‘Rather than defending her email misconduct, the Justice Department has more than enough evidence to reopen its investigations…’
Hillary Clinton/IMAGE: PBS NewsHour via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Government accountability crusaders Judicial Watch said Monday that they may finally have obtained the smoking-gun evidence of a cover-up operation surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s private email server.
The nonprofit obtained via public records requests a two-page email exchange between Clinton and some of her top advisers on Sept. 29, 2011 discussing proposed talking points about the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya prior to Clinton’s testimony before the U.S. Senate.
Included in the email’s “To:” field is Clinton’s private-server address, [email protected].
“This email is a twofer,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It shows Hillary Clinton misled the U.S. Senate on Benghazi and that the State Department wanted to hide the Benghazi connection to the Clinton email scheme.”
In the email exchange, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan said that the Intelligence Community—specifically the CIA, then overseen by disgraced former Director John Brennan—had fed bad information that the siege was an impromptu act spontaneously inspired by a Youtube video.
“[T]he White House and [national security adviser] Susan [Rice] were not making things up,” Sullivan wrote.
“… The real story may have been obvious to you from the start … but the IC gave us very different information,” he said. “They were unanimous about it.”
In a follow-up message, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills fleshed out the proposed talking points while further deflecting blame onto bad intelligence estimates in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack, only two months prior to President Barack Obama’s re-election.
After Judicial Watch filed suit in 2014, it said the email was withheld from the records but later became public knowledge due to an inspector general’s report that referenced it.
The group’s efforts to expose the Benghazi cover-up ultimately led to the revelation of Clinton’s private server.
Fitton said in a press release that it was hard to tell which of the scandals—the Benghazi talking points or the private server—the Justice Department was trying to conceal by not releasing the email at first.
But either way, he encouraged them to continue to investigate the possible criminal activity by Clinton and her surrogates.
“Rather than defending her email misconduct, the Justice Department has more than enough evidence to reopen its investigations into Hillary Clinton,” Fitton said.
SOURCE: Hiring of former VP’s son ‘was to protect the company…’
Hunter Biden / IMAGE: ABC News via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A Reuters investigation into Hunter Biden‘s role at Ukraine‘s Burisma energy company revealed he may have been paid two-thirds more than originally reported—and he never set foot in Ukraine during his five years on the board.
Biden “provided advice on legal issues, corporate finance and strategy” without ever visiting the former Soviet satellite, according to multiple sources interviewed by Reuters.
“Biden regularly attended Burisma’s twice annual board meetings—all of which were held outside of Ukraine,” Reuters reported.
Additionally, sources said, “there were constant calls, dialogue, sharing of advice, consideration of different options [and] Expansion to other markets…” discussed with Biden but that, for the most part, “He was a ceremonial figure.”
Biden resigned from the board in April 2019, shortly before his father declared his 2020 presidential candidacy.
Records provided to Reuters by Ukrainian law-enforcement indicated that during an 18-month span from April 2014 to November 2015, Burisma made monthly payments of $83,000 to Biden’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, for the purpose of “consulting services.”
Many preliminary reports listed Biden’s monthly Burisma salary as $50,000.
The payments disclosed in the newly released financial records were said to be for both Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer, who was a senior aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
However, Reuters said it could not verify how the funds broke down between the two board members.
In a recent ABC interview, Biden refused to go into details about his compensation from the Ukrainian natural gas giant or from another suspicious business deal involving a Chinese investment company.
“One thing that I don’t have to do is sit here and open my kimono as it relates to how much money I make,” he said. “… But it’s all been reported.”
Another revelation from the Reuters piece was that it was the idea of the company’s founder, wealthy oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, to hire Biden and other well-connected members of the political Left.
“It was to protect [the company]” said Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a source close to Zlochevsky.
Zlochevsky had been under investigation for corruption and embezzlement since 2012, but it seems Hunter Biden’s presence alone did little to alleviate the matter.
Prosecutor–General Viktor Shokin continued to probe the company, forcing Zlochevsky to flee Ukraine and live in exile for several years.
A year into Shokin’s tenure, Hunter’s father—then-Vice President Joe Biden—who was directly overseeing U.S.–Ukraine diplomacy at the time, forced top government officials to fire the prosecutor while threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee.
