Ted Cruz: Senate will hold ‘fair’ impeachment trial to expose Ukraine scandal — and Trump should be able to call witnesses

Speaking with BlazeTV host Glenn Beck on his radio show Tuesday morning, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, confirmed that the U.S. Senate will hold an impeachment trial aimed at exposing the Ukrainian scandal and said that the Senate trial would be “fair” to the president, unlike the impeachment probe in the House.

Earlier in the interview, Cruz described the House impeachment inquiry as a “partisan show trial” that would ultimately be “thrown out” in the Senate.

Beck later pressed Cruz on the Senate’s intentions: “Please tell me that you are going to hold an impeachment trial and expose all of this stuff in the Senate, won’t you?”

“We will have a trial in the Senate unlike the House, where there was no due process and no fairness,” Cruz confirmed to Beck during the on-air interview. “I believe [the trial in] the Senate will be much more fair.”

Cruz also said he believes that President Trump and his legal team should be allowed to call any witnesses that support his case, including Hunter Biden and the alleged whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella.

“We’re going to allow the White House and the president to present their defense,” Cruz told Beck. “I believe that means if the president wants to call witnesses, the president should be able to call witnesses.”

“If the president wants to call Hunter Biden or the whistleblower — whomever the president wants to call,” Cruz said.

Beck has been outspoken about what he considers the real Ukrainian scandal, which is the State Department-funded, George Soros-led “shadow government” effort in Ukraine.

During the interview, Beck and Cruz also agreed that allegations of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election in collusion with the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign were, in fact, founded, and that further investigation is justified.

Investigation into 2016 election interference was one of two requests from Trump to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the alleged quid pro quo, the other being an investigation into Hunter Biden’s suspicious involvement with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

In a lengthy exposé on BlazeTV last month, Beck suggested that the impeachment probe against President Trump must go to trial so that the details of the underlying scandals in Ukraine could be brought to light.

Curious Americans will have to wait, however, because according to a Politico report, the Senate impeachment trial will likely be postponed until January.


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Media Research Center Files FEC Complaint Against Bloomberg Over Journalists at His Company Continuing to Investigate Trump

The Media Research Center (MRC) has filed a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against Bloomberg LP, the owner of Bloomberg News, Michael Bloomberg and Mike Bloomberg 2020, Inc.

The media watchdog maintains that by stopping journalists at his news outlet from investigating Bloomberg himself, or other Democrat presidential candidates, but continuing to investigate President Donald Trump, they are potentially providing an improper contribution to the Bloomberg campaign.

“According to FEC law, the ‘media exemption’ that would normally exempt media organizations from federal campaign finance disclosure laws does not apply if ‘the facility is owned or controlled by any political party, political committee, or candidate’ should the organization fail to ‘give reasonably equal coverage to all opposing candidates,’” MRC’s website Newsbusters reports.

“Bloomberg News is making a mockery of legitimate journalism. They have consciously chosen to abandon their journalistic responsibilities in favor of what is politically convenient,” MRC President Brent Bozell said in a statement.

The complaint says that on or about November 23, the Editor-in-Chief of Bloomberg News stated in a memorandum that they will “continue our tradition of not investigating Mike (and his family and foundation) and we will extend the same policy to his rivals in the Democratic Primary … [but we] will continue to investigate the Trump administration.”

The complaint adds that this may be a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and should be investigated. It notes that to avoid conflict the candidate may have to register the news organization as a political committee, which it has not done.

“This is a public declaration that Bloomberg’s newsroom is adopting media bias as an official policy,” Bozell added.“This is not only categorically unethical, but potentially illegal, which is why we are calling for an investigation.”

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Guess how many guns Philadelphia’s gun “turn in” program produced

This weekend, police officers in Philadelphia hosted a gun turn-in event at two locations in the City of Brotherly love. Citizens were invited to come and turn in any firearms they had, no questions asked and without danger of facing prosecution. Despite setting up shop at multiple locations and publicizing]]>

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1 Minor Judge Shouldn’t Be Able to Block Trump’s Agenda

When a federal district judge issued a nationwide injunction preventing the Trump administration from blocking funds for sanctuary cities, conservatives protested and liberals cheered.

Liberals were similarly thrilled by a district court ruling that halted the president’s order blocking travel to the U.S. from certain Middle Eastern nations.

