they can possibly find in hopes that there’s a needle somewhere that they can bring forward and say, “Aha, we have something to impeach him.” And the American people are seeing it for what it is.
Del Guidice: So, you sit on the [House Oversight and Reform Committee], and you attended several of the closed-door depositions that happened. I’m curious if there’s anything you can share from what you observed. And as a second point to that, have Democrats even been following proper procedure when it comes to the impeachment process?
Hice: They’ve been making the rules up and the procedure up as they go. And that’s one of the frustrating things with us. The goal post has been moving all along the way. And so, I cannot get into specifics, because we are strictly forbidden from speaking about what happened in those depositions.
But I can say from a general perspective that it has been the most unfair treatment that I’ve ever seen.
I’m shocked that this type of trial, which is really what it is, is taking place in the United States, where we have only one side permitted to speak, only one side permitted to call forth witnesses, and the other side … during those depositions was not able to do anything.
The president unable to defend himself, and we [being] unable to bring forth witnesses from our side of the equation, has been the most unfair thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I just hope that as this becomes more public, that the American people will recognize that and will reject this attempt by the Democrats to destroy and harm the president.
Del Guidice: So, looking ahead to the rest of the hearings this week, I believe Fiona Hill is scheduled to testify, she was the top Russia specialist at the National Security Council, as well as David Holmes, who’s a State Department official. Do you have any forecasts of what you expect to see, or just more of the same?
Hice: Yeah, expect more of the same. It would be kind of foolish for me to try to speculate what any of them are going to say or testify. So I won’t try to go down that hypothetical route, but, again, would say that the only conversation that matters is the conversation that President Trump had with President Zelenskyy. And that conversation we have. And in that conversation is absolutely nothing impeachable.
There was nothing of demands. There were no preconditions put upon the funding. In fact, this president has funded the Ukraine with lethal weapons to defend themselves against Russia. Something that President [Barack] Obama never did.
And … just a couple of months ago, the Democrats were accusing President Trump of colluding with Russia. And yet President Trump is the one who is providing aid, lethal aid, to Ukraine to defend themselves against Russia.
And so, that is the conversation that matters. The one that the president had with President Zelenskyy, and everything else is just opinion and presumption, made-up opinions, as to what the president really meant. When what he said is right there in clear view. And what he said is exactly the way President Zelenskyy interpreted it.
Del Guidice: President Trump has also said he’s open to contributing his own testimony to Democrats’ impeachment hearings. Do you think he should testify? What is your perspective on that?
Hice: Well, my perspective is he already has. He was not forced to provide the transcript and he did. He voluntarily put it out there. This past week, [he] came out with the second conversation he had with President Zelenskyy. Again, he was not compelled to do so. He is being transparent and open with the conversation that he had. And you know, what he decides to do beyond that is a decision I’m sure that he and other advisers around him will make.
But in my opinion, the president has already exhibited tremendous transparency and a willingness to cooperate. And providing the transcript itself is evidence enough of that.
Del Guidice: One of your colleagues in the House, Congressman Jim Jordan, he had tweeted something early this week that I feel like laid out the situation really well. And he had said that “in the 55 days that aid to Ukraine was delayed, President Zelenskyy had five calls and meetings with high-ranking American officials. And in every one of those meetings, there was never a discussion of linking aid to investigating the Bidens.”
If this is true, and we’ve seen the transcripts, you’ve been talking about that, why isn’t this being discussed in these hearings?
Hice: You know, you’d have to ask the Democrats that. I think the Republican side has done a great job bringing up those facts in this whole thing. Not only were there no preconditions in the phone call, but as you just mentioned, in the five meetings that took place afterward, there was no mention of any conditions in order for aid to come forward.
And so again, this is all nothing but individuals’ opinions, basically saying what we know, the funds went, but what the president really meant was to hold up those funds until we had the investigation on the Bidens or until we had whatever that they claim.
But the fact is, none of that holds up to what actually happened in those meetings that took place following the phone call. Again, our factual evidence that there was no intent for preconditions in the funds that were going to Ukraine.
Del Guidice: So, impeachment definitely has overtaken all of Washington right now and especially Congress in the House as they’re holding these hearings. Is there anything Congress should be doing other than holding these impeachment hearings?