The man who replaced Shokin was Yuriy Lutsenko, a partisan operative with a criminal history of his own and little investigative experience. He later claimed that the Bidens were not part of any Burisma probe.
However, in a sworn affidavit for an unrelated case, Shokin said his firing was the direct result of Joe Biden’s political pressure over the Burisma investigation.
Reuters reported that Ukrainian law-enforcement officials obtained the financial records about Hunter Biden’s Burisma payments while investigating the company’s business activities prior to the American political scion’s 2014 hiring.
On Oct. 4, Ukraine’s current prosecutor–general, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, said he was reopening a review of Burisma’s 15 previous investigations.
Reuters reported that although Ryaboshapka was revisiting the cases related to Zlochevsky, “no decision had been taken on how to proceed against him or people related to him.”
In their latest efforts to impeach President Donald Trump, House Democrats are now investigating a July phone call in which they claim, without evidence, that Trump illegally pressured his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to reopen the probes while threatening to withhold military aide.
‘If anger has an algorithmic bias, then Donald Trump is the captain of that ship…’
Brad Parscale / IMAGE: Face the Nation via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Democrats are pointing fingers after their latest impeachment ploy helped President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign to surge in fundraising.
Among their top targets is social media for giving Trump and his campaign digital media director, Brad Parscale, an unfettered platform to spread negative attacks and alleged falsehoods.
After failing last week to bully several media outlets into pulling Trump’s campaign ads, whining Democrats continue to use sympathetic left-wing outlets like The New York Times in their effort to ‘work the refs’ and scapegoat their own political miscalculations.
Radical far-left websites like Vox seethed last week when social media companies, as well as mainstream cable networks like Fox and MSNBC, scoffed at the demand to pull a Trump ad linking candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter to Ukrainian corruption.
On Sunday, the Times bemoaned that the more Democrats and their media allies tried to smear the president through traditional outlets like liberal news reporting, the more he capitalized on those attacks by running online campaign ads of his own against them.
“Even seemingly ominous developments for Mr. Trump become fodder for his campaign,” said the exasperated reporters.
“When news broke last month that congressional Democrats were opening an impeachment inquiry, the campaign responded with an advertising blitz aimed at firing up the president’s base,” they wrote.
Punishing the Messenger
Hunter and Joe Biden / IMAGE: Donald J Trump via Youtube
In retaliation against Facebook for refusing to pull Trump’s ad, the Biden campaign responded by funneling more of its own advertising budget into television.
The company also became the subject of an array of attack stories and even a hashtag campaign seeking to discredit the social media giant, long reputed for its anti-conservative slant.
Companies such as Google previously have been exposed for programming into their search algorithms an underlying bias that favored left-wing websites.
Even so, leftist tech wonks tried to spin it as a way to counteract a naturally occurring bias that favored their distorted idea of conservative messaging.
Shomik Dutta, a left-wing operative whose Higher Ground Labs functioned as an “incubator” for Democratic start-ups, told the Times that Trump was simply better at leveraging the outrage that his base felt toward the other side.
“There’s an algorithmic bias that inherently benefits hate and negativity and anger,” Dutta claimed. “If anger has an algorithmic bias, then Donald Trump is the captain of that ship.”
Techies to Luddites
Where Democrats previously congratulated themselves during the Obama era for their media-savvy outreach plan, they now appear to have done a full reversal, claiming they are far too policy-oriented to communicate their message effectively on the philistine Web.
“While the Trump campaign has put its digital operation firmly at the center of the president’s re-election effort, Democrats are struggling to internalize the lessons of the 2016 race and adapt to a political landscape shaped by social media,” said the Times.
Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg/IMAGE: WH.gov via Youtube
Even President Barack Obama, once branded by his campaign sloganeers as the “first Twitter president,” recently took a shot at his successor’s bully-pulpit of choice, Twitter.
But similar efforts by Parscale, Trump’s digital media director, to leverage online platforms have been derided by the newly Luddite Left with something of a conspiratorial air.
“He is at the helm of what experts described as a sophisticated digital marketing effort, one that befits a relentlessly self-promoting candidate who honed his image, and broadcast it into national consciousness, on reality television,” the Times said grimly.