Yet when several red states sued to block Obamacare, law
professors writing in The Atlantic asked, “Can one judge really impose his
ruling from one coast to the other?”

District courts—whose reach should be limited to the area
within their geographic jurisdictions except in certain narrowly-defined
circumstances—have inappropriately claimed authority to block presidential and
congressional actions throughout the entire nation.

In particular, these courts issuing nationwide injunctions against several constitutional border security solutions has greatly worsened the ongoing humanitarian disaster

It’s time for Congress and the higher courts to push back on
these illegitimate overreaches. Doing so would move the nation closer to a
lasting solution on the border and restore a proper understanding of the role of
district courts. 

Nationwide injunctions are a fairly new development. Activists
who cannot accomplish their goals through legislation have increasingly turned
to a court system composed of a small group of unelected judges.

But in the same way that the Texas state legislature cannot make laws for Oklahoma, district courts only have authority over a single district—a limited area. By issuing a nationwide injunction, these courts are inappropriately claiming authority over other courts’ districts. 

>>> What We Need in Our Federal Judges

This leads activists and interest groups to go “forum
shopping,” gaming the system to make sure their case is heard by a court (or
even a specific judge) whom they expect will rule favorably. If they can find
the right court, they can hijack the legal process to, in essence, create laws
that bind the entire country. 

This is not only a threat to our republican form of
government, but a threat to the legitimacy of the judicial branch. When the
public perceives that a small group of judges, chosen specifically for their
partisan viewpoints, are shaping national policy, they lose confidence in the
objectivity of the entire legal system.

For example, this year, anti-border security activists pushed for catch-and-release requirements for illegal immigrants at a notoriously liberal California-based court. A single Obama-appointed judge obliged, reinterpreting a decades-old legal agreement known as the Flores settlement to require the release of detained migrant children—and their parents—within 20 days of their detention. 

This ruling set the stage for the current border crisis, as migrants began to realize that our border agencies’ hands were tied when it came to detaining migrants who cross illegally with children. 

Migrants discovered that simply arriving with a child would
swiftly secure their release, incentivizing them to bring children along for
the dangerous journey across Mexico, during which one in three females is
sexually assaulted.

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have arrived already this year, stretching our Border Patrol’s resources to the breaking point and enriching the criminal cartels that traffic migrants into the United States.

>>> After Seeing the Border, What Rep. Michael Cloud Thinks Should Be Done

So the president’s announcement in August that he would be
terminating the Flores settlement came as welcome news. The president should
not be bound by a court that lacks nationwide jurisdiction. 

In another recent example, a U.S. district judge in Manhattan
struck down a Trump administration rule that would protect the consciences of
health care workers. The rule would have ensured doctors and nurses who do not
want to actively participate in abortion procedures, assisted suicide, or
sterilizations don’t have to. It bolstered laws already in place that protect religious
freedom.

There are countless other examples of federal judges
overreaching their proper bounds. Congress should exercise its constitutional
authority to set limits on “such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to
time ordain and establish” in order to prevent federal courts—besides the
Supreme Court—from blocking policies outside that particular court’s geographic
area of authority. 

As long as activists can find sympathetic district courts to block the other side’s policies across the entire nation, our constitutional form of government is at risk. This is not how our government was meant to function, and Congress should end this illegitimate exercise of judicial power.

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6 Takeaways From the IG Report on FBI’s Spying on Trump Campaign

The Justice Department’s in-house watchdog released a 476-page report Monday that criticizes some of the FBI’s actions in beginning an investigation of the Trump campaign’s connection with Russian election meddling, but does not concludes that political bias drove the agency’s probe.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report does answer many questions and verifies some suspicions about the initial FBI investigation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane.  

Attorney General William Barr, Horowitz’s boss, issued a statement Monday saying that the report shows the FBI’s “clear abuse” of the process for obtaining warrants to spy on Americans. 

Horowitz is scheduled to take questions Wednesday from the Senate Judiciary Committee on his report, which arrives as the House Judiciary Committee drafts articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. 

Here are six key takeaways from Horowitz’s report. 

1. Surveillance Broader Than Initially Thought

Americans already knew the FBI used surveillance to keep tabs on two Trump campaign advisers. Initially, news reports made it clear that foreign policy advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were under surveillance. 

