‘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.”
‘There’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full grown adult that my father in some way hasn’t had influence over…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, faltered in the polls for the Democratic presidential primary, embattled Hunter Biden gave a rare interview to ABC attempting to rein in the negative press on his Ukraine and China dealings.
Hunter said he should have had the foresight to recognize the potentially compromising situations and the possible damage to his father’s political aspirations. But he cast much of the blame onto President Donald Trump for hyping what he claimed was a false narrative.
“In retrospect, look, I think that it was poor judgment on my part … because I don’t believe now, when I look back on it—I know that there was—did nothing wrong at all,” he told ABC News. “However, was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is … a swamp in—in—in many ways? Yeah.”
Many see Joe Biden—a relative moderate when compared with the field of progressive radicals vying for the Democratic nomination—as the best shot at wooing undecided voters and diffident Trump supporters.
Meanwhile, the Bidens have found themselves front and center in House Democrats’ latest effort to impeach Trump.
While the president’s opponents accuse Trump of trying to coerce his Ukrainian counterpart into resuming an investigation of the Bidens’ shady dealings, his supporters have countered that Joe Biden previously committed the same offense by having the investigating prosecutor fired in the first place.
The liberal media have continued to lay cover for the Bidens—claiming, contrary to evidence—that the father and son did nothing wrong.
However, the failure to report on—and subsequently contextualize—Hunter Biden’s many scandals has resulted in a severe credibility strain amid the Left’s attempt to sell its case to the public that the latest impeachment probe is different from other failed efforts.
Pressed on whether his family name may have benefited him, Hunter conceded that his dad’s political ties had played a role in nearly every aspect of his life—including his business opportunities and a checkered background of legal troubles.
“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden, because my dad was vice president of the United States,” he said.
“There’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full grown adult that my father in some way hasn’t had influence over,” he added. “It does not serve either one of us.”
Crack in the Facade
When he accepted the position with Burisma in April 2014, Hunter, now (presumably) a recovering drug- and sex-addict, likely had his judgment clouded by substance abuse.
At the time, he was facing a dishonorable discharge from the Navy. He had been commissioned in May 2013 (with his father administering the oath at the White House) but tested positive for cocaine a month later.
Hunter claimed he had inadvertently smoked a cigarette laced with the illegal narcotic, but he later acknowledged in a New Yorker profile that at the nadir of his drug addiction, in 2016, he once was held at gunpoint while trying to buy crack off a homeless man.
He also was involved in at least one drug-related auto accident and was reportedly busted for cocaine possession by police, though charges were never filed.
Hunter and Joe Biden / IMAGE: Donald J Trump via Youtube
Additionally, in 2017, Hunter’s wife filed for divorce, citing not only his drug abuse but also his infidelity with prostitutes and his poor financial habits.
While still married to his first wife, he was romantically involved with—and later wed—the widow of his recently deceased brother, Beau.
Hunter stepped down from the Burisma board in April 2019, as the story about his questionable Ukraine dealings was beginning to break and his father was preparing to announce his candidacy for president.
In his strained mea culpa to ABC, the 49-year-old blamed others for attempting to damage his father’s run by casting a spotlight on his little-reported character deficiencies.
“I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake,” Hunter said of his Burisma scandal.
“So I take full responsibility for that,” he claimed, before quickly dialing it back. “Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever.”
A Proxy War for Influence
Despite the many lapses in his private life, Hunter insisted that he had not personally committed any ethical lapses while serving on the Burisma board.
Nor, he said, did he consult his father when accepting the position with the company—which had been under investigation for corruption since 2012.
“I joined a board, I served honorably. I did—I focused on corporate governance,” he said. “I didn’t have any discussions with my father before or after I joined the board as it related to it, other than that brief exchange that we had.”
Notwithstanding, Hunter’s time on the company’s board overlapped with a considerable amount of geopolitical tumult in Ukraine, a region where Russia and U.S. have long engaged in a proxy war for influence, especially in the energy sector.
Ukraine’s investigation of Burisma was reported to have centered around its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, who maintained close ties with the country’s deposed, Russia-backed former president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Yanukovych—who also had on his staff Paul Manafort, Trump’s future campaign chair—was exiled to Russia following a 2014 revolution that helped to install a regime more accommodating to Western influence and, in particular, the Obama–Biden administration.
Shortly thereafter, Russia annexed by military force the Crimean peninsula, a strategically important region for its energy pipelines to Europe, which it had long laid claim to.
Zlochevsky fled Ukraine in 2014 while continuing to face an investigation into embezzlement and corruption.
Manipulation and ‘False Pretexts’
Following the 2014 revolution, new Ukranian President Petro Poroshenko appointed Viktor Shokin as prosecutor–general.
Shokin continued to investigate Burisma, even after the company sought to curry U.S. favor by adding Hunter Biden to its board, along with Devin Archer, a former senior adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, who was Archer’s college roommate and became a business partner of his and Hunter Biden’s, emailed the State Department to flag the questionable conflict of interests surrounding the two board appointments.
“Apparently Devon and Hunter both joined the board of Burisma and a press release went out today,” Heinz wrote, according to the Washington Examiner, which obtained the message via an open-records request.
In March 2016, Joe Biden met with representatives of the Poroshenko administration and demanded that Shokin be fired or else he would personally oversee the withdrawal of a billion-dollar U.S. loan guarantee.