“The campaign under Mr. Parscale is focused on pushing its product—Mr. Trump—by churning out targeted ads, aggressively testing the content and collecting data to further refine its messages,” the Times continued. “It is selling hats, shirts and other gear, a strategy that yields yet more data, along with cash and, of course, walking campaign billboards.”
In other words, it is doing what a campaign is supposed to do, only with President Trump as its candidate.
The Curse of ‘Civility’
“Herbie the Love Bug,” a 1963 VW Beetle / IMAGE: MotorCar Collector
By contrast, Democrats—longtime giants in fundraising through corporate mega-donors, who routinely trumpeted their warchest advantages during the 2018 election—were cast by the Times as a scrappy underdogs in the 2020 race.
Trump “is like a supercar racing a little Volkswagen Bug,” said Laura Edelson, a political advertising researcher at New York University.
The Times bemoaned the Democrats’ insistence on taking the ‘high road‘ with innocuous ads geared toward courting crossover votes instead of launching more negative attacks against the president that may risk offending prospective backers.
“It’s true that anodyne messaging doesn’t turn anyone off,” said left-wing operative Elizabeth Spiers of the firm Insurrection. “But it doesn’t turn them on either.”
She said the Left must somehow push through its overwhelming desire to heal the country and bring consensus, since that was not a winning strategy.
Republicans are “not messaging around unity and civility, because those things don’t mobilize people,” Spiers said. “… [N]obody takes time off work, gets in their car and drives to the polls to vote specifically for that.”
Windowless Rooms
Charles Schumer & Nancy Pelosi/IMAGE: YouTube
The Democrats’ claims that they are resisting negative campaigning fly counter to some reports.
Would-be candidates have complained that powerful party leaders, such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-NY, are shunning primary candidates who want to engage voters in favor of those who will sit in a “windowless room” making calls to donors.
Schumer reportedly said he plans to spend 90 percent of the money raised on negative ads to attack vulnerable GOP candidates in states such as Iowa, North Carolina and Maine.
Of course, the Left is still quick to tout its fundraising advantages when it can. A recent article from The Hill noted that a Democratic challenger to incumbent Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, had slightly out-raised her for the third quarter.
“It’s clear that the momentum and energy is on our side to flip this Senate seat,” said Democratic candidate Theresa Greenfield, boasting of a fundraising operation that was largely online driven.
Greenfield raised a little more than $100,000 more than Ernst for the quarter, though neither had been raking in the big bucks.
“I’m so proud of what our grassroots campaign has already been able to accomplish to lay the groundwork to win this race next year,” she said.
‘He worked until his last breath because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who since January had served as chair of the House Oversight Committee, was so dedicated to his efforts that he spent his final hours issuing subpoenas against President Donald Trump from his deathbed.
Aides said that Cummings remained active after being admitted to Baltimore‘s Johns Hopkins Hospital.
According to New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, he led a conference call from the hospital less than a week before his death early Thursday.
Cummings was active until the end, an aide tells me. He signed subpoenas from his hospital bed and as recently as Friday helped lead a Democratic caucus conference call. https://t.co/2qkxi4Em7O
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a fellow Maryland Democrat, previously had said Cummings spoke with Democrats on Sunday and had encouraged them to keep up the “heavy lifting.”
Even so, Cummings, who had garnered complaints from Republican colleagues over the staggering number of (largely ignored) congressional oversight subpoenas he had issued in his Trump investigations, continued signing them until the very end.
Despite unparalleled transparency during the Mueller investigation on Russian collusion and House Democrats’ latest Ukraine investigation, the Trump administration has refused to cooperate with many of the subpoenas, arguing that they do not serve a legislative purpose as mandated.
Elijah Cummings / IMAGE: The Guardian via Youtube
While a legitimate impeachment investigation would provide Congress with the grounds to file obstruction charges for that refusal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected all prior precedent by refusing to put the impeachment probe to a formal vote.
Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton, also notably disregarded congressional subpoenas when she deleted some 30,000 emails from a private server and colluded with the FBI to destroy additional evidence during an ongoing congressional investigation.
Cummings also had his share of ethical scandals, including accusations of tax fraud. He and his wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, were both under fire after a recent IRS complaint that she had mixed the funds for a nonprofit she oversaw with those of a similarly named for-profit business.