The IG report states that two others also were subject to FBI spying: retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn, a high-level campaign adviser who would serve less than a month as Trump’s first White House national security adviser, and onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The IG report concludes that “the quantum of information articulated by the FBI to open the individual investigations on Papadopoulos, Page, Flynn, and Manafort in August 2016 was sufficient to satisfy the low threshold established by the [Justice] Department and the FBI.” 

In May 2017, about four months after Trump became president, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to complete the investigation. 

Mueller determined in his final report released in April 2019 that there was no evidence either Trump or his campaign conspired with the Russian government or Russian operatives to influence the 2016 election. 

2. FBI ‘Far Short’ on Facts in Applying for Warrant

On one key matter, the IG report scolds the FBI for “falling far short” on standards. 

The report identifies 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” by the FBI, which it subsequently refers to as “errors,” in obtaining a warrant to surveil Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. 

“Our review found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate,’” the report says. “We identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.”

The inspector general also “determined that the inaccuracies and omissions we identified in the applications resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to Department attorneys and failing to identify important issues for discussion.”

The report continues: 

Moreover, we concluded that case agents and SSAs [supervisory special agents] did not give appropriate attention to facts that cut against probable cause, and that as the investigation progressed and more information tended to undermine or weaken the assertions in the FISA applications, the agents and SSAs did not reassess the information supporting probable cause.

Further, the report notes that “among the most serious” errors committed by the FBI on FISA was the “failure to advise OI [the Office of Intelligence] or the court of the inconsistencies.”

The Office of Intelligence is part of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

3. No ‘Documentary or Testimonial Evidence’ of Political Bias, but …

On the question of political bias by FBI agents and officials, Horowtiz’s report appears to throw a bone to both sides by making a scathing assessment but asserting on each evaluation that his investigators didn’t find “documentary or testimonial evidence” of impropriety. 

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations,” the IG report says. 

Later, when describing the process of obtaining a surveillance warrant under FISA, the report uses the same phrase:

Although we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the case agents who assisted NSD’s Office of Intelligence … we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or missing information. We found that the offered explanations for these serious errors did not excuse them, or the repeated failures to ensure the accuracy of information presented to the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court].

The report says a protocol known as the Woods Procedures, adopted in 2001, requires the FBI to verify facts presented in a FISA application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose proceedings are secret.

“As described above, given that certain factual misstatements were repeated in all four applications, across three different investigative teams, we also concluded that agents and supervisors failed to appropriately perform the Woods Procedures on the renewal applications by not giving much, if any, attention to re-verifying ‘old facts.’” 

This section of the IG report is mostly consistent with a memo released in early 2018 by then-House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., which said the FBI did not comply with the Woods Procedures. 

4. Why the FBI Says It Didn’t Notify Trump

Horowitz’s report says that an FBI counterintelligence official, E.W. “Bill” Priestap, told investigators that the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers created an obligation to investigate members of the Trump campaign who had potential ties to Russia. 

Priestap had an explanation for why the FBI never notified the Trump campaign that it was looking into potential wrongdoing, the report says:

Priestap stated that he considered whether the FBI should conduct defensive briefings for the Trump campaign but ultimately decided that providing such briefings created the risk that ‘if someone on the campaign was engaged with the Russians, he/she would very likely change his/her tactics and/or otherwise seek to cover up his/her activities, thereby preventing us from finding the truth.’

5. Comey, McCabe, and the Steele Dossier

The IG report says that top FBI leadership approved use of unverified information in a so-called dossier assembled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, to apply for the warrants.

However, a lower-level FBI official raised red flags that Steele’s document was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

“We further determined that FBI officials at every level concurred with this judgment, [including] then-General Counsel James Baker, then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and then-Director James Comey,” the report says, referring to basing the warrant application on the unverified information: 

FBI leadership supported relying on Steele’s reporting to seek a FISA order on Page after being advised of, and giving consideration to concerns expressed by Stuart Evans, then [the National Security Division’s] Deputy Assistant Attorney General with oversight responsibility over [the Office of Intelligence], that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC, and that the foreign intelligence to be collected through the FISA order would probably not be worth the ‘risk’ of being criticized later for collecting communications of someone (Carter Page) who was ‘politically sensitive.’

According to McCabe, the FBI ‘felt strongly’ that the FISA application should move forward because the team believed they had to get to the bottom of what they considered to be a potentially serious threat to national security, even if the FBI would later be criticized for taking such action.

