Month: September 2019

President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speak during a meeting in New York on September 25, 2019, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) – President Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow said the Democrats’ newly announced “impeachment inquiry,” launched before all the facts were known, is “political theater” that will come to “nothing” in the end.

“The president is conducting his role as commander in chief, and the American people don’t deserve this. They don’t deserve what’s being done,” Sekulow told Fox News’s Sean Hannity Wednesday night.

Part of what’s being done is a shrug — complete indifference from Democrats and the liberal media — at former Vice President Joe Biden’s quid pro quo with the Ukraine government.

In 2016 then-Vice President Biden threatened to withhold U.S. loan guarantees unless the Ukraine government immediately fired its prosecutor-general who was about to investigate the Ukraine gas company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.

But Sekulow isn’t ignoring it:

Joe Biden, OK, the former vice president of the United States, when he was the vice president of the United States, in essence bragged about this, has stated when he was vice president, this prosecutor is gone in six hours or you’re going to be losing a lot of money. And that’s not an issue for anybody?

OK, that is a quid pro quo. And it just happened to be that his son was engaged in this activity. Whatever that activity was, let me tell you what’s not right. The vice president using his office. Are the Democrats talking about that? No.

In fact, what does Senator Murphy say? If you discuss this, if you open up a probe, Ukraine, against the vice president, here you’re going to have — put your financial assistance in jeopardy.

This goes beyond a double standard. But I’m going to tell you, Sean. It was nothing before. It is nothing again.

Sekulow said there is no quid pro quo in Trump’s phone conversation with the newly elected Ukraine president.

“Well, let’s see what we have,” Sekulow said. “We have a conversation of the president of the United States with another world leader, president of Ukraine, and in that there is no quid pro quo, there’s no “I’ll do this if you’ll do that.’ There is no thing of value exchanged. None of that takes place.

“We have political theater.”

According to a Sept. 23 report in The Hill:

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

“I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them,” Murphy told me (reporter John Solomon) today, confirming what he told Ukraine’s leader.

Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin (Screenshot)

In a post on his Facebook page on Thursday, nationally syndicated radio talk show host, TV host, author and American lawyer Mark Levin blasted today’s hearing on President Donald J. Trump’s comments to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “just another spectacle, another drama for the media, another sham.”

“We will learn nothing,” wrote Mark Levin on social media. “This is just another spectacle, another drama for the media, another sham.”

Mark Levin’s remarks stem from an ongoing hearing, wherein Acting Director of National Intelligence (“DNI”) Joseph Maguire is testifying about the whistleblower complaint at the center of the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, and came after the White House declassified and released a transcript of the phone conversation between President Trump and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine and after the release of the whistleblower complaint.

“Today’s hearing, already … now we have the spectacle of Schiff trying to pressure the acting DNI, trying to put words in his mouth that were written by a so-called whistleblower, the latter of whom was not a direct witness to virtually anything, and who is represented by counsel who once worked for Clinton and Schumer,” Levin began his social media post.

“A hearing on hearsay — ,” Levin continued later in his post, “should the so-called whistleblower be the first witness, his identity known, his complaint question[ed] and scrutinized, etc., before questioning the acting DNI about the complaint? Of course, but that wouldn’t serve the purpose of the Democrats and the media.”

In an earlier Facebook post on Thursday morning, Levin expressed that “our government constantly works with and coordinates with foreign governments on criminal investigations,” and suggested that the president, as head of the executive branch, “can suggest to another head of state that his prosecutor talk to our attorney general.” Levin also commented on the “corrupt Bidens,” suggesting they “are not above the law,” further noting that there is “no constitutional issue” here and that “the president didn’t say anything untoward or improper.”