The complaint also charged that one of the organization’s biggest donors was Johnson & Johnson, which happened to fall under the oversight purview of the late congressman, and that there appeared to be a quid-pro-quo arrangement with the pharmaceutical powerhouse.
Rockeymoore Cummings—who also heads the Maryland Democratic Party—issued a formal statement on Twitter that praised her husband’s undying dedication to the task of impeaching Trump.
Statement regarding the passing of @RepCummings : “He worked until his last breath because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity… I loved him deeply and will miss him dearly.” — @MayaRockeymoorepic.twitter.com/OLXVdHydoO
‘The then-vice president didn’t have the ‘bandwidth’ to deal with the issue involving his son as his other son, Beau, was battling cancer…’
George Kent / IMAGE: News Update Live via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Tuesday’s top-secret congressional testimony from George Kent, an assistant deputy secretary of State, revealed just why House Democrats are so keen to hide their impeachment investigation behind closed doors—it may backfire otherwise.
Leaking Democrats spun Kent’s testimony to the media as being damaging to Trump, but on Friday The Washington Post reported that the career diplomat had raised alarms about former Vice President Joe Biden‘s corrupt Ukraine activities—only to be shut down by Biden’s office.
“Kent said he had concerns that Ukrainian officials would view Hunter Biden as a conduit for currying influence with his father,” the Post reported, citing anonymous sources who were present. “But when Kent raised the issue with Biden’s office, he was told the then-vice president didn’t have the ‘bandwidth’ to deal with the issue involving his son as his other son, Beau, was battling cancer.”
The Post cautioned that the impeachment probe against Trump, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to formally launch with a full House vote, “also threatens to keep alive questions about the former vice president’s handling of his son’s foreign work at a precarious moment for his 2020 presidential campaign.”
It was revealed this week also that the Democrats may hope to maintain their secrecy even more by scheduling a vote to impeach Trump over the Thanksgiving holiday, when it may garner the least public attention, and likely pushing a Senate trial into the Christmas holiday season.
Joe Biden / IMAGE: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert via Youtube
Many in the liberal media continue to lay cover for the Bidens, claiming—contrary to evidence—that the accusations of impropriety are “unfounded” as the Post article maintained.
Even so, it was forced to concede that not all of the accusations were meritless simply because the Left decreed them to be.
The article quickly pivoted to a former senior aide of Biden’s, giving him the opportunity to downplay the alarming revelation from Kent.
“I don’t understand what the optics thing means other than someone thinking it looked bad in a political way,” the aide said. “Did it have any effect on U.S. policies, either on what we were doing or what the Ukrainians were doing? … In the aggregate it didn’t have any discernible effect.”
Biden, who has been called out for embellishing and fabricating stories while on the campaign trail, posited a similar argument, claiming they were harmless white lies. By contrast, he said, Trump was guilty of a much worse form of corruption by doing the same thing—but to Democrats.
HOYER: Cummings told House Dems on Sunday they ‘should continue’ with the ‘heavy lifting’…
Rashida Tlaib / IMAGE: Time via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In a Twitter tribute to the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., President Donald Trump observed that “[h]is work and voice on so many fronts will be very hard, if not impossible, to replace!”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a fellow Maryland Democrat, said Thursday that despite his failing health, Cummings had been on a telephone call with Democrats last Sunday and encouraged them to “continue [with the] heavy lifting.”
While Cummings’s district surrounding the northeastern sector of Baltimore likely remains safely blue, speculation now turns to how Democrats will compensate for the loss of one of Trump’s most fervent adversaries, as well as being among the most powerful and influential African–Americans in Congress.
In addition to filling Cummings’s open House seat, also on the line is the chairmanship of the House Oversight Committee—one of six that has led the way in the ongoing impeachment investigations of Trump—where several of the ambitious freshman congresswomen on the notorious ‘Squad‘ hold spots.
MD-07 Seat
Maryland law dictates that Republican Gov. Larry Hogan must issue a proclamation within the next 10 days about holding a special election in Maryland‘s 7th Congressional District, the Baltimore Sun reported.
A primary must follow within 65 days, and a general election within 65 days of that.