6. Next Step in John Durham’s Criminal Probe

In a statement also released Monday, U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham, who is conducting a criminal investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, disagreed with some of the IG report’s findings. 

“I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff,” Durham said. “However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.”

Durham continued:  

Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.

Indeed, questions about what the FBI predicated its case on include actions by officials with the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 

The IG report, however, says that nearly all of its information came from sources within the FBI, as it is not authorized to investigate matters outside the Justice Department:

The question we considered was not whether a particular investigative decision was ideal or could have been handled more effectively, but rather whether the [Justice] Department and the FBI complied with applicable legal requirements, policies, and procedures in taking the actions we reviewed or, alternatively, whether the circumstances surrounding the decision indicated that it was based on inaccurate or incomplete information, or considerations other than the merits of the investigation.

If the explanations we were given for a particular decision were consistent with legal requirements, policies, procedures, and not unreasonable, we did not conclude that the decision was based on improper considerations in the absence of documentary or testimonial evidence to the contrary.

Barr, who as attorney general is the boss of both Horowitz and Durham, issued a statement saying the report reveals “clear abuse” of the FISA process. 

“The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” Barr said in the statement, adding:

It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation [of Trump campaign ties to Russia] was consistently exculpatory.  Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into Preisident Trump’s administration.

In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source.  

The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory.  While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.

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Supreme Court Gives a Win to Pro-Lifers

Gov. Matt Bevin walked out of his office for the last time Dec. 9, and it’s somewhat fitting that the U.S. Supreme Court picked that same day to uphold one of the most important laws he ever signed—the Kentucky ultrasound bill.

The justices, who watched the ACLU appeal all the way to their doorstep, refused to even hear the case. Instead, they deferred to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which didn’t see the harm in showing moms a picture of their babies before they abort. If it’s just “a clump of cells,” who cares? Liberals, that’s who.

The last thing the abortion industry wants is for moms to come face to face with the personhood of their child. It’s why they’ve poured millions of dollars into fighting heartbeat bills, sonograms, even basic medical disclaimers.

When it comes to abortion, technology is—and always has been—the single biggest enemy of the left. Nothing comes between women and their business more than the truth about these tiny humans in the womb—humans that yawn, smile, suck their thumbs.

The imaging is so advanced these days that doctors can track something as small as a baby’s hiccup. It’s a game-changer. Which is exactly why groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are trying to shut down laws like Kentucky’s. It’s hard enough to get moms to destroy their babies. But it’s near impossible once they see and hear how intensely human their children are.

For young moms like Lisa, who never wanted to be pregnant in the first place, it was a revelation.

“I didn’t want to go through with having the baby,” she explained. “I didn’t want to face all of the challenges that a single mom would.” And besides, she said, “My life was just beginning,” and this “makes you feel like your life is over.”

She made three appointments to abort her little girl. But every time, she found a reason not to go. Something just wasn’t right. She went back to the pregnancy care center and they offered her a free sonogram. “I heard the heartbeat,” Lisa remembers, “and it made it all real. There was a real life inside of me.” It made her realize that “no matter what I was feeling or thinking at the time, I had a little one to worry about.”

As hard as it was to tell her parents, Lisa was overcome when they found her note and called her crying. “Through tears they told me they would help—no matter what.”

It hasn’t always been easy, but her daughter, Selah, has been the joy of her life. A few years later, while her daughter played at the park, Lisa struck up a conversation with a woman sitting by her on the bench. Laura was her name. She said she worked at Life Network. Stunned, Lisa pointed to the blonde little girl on the swings. “The pregnancy center saved her life!” she exclaimed.

It’s a miraculous story—one the folks at Planned Parenthood don’t want to see repeated.

In its challenge, the ACLU even argued that giving women these options was somehow a violation of doctors’ free speech. But the Supreme Court didn’t buy it. Just like it hasn’t bought other lies about “informed consent” laws. Under Kentucky’s, all doctors are required to do is describe the ultrasound while moms listen to the heartbeat. If the women choose, they can shut their eyes and cover their ears. Even still, the ACLU calls it “unconstitutional and unethical.”

