‘It’s our hope when the trial concludes—you’ve heard us and you’ve heard the president’s counsel over a series of long days—that you don’t choose imprisonment…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the lead impeachment manager in the ongoing Senate trial against President Donald Trump, spoke at length on Wednesday rehashing the House’s case for abuse of power, Democrats on Thursday trotted out the B-squad to help defend some of the case’s many holes.
The widespread reports of senators on both sides of the aisle growing restless and bored by Schiff’s speech prompted the House Intelligence Committee chairman to warn the world’s premier deliberative body that its members, too, could face imprisonment for any disruption in the proceedings.
“I’m not sure that chief justice is fully aware of just how rare it is, how extraordinary it is for the House members to be able to command the attention of senators sitting silently for hours—or even four minutes, for that matter,” Schiff said.
“Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the morning starts out every day with the sergeant-of-arms warning you that if you don’t, you will be imprisoned,” Schiff continued. “It’s our hope when the trial concludes—you’ve heard us and you’ve heard the president’s counsel over a series of long days—that you don’t choose imprisonment instead of anything further.”
Among the day’s “highlights”—or blooper reels, as it were—Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, provided a lengthy historical justification for impeachment without any crimes having been committed.
More notably, freshman congresswoman Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, was dispatched to pre-emptively defuse a core element of Trump’s likely defense—that he was justified in calling for an investigation into allegations of corruption in Ukraine involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Garcia—who at one point made a Freudian slip by referring to the president as “Drumpf”—predictably cherry-picked elements of the claims long propelled by Democrats and their media accomplices to support the Bidens.
However, in suggesting there was no evidence of wrongdoing, Garcia’s claims, once again, omitted several important facts.
Among the fallacies in her arguments:
- Asserting the corruption of one Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, while using the statements or recantations of other corrupt Ukrainian prosecutors to attempt to downplay both Bidens’ wrongdoing
- Failing to address an intensive pressure campaign from Hunter Biden and other well-connected Burisma “consultants” to force Shokin to drop his investigation into the company prior to his firing
- Suggesting that peripheral examples of Shokin’s own ethical issues justified a billion-dollar quid-pro-quo extortion scheme by the Obama administration to fire the prosecutor
- Implying that a lack of evidence from prior Ukrainian investigations into Burisma—despite the obvious flaws in those investigations—equated to an exoneration of the Bidens
- Ascribing political motives to Trump by pointing to his prior support for Ukraine, while ignoring the March 2019 publication of a pivotal book that exposed the Bidens’ corruption, along with the mainstream media’s widespread disinterest in covering the story
“The allegations against Vice President Biden were based on the evidence that occurred in late 2015 and early 2016,” Garcia said.
“They are all well publicized … but it wasn’t until 2019—over three years after Vice President Biden called for his [Shokin’s] removal—three years after that, President Trump started pushing Ukraine to investigate that conduct,” she continued. “What changed?”
Although Garcia claimed it was Biden’s long-anticipated April 25 announcement that he would enter the 2020 presidential race, she forgot to mention the work of the two conservative investigative journalists who had first exposed the scandal a month prior.
The Ukraine scandal first garnered widespread public attention—along with that of Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani—after the March 26, 2019 publication of Peter Schweizer‘s book Secret Empires.
Shortly thereafter, Hill contributor John Solomon dropped another bombshell on the Bidens pointing to the former vice president’s on-tape confession in 2018 to having extorted the Ukrainian administration.
Not coincidentally, the corruption of the pro-Obama Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his administration played a central part in the anti-corruption platform of his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, later that year.
The work of Solomon and Schweizer has continued to lead the way in exposing the Bidens. Yet, proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Solomon was subsequently targeted by Schiff, who subpoenaed his phone records and released them as part of the House impeachment report.
His name again appeared in the publicly released text messages of Lev Parnas, whom he turned to for help in facilitating an interview with Shokin.