“The whole process could be five months,” Jared DeMarinis, the state elections board’s director of candidacy and campaign finance, told the Sun. “And that’s moving it along.”
Included on the likely shortlist to fill the open seat is Cummings’s widow, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, who currently chairs the Maryland Democratic Party and previously considered a run for governor.
Maya Rockeymoore Cummings / IMAGE: Center for Global Policy Solutions. via Youtube
However, Rockeymoore Cummings—whose name previously surfaced in 2017 to fill her husband’s seat as he mulled a possible Senate run—is in the midst of an ethics scandal.
According to a complaint from the National Legal and Policy Center, she allegedly misused funds for a nonprofit by funneling them into a similarly named for-profit operation.
Another possible contender is Ben Jealous, former chairman of the NAACP, who ultimately ran unsuccessfully as the Democrat last year opposing the incumbent Hogan.
Whoever emerges the victor will have no time to rest as their re-election battle will be right around the corner in the November election.
Oversight Committee Chair
Cummings’s passing puts the current makeup of the House at 234 Democrats and 197 Republicans and is likely to do little to impede the impeachment push.
Yet, it may cast further uncertainty on the time-frame and political calculus of the hastily launched probe with the 2020 election season in full swing.
Carolyn Maloney / IMAGE: Nancy Pelosi via Youtube
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, a veteran of the House for more than a quarter-century, will serve as acting chair of the Oversight Committee, the Sun reported, citing an anonymous senior Democratic leadership aide.
But several other prominent Democrats also hold seats on the committee, including three members of the ‘Squad’: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
While all could lend their name-recognition clout to the leadership role—as well as their outspoken advocacy for impeachment, which would likely roil Trump to the extreme—the freshman congresswomen have done little to ingratiate themselves to Pelosi, frequently questioning the careful political stratagems endorsed by House leadership in favor of swift, radical action.
However her past scandal—resigning in disgrace from the DNC post after leaked emails revealed she had colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to secure the 2016 presidential nomination against Sen. Bernie Sanders—may have alienated her with some in the party’s progressive arm.
Fox News’s Chad Pergram offered an additional list of prospective names to fill the chairmanship based on their seniority on the committee.
Those to watch as next chair of Oversight Cmte: Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY),Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), William Lacy Clay (D-MO), Stephen Lynch (D-MA), Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA).
‘I got to see first hand the strength, passion and wisdom of this highly respected political leader…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump on Thursday paid a heartfelt tribute to his frequent congressional nemesis, the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, who died overnight at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore.
My warmest condolences to the family and many friends of Congressman Elijah Cummings. I got to see first hand the strength, passion and wisdom of this highly respected political leader. His work and voice on so many fronts will be very hard, if not impossible, to replace!
As chairman of the House Oversight Committee since January, Cummings had been one of the leading investigators into a broad swath of prospective scandals for which he hoped to impeach the president.
He was known for having issued frequent subpoenas to White House staff while attempting to pry into the Trump’s finances and tax records, but those were largely disregarded by the Trump administration, which maintained that they served no legislative purpose.
Trump prodded his political sparring partner in July to focus less on his political fishing expeditions and more on serving his Baltimore district, some of which had fallen into disrepair.
Last month, Democrats finally undertook the effort, launching a formal probe into a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Elijah Cummings / IMAGE: NBC News
But Cummings, who was said to have been facing an extended illness, never saw his efforts come into fruition.
Trump noted that his work would be “very hard, if not impossible, to replace.”
Other Republicans—including those who served with Cummings on the Oversight Committee, shared in the outpouring of condolences.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the committee’s ranking minority member, retweeted an official statement from the Oversight Committee Republicans’s Twitter account, saying that he showed an “unyielding passion and purpose” in his work.
‘His work and voice on so many fronts will be very hard, if not impossible, to replace!’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In a Twitter tribute to the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, his House colleague Rep. Adam Schiff called him the party’s “moral and ethical North Star.”
Elijah Cummings was the heart and soul of our caucus, a dignified leader with a voice that could move mountains.
He was our moral and ethical North Star. Now we will be guided by his powerful memory and incomparable legacy.
Despite his recent role as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, both Cummings and his wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, were deeply embroiled in ethical scandals of their own involving the blurring of lines between nonprofits, corporate lobbying and political influence.