No, what’s unethical is misleading women about the personhood of their baby and the life-long consequences of aborting her. Even now, Laura says, she’s met other young moms who “couldn’t see past their circumstances—a child they’re not ready for, a relationship they’d rather escape.” But then they see their baby’s “heartbeat, fingers, and toes.” She says they see the impact of their ultrasound machine every day.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, let’s hope Kentucky can say the same thing about its informed consent law.

Originally published in Tony Perkins’ Washington Update, which is written with the aid of Family Research Council senior writers.

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Impeachment Backlash: Trump Now Beating All Democrats In Three Key Battleground States

New polling shows a very troubling development for those desperate to see Donald Trump go down in 2020. After struggling in three key battleground states against Democratic presidential frontrunners, Trump has seen a surge in support since Democrats formally moved forward with impeachment. The Republican president now leads every potential Democratic opponent in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three of the Rust Belt states that helped deliver Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.

In a report published Sunday, Firehouse Strategies presented their new quarterly battleground polling results, and they were quite grim for Democrats. In a survey of 1,759 likely 2020 general election voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania conducted last week (12/3 through 12/5), the Firehouse/Optimus pollsters found that Trump was “surging” as an apparent result of the Democrats’ impeachment effort — while Democratic frontrunner former Vice President Joe Biden is suffering a “sharp decline in support.”

“As the impeachment process heats up in Washington, Donald Trump is seeing a boost in support in crucial swing states,” Firehouse Strategies reports. “Across the board, President Trump is polling well against the Democratic field in each of these battleground states. Notably, Vice President Biden has seen a sharp decline in support in our surveys as he currently runs behind President Trump in each of the three states.”

And it’s not just Biden who is suffering, it’s all the Democratic candidates. Trump now leads each of them, and often by significant margins.

“As the race currently stands, President Trump is in the lead in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in hypothetical match-ups against former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” Firehouse explains. “Across the three states, Trump’s closest contest is against Joe Biden, although the president leads by an average of 6 percentage points against each Democrat.”

In Michigan, Trump leads Biden by 5 points (46-41), Warren by 9 points (47-38), Sanders by 6 points (48-42), Buttigieg by 11 points (48-37), and Bloomberg by 11 points (48-37).

The numbers are similar in Pennsylvania, where Trump leads Biden by 5 points (46-41), Warren by 7 points (47-40), Sanders by 10 points (48-38), Buttigieg by 6 points (46-40), and Bloomberg by 4 points (45-41). The 4-point gap with Bloomberg is the closest any of the Democrats get to Trump in the three key states.

The results are even worse for Democrats in Wisconsin, where Trump now enjoys a greater than 8-point advantage over all of the Democratic contenders. Trump beats Biden by 9 points (48-39), Warren by 13 points (50-37), Sanders by 13 points (51-38), Buttigieg by 11 points (49-38), and Bloomberg by 14 points (49-37).

So is the Democrats’ impeachment campaign to blame for Trump’s surge and the Democrats’ — particularly Bidens’ — “sharp decline”? The Firehouse/Optimus survey asked the likely 2020 voters in the three battleground states what they thought about impeachment and got some pretty clear results:

In each of these battleground states, we find that a majority of likely 2020 voters do not support the impeachment and removal of President Trump from office. Impeachment and removal is opposed by 50.8% of voters in Michigan, 52.2% of voters in Pennsylvania, and 57.9% of voters in Wisconsin. Non-partisan voters in Michigan (70%) and Wisconsin (61%) oppose impeachment and removal while non-partisan voters in Pennsylvania slightly support it (46.4% to 40.9%). When asked about whether congressional Democrats should be spending their time impeaching Trump or focusing on policy issues, a majority of these battleground state voters choose “focus on policy issues” (MI: 59.4%; PA: 63%; WI: 67.2%).

Firehouse provides the following “key point” in summary of its findings: “Overall, we find President Trump performing well in these crucial 2020 states. While these numbers will fluctuate as the presidential election continues, Trump is well situated to win back these contests.” (Read the full report here.)

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So Obama knew all along about the FBI bid to spy on his rival

Up until now, President Obama has said he knew nothing about the FBI bid to destroy his political rival, Donald J.Trump, as evidenced in the newly released and mighty critical Inspector General, report.

Back in August 2016, Obama said:

 ”I do not talk to the attorney general about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations,” he insisted.

“I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI — not just in this case, but in any case. FULL STOP. PERIOD. Guaranteed. Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department,” he said.