Hice: Well, the first thing we should do is close the door on these impeachment hearings. It’s an absolute hoax in every way.
But yeah, I mean, the Democrats have been so focused on destroying the president and proceeding with this impeachment inquiry that they have accomplished absolutely nothing since they have been the majority here in the House. And there are multiple issues that need to be addressed.
I mean, we haven’t even funded the government, and now that is hanging over our head. We haven’t funded the military. We have drug pricing that needs to be addressed. We have trade deals, the USMCA, that needs to be addressed.
There are multiple issues that are extremely important to the well-being of our country and to every one of our constituents, be it Republican or Democrat. But they have been so focused on one single item, and that is to impeach the president, that they have shown their absolute inability to legislate and do what the American people sent us here to do.
Del Guidice: Final question: What do your constituents in Georgia think about all these impeachment hearings?
Hice: You know, we’ve got 750,000, 800,000, and there are different individuals, different parties that are represented, but overwhelmingly, the people in the 10th District of Georgia are fed up with this impeachment inquiry. They see it for what it is. They want it to come to a stop.
They see the actions of this president and the policies of this president are working in our economy. They’re working in reestablishing the strength of our military. They’re working across the board, impacting individual lives.
They appreciate this president stands for life. He stands for religious liberties. And they want us to continue supporting this president, and they want this impeachment inquiry to come to an end.
I believe, at the end of the day, this is going to prove to be an absolute disaster for the Democrats, and in my opinion, well, it should be.
Del Guidice: Congressman Hice, thank you so much for joining us today on The Daily Signal Podcast.
Hice: Always an honor to be with you. Thank you so much.
“Children in cages” didn’t go away even after it was proved that the mephitic story actually traced its provenance to the Obama administration. At that level, I suppose, we should congratulate Reuters and Agence France Presse for actually doing the right thing and retracting a story about immigration after it became clear that it was…
Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council (NSC) official who is testifying in Thursday’s impeachment inquiry, admitted in her closed-door deposition to having worked with Russia “dossier” author Christopher Steele.
Steele, a former British spy, was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to find dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump. The firm was paid by Trump’s political opponents, particularly the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. His “dossier” produced a slew of unsubstantiated, salacious accusations, some of them were proven false outright. But the FBI used it to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign associates.
Hill was asked directly about her work with Steele. She portrayed it as a product of circumstance, and said that she believed he was being fed misinformation by Russians, perhaps as payback for his past spying on them. (Some of the information also came from Ukraine, though Hill dismissed Ukrainian interference as a “fictional narrative.”)
“He was my counterpart when I was the director, the national intelligence officer,” she testified. She added: “So inevitably, when I had to do liaison meetings with the U.K., he was the person I had to meet with.” She said that she had worked with him from 2006 to 2009 — and added that he had reached out to her in 2016, during the election: “That was prior to the time that I had any knowledge about the dossier. He was constantly trying to drum up business, and he had contacted me because he wanted to see if I could give him a contact to some other individual, who actually I don’t even recall now, who he could approach about some business issues.”
She said that she saw a copy of the “dossier” in January 2017, the day before it was published by Buzzfeed, adding that “it seemed to be about half of Washington, D.C., had it.” She later said she was “shocked” he was responsible.
According to her résumé, Hill was also once on a regional board of George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s prison guards, Tova Noel, who was charged Tuesday with falsifying records to cover an unauthorized period of absence, now says she wants to cooperate with Federal prosecutors and spill details about the night Epstein committed suicide to Federal investigators.
It’s not clear what information Noel has that would interest either the Department of Justice or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, aside from details about why she was missing from her post for at least two hours the night Epstein hung himself in his prison cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, the New York Post reports.
Noel and her fellow prison guard Michael Thomas were arrested Tuesday and charged with criminal conspiracy and falsifying official records “for allegedly fudging ‘count slips’ while failing for hours to check on Epstein and other inmates in the MCC’s ninth-floor Special Housing Unit,” according to the Post.