Cummings death raises several questions as to who will succeed him, both in his safely Democratic Baltimore district and in his committee chairmanship—one of the three that was leading the way in the impeachment probe of President Donald Trump.
Some Democrats, such as former Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, noted the challenges of the timing while honoring Cummings’ legacy, reported the Baltimore Sun.
“When our nation can ill-afford to lose such a kind, principled leader one of my dearest friends and mentors has left us,” Schultz said in a statement.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., noted that it came “[a]t a time of chaos and division,” while suggesting, misleadingly, that Cummings rose above such things “as a man of principle, unity, dignity, and compassion” with an “insatiable thirst for justice was rooted in his core.”
Cummings himself called the impeachment efforts a “critical moment” that “people will be talking about 3-, 400, 500 years from now,” but was ultimately deprived of the opportunity to see his longtime efforts come into fruition.
I’m begging the American people to pay attention to what is going on. Because if you want to have a democracy intact for your children, and your children’s children, and generations yet unborn we’ve got to guard this moment…this is our watch. pic.twitter.com/ShTZwbQROP
Meanwhile, Trump, who had a public spat recently with Cummings over his “rat-infested” district, paid a heartfelt tribute to his adversary.
My warmest condolences to the family and many friends of Congressman Elijah Cummings. I got to see first hand the strength, passion and wisdom of this highly respected political leader. His work and voice on so many fronts will be very hard, if not impossible, to replace!
‘If Biden fades out, Buttigieg stands to take his place…’
Pete Buttigieg / IMAGE: CNN via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After Tuesday’s Democratic debates, it seems Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is no longer feeling the Left’s love.
The radical progressive, who is poised to become this election’s Bernie Sanders (as the actual Sanders faces health troubles and an inherent lack of charm) was cast aside by many media outlets in favor of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
“Buttigieg used forceful rhetoric during the debate to showcase his more moderate proposals,” said USA Today.
Across the board, from far-left outlets to the more conservative Fox News and National Review, “Mayor Pete” found his way to the top of the list. Many ranked Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota—another so-called moderate—in second place.
The consensus, though, was that Buttigieg had the right combination of charisma, flyover-state appeal and fundraising prowess to “set himself on a collision course with Warren,” said The Hill.
It is something of an encore audition for Buttigieg, who rode his first wave of buzz from obscurity to a spot just below frontrunner status, where he has since polled neck-and-neck with heavyweights like Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.
However, as the primary pool’s top ‘moderate’ alternative, former Vice President Joe Biden, becomes increasingly immersed in the controversy surrounding his Ukraine dealings—for which House Democrats are now attempting another Pyrrhic impeachment crusade against President Donald Trump—Buttigieg seems the next best option to be elevated.
Vox said he had “emerged as the ‘marquee candidate of the centrist Democratic party.’ … If Biden fades out, Buttigieg stands to take his place.”
Much like Biden, who has pivoted to the far left during the campaign on several hot-button issues, including abortion, Buttigieg is, in reality, far from moderate.
More recently, in an LGBT town hall sponsored by CNN, Buttigieg, who is gay, was one of three candidates—including Warren—who supported eliminating disclosure requirements for people who test HIV positive.
Even so, it was a testament to how far toward socialism many of his opponents have veered that Buttigieg was able to masquerade as a centrist while attacking both flanks.
He lodged a direct hit on Warren in the debate, criticizing her for dodging questions on tax increases while drawing contrast with his own public-subsidized healthcare plan
“From beginning to end, Buttigieg was a dominant and commanding force,” said CNN. “Yes, some will say he was ‘mean.’ But debates—and primaries!—are about drawing contrasts, and that is what Buttigieg did. And did very well.”
The left-wing media mouthpiece also commended Buttigieg on a takedown of former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke‘s gun-control proposals while trumpeting his own military service as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer.
“I don’t need lessons from you in courage, political or personal,” said Buttigieg.
But many agreed it was his exchange with another “moderate,” Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard that most stood out.
Gabbard—still holding fast to the old, pre-Trump stance of blanket opposition to U.S. military intervention—lobbed an easy bankshot for Buttigieg to engage in a moment of impassioned—yet generic—grandstanding over the recent withdrawal of troops from Syria.