Today, Obama’s claim is in tatters. Julie Kelly of the Federalist, found references within the new IG report that Obama was briefed on the gamy investigation, and knew all about it all along.

Former FBI Director James Comey briefed President Barack Obama about the investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign before the 2016 election, according to a report released today by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

When we asked Comey about meetings with the White House concerning Crossfire Hurricane, he said that although he did not brief the White House about the investigation, he did mention to President Obama and others at a meeting in the Situation Room that the FBI was trying to determine whether any U.S. person had worked with the Russians in their efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Comey said he thought it was important that the President know the nature of the FBI’s efforts without providing any specifics. Comey said although he did not recall exactly what he said, he may have said there were four individuals with ‘some association or connection to the Trump campaign.’ Comey stated that after he provided this information, no one at the meeting responded or followed up with any questions. Comey did not recall specifically when this meeting took place, but believed it may have been in August 2016.

The White House meeting also included then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and then-CIA Director John Brennan, the inspector general found.

So Obama knew, quite contrary to his claims, that this now-criticized rat-king of an investigation on his rival, was happening as he watched.

It’s not a big surprise, actually. As Kelly notes, FBI officials Peter Strzok’s and Lisa Page’s emails suggested that that was going on:

One text causing raised eyebrows today seems to implicate the president: ”potus wants to know everything we’re doing,” former FBI lawyer Lisa Page texted to her paramour, then-FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, on Sept. 2, 2016.  She said that she had just been in a meeting to discuss “TPs for D” (talking points for the director, i.e. FBI Director James Comey) to brief the president on their investigation.

Yet President Trump, who tried to resolve this matter by asking the Ukrainians to cooperate with investigators over the Obama-linked Biden tentacle of this octopus, is now being impeached today for taking actions “against his rivals.”

Obama did it earlier, and he sure as heck wasn’t impeached. Yet his string of crimes against his political rival was incredibly long, and there seems to have been a groupthink element to it, the way a group of crooks gets together and commits crimes together, except that their presence of one another seems to propel them along to do much worse than they would be capable of alone.

It wasn’t just the FBI investigation he knew about – it was also the ‘unmaskings’ that followed from the FBI bid to pin something on Trump – the timelines show that around the time of that Coomey briefing, the “unmaskings” of Americans caught up in intelligence dragnets, looking to see if any of them were Trump officials, were stepped up, ending only when Obama administration officials packed up and left the White House.

It’s apparently a whole slew of things he did to spy on and undercut his rivals. Had he used that formidable energy on America’s actual enemies, he might not have been such a failure as president. For now, Obama stands exposed.

Up until now, President Obama has said he knew nothing about the FBI bid to destroy his political rival, Donald J.Trump, as evidenced in the newly released and mighty critical Inspector General, report.

Back in August 2016, Obama said:

 ”I do not talk to the attorney general about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations,” he insisted.

“I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI — not just in this case, but in any case. FULL STOP. PERIOD. Guaranteed. Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department,” he said.

Today, Obama’s claim is in tatters. Julie Kelly of the Federalist, found references within the new IG report that Obama was briefed on the gamy investigation, and knew all about it all along.

Former FBI Director James Comey briefed President Barack Obama about the investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign before the 2016 election, according to a report released today by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

When we asked Comey about meetings with the White House concerning Crossfire Hurricane, he said that although he did not brief the White House about the investigation, he did mention to President Obama and others at a meeting in the Situation Room that the FBI was trying to determine whether any U.S. person had worked with the Russians in their efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Comey said he thought it was important that the President know the nature of the FBI’s efforts without providing any specifics. Comey said although he did not recall exactly what he said, he may have said there were four individuals with ‘some association or connection to the Trump campaign.’ Comey stated that after he provided this information, no one at the meeting responded or followed up with any questions. Comey did not recall specifically when this meeting took place, but believed it may have been in August 2016.

The White House meeting also included then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and then-CIA Director John Brennan, the inspector general found.

So Obama knew, quite contrary to his claims, that this now-criticized rat-king of an investigation on his rival, was happening as he watched.

It’s not a big surprise, actually. As Kelly notes, FBI officials Peter Strzok’s and Lisa Page’s emails suggested that that was going on:

One text causing raised eyebrows today seems to implicate the president: ”potus wants to know everything we’re doing,” former FBI lawyer Lisa Page texted to her paramour, then-FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, on Sept. 2, 2016.  She said that she had just been in a meeting to discuss “TPs for D” (talking points for the director, i.e. FBI Director James Comey) to brief the president on their investigation.