So now we have a whistleblower who isn’t because he cannot be, either from his circumstance or from the law. He or she had no firsthand knowledge, weren’t on the call or in the room, and in any case cannot blow the whistle on a unitary executive, namely President Trump. You can only be a whistleblower for an agency you are a member of. We have a quid without a quo and a phone conversation in which President Trump did not pressure a Ukrainian leader into a crime Joe Biden has previously confessed to, namely threatening to withhold a loan guarantee unless the Ukrainian government fires a prosecutor looking into a company that was paying Hunter Biden, a man with no special knowledge of Ukraine or the business, $600,0000 a year.

As Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani points out, the phone transcript makes Trump the whistleblower and Biden the criminal in a Ukrainian collusion saga that leads to Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump. As Giulian states in an interview with Fox News’ John Roberts:

The reality is, the distinction is this. What they are trying to say is, I went there for a political mission to kind of get Joe Biden in trouble.

Ridiculous.

I went there as a lawyer defending his client. I — I have known about this for five months. I have been trying to get people to cover this for five months. So, I knew it would be very, very hard to get this out.

And what I’m talking about, this, it’s Ukrainian collusion, which was large, significant, and proven with Hillary Clinton, with the Democratic National Committee, a woman named Chalupa, with the ambassador, with an FBI agent who’s now been hired by George Soros who was funding a lot of it.

If you want real collusion with a real trail of evidence of people trying to do real things interfering with our elections, particularly the 2016 campaign, try Hillary Clinton’s real collusion with Ukraine to derail and besmirch Team Trump. As Politico reported in a story that went nowhere at the time:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Here you have a meeting between a DNC operative in a foreign embassy receiving materials used to defame and derail the Trump campaign. This meeting had real consequences worse than in the case of the Donald Trump, Jr. meeting which bored its participants to death.

Was anyone interested?  Certainly not MSNBC’s Brian Williams and Andrea Mitchell, who were puzzled as to what Donald Trump was referring to when he tweeted about Team Hillary’s collusion with Ukraine:

On MSNBC Wednesday morning, two of MSNBC’s most prominent anchors admitted they had no idea what Trump was referring to, when he tweeted out that the Clinton campaign also sought out information from foreign government officials to help boost her campaign, during the 2016 election. After reading the tweet, Brian Williams asked Andrea Mitchell if she knew what he was talking about. “I’m hoping you can help me decipher this,” he asked. “It’s hard to figure out what this is about,” Andrea Mitchell quizzically responded.

It wouldn’t have been so hard if the crack investigative reporters at MSNBC and CNN had followed the facts and the named sources in the Politico report instead of unnamed sources who produce fake news about Team Trump which result in stories being retrace and reporters resigning. As MRC/Neswbusters reported:

Trump’s tweet was referring to a seven-month old report from Politico, which found that Ukrainian officials worked with the DNC to help do opposition research on Trump in order to help Clinton’s campaign. This research was also leaked to several American journalists, according to the report.

Politico found that a veteran DNC operative, Alexandra Chalupa, sought out information to damage the Trump campaign after media reports speculated Paul Manafort had ties to Russia. She sought out help to do this from the Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. and one of his top aides, “with the DNC’s encouragement,” Politico reported.

Chalupa spoke to Politico, which recalled:

She [Chalupa] said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well. She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said.

The report went into further detail, but the long and short of it explained how Ukrainian officials admitted to “working very closely” with Chalupa, who then shared this information with the DNC.

One official, Andrii Telizhenko told Politico:

“They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa.”

Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”

Say what? This is what you really call “empirical evidence” of collusion with a foreign government, inviting them to interfere in the 2016 election. Yet the media ignores it, Congressional Democrats avert their eyes, and congressional Republicans afraid of their own shadow let Democratic bottom feeders like Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Chuck Schumer beat up on President Trump without any meaningful response or defense.

Where are the congressional hearings on Hillary’s collusion with Ukraine? Where are the hearings on a sitting vice president’s criminal collusion with that same foreign government? Where are the hearings on her making it possible for Russian interests to control 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation?

Joe Biden? Lock him up.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.               