In a bizarre about-face, leftists who once fervently clamored for U.S. forces to leave the Middle East have criticized Trump for his abandonment of Kurdish mercenaries who were allied in the fight to liberate Syria from ISIS control.
Yet, the Navy veteran Buttigieg was able to trumpet his support for the military and still pander to the Trump-bashing that underlies every liberal policy position in the modern era.
“Respectfully Congresswoman, I think that is dead wrong,” he said. “The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence, it’s a consequence of a withdrawal and betrayal by this president of American allies and American values.”
‘Their actions literally fit their own definition of collusion…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A top GOP senator outlined what likely would be a crucial consideration if House Democrats were to send impeachment charges against President Donald Trump to the upper chamber: their own hypocrisy.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and also—as Senate president pro tempore—is fourth in line for the Oval Office behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
However, Grassley made clear in prepared floor remarks on Tuesday that he had no desire to move a notch or two closer to the presidency as Trump’s opponents investigate his July phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
In a follow-up to an April speech he made on the need for more consistent congressional oversight practices, Grassley tore into the many examples of Democrats attacking Trump for offenses that they, themselves, egregiously disregarded under their own administrations.
“Their actions literally fit their own definition of collusion,” said Grassley in regards to the use of a foreign agent with Kremlin ties—as well as the aid of corrupt Ukrainian political agents—to smear Trump with now debunked claims that his campaign worked with Russia.
In fact, Grassley outlined multiple counts of hypocrisy and double-standards Democrats exercised in the Russia collusion investigation alone, but that was only the tip of the iceberg.
He also called out Democrats’ inconsistent application of justice and oversight with their latest impeachment bid.
“We’ve heard a lot about whistleblowers in the past several weeks,” Grassley began.
“There’s been an outpouring of concern for whistleblowers ever since word came out that there was a whistleblower complaint that implicates the current administration,” he said. “A lot of those on the other side of the aisle expressing support for whistleblowers, to the best of my recollection, haven’t expressed the same level of concern for whistleblowers in the last administration.”
Grassley pointed out that he had acted in good faith advocating for strong whistleblower protections and even supporting early investigation efforts into Trump.
“I am an equal-opportunity overseer because I seek the facts irrespective of party and no matter where they lead,” he said. “I don’t think many of the Democrats today can say the same”
By contrast, House Democrats have frozen Republicans out of their impeachment investigation by refusing to vote on it, and they have conducted inquiries shrouded in the secrecy of closed-door hearings.
Grassley also pointed to past examples of Democrats—including former President Bill Clinton—explicitly seeking quid pro quo arrangements for political benefit while pointing to the fact that no such requests were evident in the call transcript and whistleblower complaint that Trump had permitted release of.
Grassley called Trump’s consent to release the classified files—knowing that Democrats would use them for blatantly partisan purposes—as “extraordinary acts of transparency.”
That, too, stood in contrast to his political opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, who deleted some 30,000 emails from a private server after receiving a congressional subpoena, and then was granted immunity from the Obama FBI and Justice Department, who further promised to destroy other evidence after conducting their own analysis.
“All of this is clear evidence of alienation of federal records, a federal crime,” Grassley said.
Even Joe Biden, the former vice president and current presidential candidate whom Trump sought to investigate, was guilty of doing the exact same thing by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee if the prosecutor investing his son’s company wasn’t fired.
“The Democrats have argued that Trump has tried to get the government of Ukraine to look into this matter to benefit his political campaign,” Grassley said. “Yet, it doesn’t sound like there’s much concern from many on the other side of the aisle about what Biden claimed to have done.”
He criticized the Left’s divisive political maneuvering as a distraction from the business of legislating while they desperately sought to usurp power from a rightfully elected leader.
“Instead of coming together to work for the American people and pass trade deals and legislation that would lower drug costs for seniors, the Democrats choose to gin up false political controversies while ignoring the faults and involvement of their own political leaders,” Grassley said.
In the broader perspective, whether their disgraceful efforts succeeded or failed, he said, Democrats’ partisan wranglings will prove inconsequential.
“Get over yourselves,” Grassley said.
“All of us will be footnotes to footnotes in history,” he continued. “It’s the policies that we leave behind that will matter for future generations, not smear campaigns.”