Yet President Trump, who tried to resolve this matter by asking the Ukrainians to cooperate with investigators over the Obama-linked Biden tentacle of this octopus, is now being impeached today for taking actions “against his rivals.”

Obama did it earlier, and he sure as heck wasn’t impeached. Yet his string of crimes against his political rival was incredibly long, and there seems to have been a groupthink element to it, the way a group of crooks gets together and commits crimes together, except that their presence of one another seems to propel them along to do much worse than they would be capable of alone.

It wasn’t just the FBI investigation he knew about – it was also the ‘unmaskings’ that followed from the FBI bid to pin something on Trump – the timelines show that around the time of that Coomey briefing, the “unmaskings” of Americans caught up in intelligence dragnets, looking to see if any of them were Trump officials, were stepped up, ending only when Obama administration officials packed up and left the White House.

It’s apparently a whole slew of things he did to spy on and undercut his rivals. Had he used that formidable energy on America’s actual enemies, he might not have been such a failure as president. For now, Obama stands exposed.

via American Thinker Blog

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Pollak: Democrats Set the Constitution on Fire with Fraudulent Impeachment

House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning after an investigation that violated fundamental provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The investigation of the president began with the complaint of a so-called “whistleblower” who turned out to be a rogue Central Intelligence Agency employee, protected by a lawyer who had called for a “coup” against Trump in early 2017.

Democrats first demanded that the “whistleblower” be allowed to testify. But after House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was found to have lied about his committee’s contact with the “whistleblower,” and after details of the “whistleblower’s” bias began to leak, Democrats reversed course. In violation of the President Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to confront his accuser, Democrats refused to allow the “whistleblower” to testify. They argue the president’s procedural rights, even if they existed, would not apply until he was tried in the Senate — but they also invented a fraudulent “right to anonymity” that, they hope, might conceal the whistleblower even then.

Schiff began the “impeachment inquiry” in secret, behind the closed doors of the Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, even though none of the testimony was deemed classified. Few members of Congress were allowed access. Schiff allowed selective bits of testimony to leak to friendly media, while withholding transcripts of testimony.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), having allowed the secret process to unfold, legitimized it with a party-line vote authorizing the inquiry. The House resolution denied President Trump the procedural rights enjoyed by Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, and denied the minority party the traditional right to object to witnesses called by the majority.

Rather than the House Judiciary Committee, which traditionally handles impeachment, Pelosi also deputized the House Intelligence Committee to conduct fact-finding; the Judiciary Committee was turned into a rubber stamp. Schiff held a few public hearings, but often failed to release transcripts containing exculpatory evidence until after they had passed.

In the course of the Intelligence Committee’s investigation, Schiff quietly spied on the telephone records of his Republican counterpart, Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA). He also snooped on the phone records of a journalist, John Solomon; and on the phone records of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, acting as President Trump’s personal lawyer.

Schiff’s eavesdropping violated both the First Amendment right to press freedom and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Yet he proceeded undeterred by constitutional rights, publishing the phone logs in his committee’s report without warning, confirmation, or explanation, alleging that Nunes and the others were part of a conspiracy to assist the president’s allegedly impeachable conduct. When Republicans on the Judiciary Committee asked the Intelligence Committee’s majority counsel, Daniel Goldman, to explain the phone logs, he refused to answer,

Ironically, Schiff had done exactly what Democrats accuse Trump of doing: abused his power to dig up dirt on political opponents, then obstructed a congressional investigation into his party’s and his committee’s misconduct.

Democrats’ articles of impeachment include one for the dubious charge of “abuse of power,” which is not mentioned in the Constitution; and one for “obstruction of Congress,” which in this case is an abuse of power in itself.

Alexander Hamilton, writing about impeachment in Federalist 65, warned that “there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” Democrats have fulfilled Hamilton’s worst fears.

The Trump impeachment will soon replace the 1868 impeachment of President Andrew Johnson — which the House Judiciary Committee staff actually cited as a positive precedent — as the worst in American history.

In service of their “coup,” Democrats have trampled the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Republic has never been in greater danger.

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.

via Breitbart News

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