Epstein had attempted suicide by hanging just a week before and had only recently been moved off suicide watch when Noel and Thomas decided to abrogate their duties and spend the evening “goofing off,” as the Post put it. When they returned to duty at 6:30 a.m. to deliver breakfast to the accused pedophile and child trafficker, they found him dead, hanging in his cell, having used strips of cloth ripped from his bedsheet to form a makeshift noose.
Federal investigators are looking to get to the bottom of the odd circumstances and events surrounding Epstein’s death and, as the Daily Wire reported earlier this week, the Bureau of Prisons chief, in charge of the Manhattan prison where Epstein died, admitted that the FBI and DOJ may be considering the possibility that a “criminal enterprise” was involved in the incident.
The two guards were arrested Tuesday after being informed they were under scrutiny sometime late last week.
“As alleged, the defendants had a duty to ensure the safety and security of federal inmates in their care at the Metropolitan Correctional Center,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said about the arrests in a statement. “Instead, they repeatedly failed to conduct mandated checks on inmates, and lied on official forms to hide their dereliction.”
Wednesday, Noel’s lawyers made their first efforts at inking a plea deal by offering information.
“In fact, Ms. Noel remains available to fully and truthfully cooperate with the Inspector General’s investigation, which is also geared toward uncovering the many problems that existed from the commencement of her employment which continue to plague the Metropolitan Correctional Center,” her defense lawyer said in a statement.
Noel’s lawyers did not specify further what information Noel could offer, but presumably it has, at least, something to do with the inner workings of MCC. In addition to guards that were apparently sleeping on the job, the jail suffered from malfunctioning security cameras and questionable management, all of which affected Epstein’s stay. And although an autopsy concluded that Epstein’s death was a suicide, the strange circumstances have allowed questions to persist.
The FBI and DOJ investigations are ongoing. Congress is also currently hearing testimony from jail officials over how they were able to lose such a high-profile defendant. Those hearings have gone largely unnoticed, falling victim to a focus on the House impeachment inquiry.
I don’t know if the United States is headed for another literal civil war or not, but there’s little doubt that we are far more divided as a nation than when I was growing up. It’s not so much a case of registered Democrats versus registered Republicans as it is]]>
Rush Limbaugh took to “the golden EIB microphone” on Tuesday to unpack the latest developments in the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry, which continued Tuesday with a few more of the Democrats’ “star witnesses,” most notably Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman. Among the exchanges in Tuesday’s hearings Limbaugh highlighted was a crucial line of questions and comments from Texas Republican John Ratcliffe, who, as Rush put it, “busted” the Democrats on their central accusation of “bribery” against President Trump.
Ratcliffe’s exchange with Vindman and State Department official Jennifer Williams, said Limbaugh, “illustrates the phoniness and the moving-target nature of this so-called impeachment inquiry.”
To let his audience witness the moment for themselves, the host played the following clip from Ratcliffe’s questions (transcript via RushLimbaugh.com):
RATCLIFFE: Ms. Williams, you’ve never used the word “bribery” or “bribe” to explain President Trump’s conduct, correct?
WILLIAMS: No, sir.
RATCLIFFE: Colonel Vindman, you haven’t either?
VINDMAN: That is correct.
RATCLIFFE: The problem is, in an impeachment inquiry that the speaker of the House says is all about bribery — where bribery is the impeachable offense — no one has used the word “bribery” to describe President Trump’s conduct. None of them. These aren’t all of the deposition transcripts. These are just the 10 that have been released. Six weeks of witness interviews in this impeachment inquiry, hundreds of hours of testimony, thousands of questions asked, thousands of answers given. The number of times that witnesses have been asked any question about whether or not President Trump’s conduct constituted bribery — before Ambassador Yovanovitch was asked by my colleague Congressman Stewart last Thursday — is zero.
“Stop and think about this,” said Limbaugh. “Now, imagine also as you hear this that sitting right nearby are all of the Democrats, and the media is packed into this room, and they have just been undressed and exposed. The media has been exposed as willing participants in the Democrats’ effort here to get rid of Trump by reversing the election results. They’ve got nothing.”
“They start out with ‘quid pro quo’ and all these other things and it doesn’t register because they focus grouped it,” Rush continued. “They found the American people were not being impacted by it at all. So they tried other words — bribery and what have you — and bribery stuck because it’s something everybody understands, it’s pretty simple to understand what it is, and it’d be very bad if a president actually did it. And yet nobody has yet accused Trump of it until Pelosi came along after the focus grouping.”