So now we have a whistleblower who isn’t because he cannot be, either from his circumstance or from the law. He or she had no firsthand knowledge, weren’t on the call or in the room, and in any case cannot blow the whistle on a unitary executive, namely President Trump. You can only be a whistleblower for an agency you are a member of. We have a quid without a quo and a phone conversation in which President Trump did not pressure a Ukrainian leader into a crime Joe Biden has previously confessed to, namely threatening to withhold a loan guarantee unless the Ukrainian government fires a prosecutor looking into a company that was paying Hunter Biden, a man with no special knowledge of Ukraine or the business, $600,0000 a year.

As Trump lawyer and former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani points out, the phone transcript makes Trump the whistleblower and Biden the criminal in a Ukrainian collusion saga that leads to Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump. As Giulian states in an interview with Fox News’ John Roberts:

The reality is, the distinction is this. What they are trying to say is, I went there for a political mission to kind of get Joe Biden in trouble.

Ridiculous.

I went there as a lawyer defending his client. I — I have known about this for five months. I have been trying to get people to cover this for five months. So, I knew it would be very, very hard to get this out.

And what I’m talking about, this, it’s Ukrainian collusion, which was large, significant, and proven with Hillary Clinton, with the Democratic National Committee, a woman named Chalupa, with the ambassador, with an FBI agent who’s now been hired by George Soros who was funding a lot of it.

If you want real collusion with a real trail of evidence of people trying to do real things interfering with our elections, particularly the 2016 campaign, try Hillary Clinton’s real collusion with Ukraine to derail and besmirch Team Trump. As Politico reported in a story that went nowhere at the time:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Here you have a meeting between a DNC operative in a foreign embassy receiving materials used to defame and derail the Trump campaign. This meeting had real consequences worse than in the case of the Donald Trump, Jr. meeting which bored its participants to death.

Was anyone interested?  Certainly not MSNBC’s Brian Williams and Andrea Mitchell, who were puzzled as to what Donald Trump was referring to when he tweeted about Team Hillary’s collusion with Ukraine:

On MSNBC Wednesday morning, two of MSNBC’s most prominent anchors admitted they had no idea what Trump was referring to, when he tweeted out that the Clinton campaign also sought out information from foreign government officials to help boost her campaign, during the 2016 election. After reading the tweet, Brian Williams asked Andrea Mitchell if she knew what he was talking about. “I’m hoping you can help me decipher this,” he asked. “It’s hard to figure out what this is about,” Andrea Mitchell quizzically responded.

It wouldn’t have been so hard if the crack investigative reporters at MSNBC and CNN had followed the facts and the named sources in the Politico report instead of unnamed sources who produce fake news about Team Trump which result in stories being retrace and reporters resigning. As MRC/Neswbusters reported:

Trump’s tweet was referring to a seven-month old report from Politico, which found that Ukrainian officials worked with the DNC to help do opposition research on Trump in order to help Clinton’s campaign. This research was also leaked to several American journalists, according to the report.

Politico found that a veteran DNC operative, Alexandra Chalupa, sought out information to damage the Trump campaign after media reports speculated Paul Manafort had ties to Russia. She sought out help to do this from the Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. and one of his top aides, “with the DNC’s encouragement,” Politico reported.

Chalupa spoke to Politico, which recalled:

She [Chalupa] said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well. She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said.

The report went into further detail, but the long and short of it explained how Ukrainian officials admitted to “working very closely” with Chalupa, who then shared this information with the DNC.

One official, Andrii Telizhenko told Politico:

“They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa.”

Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”

Say what? This is what you really call “empirical evidence” of collusion with a foreign government, inviting them to interfere in the 2016 election. Yet the media ignores it, Congressional Democrats avert their eyes, and congressional Republicans afraid of their own shadow let Democratic bottom feeders like Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Chuck Schumer beat up on President Trump without any meaningful response or defense.

Where are the congressional hearings on Hillary’s collusion with Ukraine? Where are the hearings on a sitting vice president’s criminal collusion with that same foreign government? Where are the hearings on her making it possible for Russian interests to control 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation?

Joe Biden? Lock him up.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.