Limbaugh then turned again to Ratcliffe’s questions, which he concluded by asserting:
RATCLIFFE: When Speaker Pelosi says this is all about bribery, she’s promised us evidence of bribery that would be compelling and overwhelming — and instead, it’s invisible.
“Because it doesn’t exist. It literally doesn’t exist,” said Limbaugh. “So you’ve got Schiff sitting there. He’s been exposed as a fraud. The Democrats know it and the media know it, and they don’t even care. They’re not even daunted by this, I’ll guarantee you. Because as far as they’re concerned this is never gonna escape the hearing room. Nobody’s gonna ever know about this. They’re not gonna spend any time on it.”
Below is a more complete transcript of Ratcliffe’s questioning of Vindman and Williams Tuesday, as reported by The Daily Wire:
RATCLIFFE: At a press conference last Thursday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that President Trump committed the impeachable offense of “bribery,” evidenced in his July 25th call transcript with President Zelensky. In concert with that, multiple Democratic members of this committee gave TV and radio interviews over this past week discussing how the president’s conduct supported his impeachment for committing bribery — all of which struck me as very odd because for the longest time this was all about “quid pro quo,” according to the whistleblower complaint. But after witness after witness began saying there was no quid pro quo or even that quid pro quo was not even possible, we saw a shift from the Democrats, who briefly started to refer to the president’s conduct on the July 25 call as “extortion.” And now it’s shifted again, last week, to “bribery.”
Ms. Williams, you used the word “unusual” to describe the president’s call on July 25th. Lt. Colonel Vindman, you used the word “improper.” I’ve word-searched each of your transcripts, and the word “bribery” or “bribe” doesn’t appear anywhere in that. Ms. Williams, you’ve never used the word bribery or bribe to explain President Trump’s conduct, correct?
WILLIAMS: No sir.
RATCLIFFE: Colonel Vindman, you haven’t either?
VINDMAN: Correct.
RATCLIFFE: The problem is, in an impeachment inquiry that the Speaker of the House says is all about bribery — bribery is the impeachable offense — no witness has used the term “bribery” to describe the president’s conduct. Six weeks of witness interviews in this impeachment inquiry, hundreds of hours of testimony, thousands of questions asked, thousands of answers given. The number of times that witnesses have been asked any questions about whether or not President Trump’s conduct constituted bribery — before Ambassador [Marie] Yovanovitch was asked by my colleague Congressman [Chris] Stewart last Thursday — is zero. Zero. The number of times witnesses have used the word “bribery” or “bribe” to describe President Trump’s conduct in the last six weeks of this inquiry is zero.
In fact, in these 3,500 pages of sworn deposition testimony in just these ten transcripts released thus far, the word “bribery” appears in these 3,500 pages exactly one time. And ironically, it appears not in a description of President Trump’s alleged conduct. It appears in the description of Vice President [Joe] Biden’s alleged conduct.
This is important because as early as next week, my Democratic colleagues are going to say, “We need to vote on the evidence from this impeachment inquiry on the impeachment of the president for bribery.” They’re going to send a report to the Judiciary Committee. Because there’s more Democrats than Republicans, it’s likely going to pass. When that happens, the American people need to be clear that when the Democrats, what they are describing as bribery, not a single witness is describing as bribery.
We’ve heard many times in the course of these proceedings that the facts of the president are not in dispute, but the American people are asking: If the facts are the same, why do the crimes that the president is being accused of keep changing? Why do we go from “quid pro quo” to “extortion” now to “bribery”? The answer is polling….
It’s bad enough that the Democrats have forbidden White House lawyers from participating in this proceeding. It’s hard enough to defend yourself without your lawyers present. But what’s even worse is to try to defend yourself against an accusation that keeps changing in the middle of the proceeding. If Democrats accuse the president of high crime or an impeachable offense, he ought to at least know which one it is. And when Speaker Pelosi says this is all about “bribery,” she’s promised us evidence of bribery that would be compelling and overwhelming. And, instead, it’s invisible.