Shokin subsequently issued an affidavit, as reported by Hill columnist John Solomon, in which he affirmed that the Obama–Biden administration had sought to exert pressure and had “directly manipulated the political leadership of Ukraine under false pretexts.”
Shokin said directly in the affidavit that Biden’s interest in the Burisma investigation was a leading factor in his ouster.
“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma … and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” he stated.
“I assume Burisma, which was connected with natural gas extraction, had the support of the US Vice-President Joe Biden because his son was on the Board of Directors,” he added.
Shokin said he had refused to close the Burisma case despite requests from Poroshenko to do so.
“[I]t was precisely the state officials from the US administration of President Obama—and Joe Biden in particular—who were telling the heads of the Ukraine law-enforcement system how to investigate and whom to investigate,” he said. “… I was not complying with their will.”
Daddy’s Boy
In his ABC interview, Hunter Biden, dismissed the apparent quid-pro-quo arrangement his father was alleged to have made with Ukrainian leaders while reaffirming that he had no regrets about his work for Burisma.
“What I regret is not taking into account that there would be a Rudy Giuliani and a president of the United States that would be listening to this—this ridiculous conspiracy idea,” he said.
Hunter also downplayed a second business deal—estimated at $1.5 billion—with a Chinese company, BHR.
He had flown to China with his father aboard Air Force Two and met with top Chinese officials while the deal was being negotiated, leading Trump to decry the appearance of impropriety and call on China to investigate.
Wow! Hunter Biden is being forced to leave a Chinese Company. Now watch the Fake News wrap their greasy and very protective arms around him. Only softball questions of him please!
Hunter denied conducting business during and after the 13-hour flight.
“I’ve traveled everywhere with my dad,” Hunter told ABC. “And I went [to China in 2013] because my daughter was on the trip too.”
Nonetheless, on Sunday, he announced his resignation from that board—just as his father rolled out a new anti-corruption policy that would prevent such conflicts of interest from occurring in the future, should he be elected president.
Media sympathizers question whether Hunter Biden actually received any return on investment in his Chinese dealings. He, in turn, insisted that they the amount he made on the deal was irrelevant.
“Look, I’m a private citizen,” he told ABC. “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 or make or did or didn’t. But it’s all been reported.”
While he attacked Trump, calling him a “bully” Hunter claimed that the political attacks amounted to little more than “noise” for him.
“I’ve been through some sh—stuff in my life. I’ve been through some real, real stuff,” said Hunter.
“This isn’t real stuff. It isn’t. It truly isn’t,” he continued. “That part of it, that Barnum and Bailey—you know, say anything, do anything you want, you know, I mean, like, you know, Donald Prince Humperdinck—Trump Jr. is not somebody that I really care about.”
Mark Zuckerberg / IMAGE: Guardian News via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Democrats seethed and launched a hashtag campaign to #DeleteFacebook after the social-media giant‘s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, sought to reach out to long aggrieved right-wing influencers.
Politico reported on Monday that over the past several months the mega-billionaire has been flying conservative journalists, pundits and lawmakers to his Silicon Valley home for off-the-record dinners to discuss potential partnerships.
“The discussion in Silicon Valley is that Zuckerberg is very concerned about the Justice Department, under Bill Barr, bringing an enforcement action to break up the company,” a cybersecurity researcher and former government official told Politico. “So the fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.”
Ironically, Zuckerberg reportedly expressed his concerns recently that radical progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the leading Democratic primary candidates, would also pursue antitrust policies that were hostile to Facebook.
“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies,” Zuckerberg said during a July Q&A with Facebook employees that was leaked to media. “… I mean, if she gets elected president then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge.”
Warren was one of several high-profile Democrats last week who criticized Facebook for being one of several major media platforms that refused to pull an ad from President Donald Trump targeting fellow candidate Joe Biden.
The Biden campaign had demanded that the ad, attacking the former vice president on allegations of his corrupt Ukraine dealings, be pulled. While some major left-wing news operations, such as CNN, proudly acquiesced, many others—including Fox and MSNBC—refused.
Facebook changed their ads policy to allow politicians to run ads with known lies—explicitly turning the platform into a disinformation-for-profit machine. This week, we decided to see just how far it goes.
A Facebook spokesperson dismissed the complaints from the Left while coyly suggesting—contrary to evidence—that the company has always maintained a bipartisan approach.
“For years, Mark Zuckerberg has met with elected officials and thought leaders all across the political spectrum,” said the spokesperson.
However, a Trump administration official confirmed that the outreach was part of a deliberate effort to counteract the systemic political bias against conservative speech, including bans of several right-wing pundits and questionable fact-checking practices.
“[T]he White House is looking for meaningful steps from Facebook on a number of fronts,” the official told Politico, among them: “competition, free speech for everybody including conservatives, and privacy.”
Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg/IMAGE: WH.gov via Youtube
Although Zuckerberg has paid lip-service to such things in the past, “Nominal outreach won’t cut it,” the official said.
Other prominent conservatives present during the series of meetings included CNN commentator Mary Katherine Hamm, Town Hall editor Guy Benson, Washington Examiner columnist Byron York, Media Research Center head Brent Bozell and columnist/radio host Ben Shapiro.
A source familiar with the dinner talks said they were productive and that Zuckerberg seemed sincere about wanting to address concerns.
“I’ve always thought that he wanted to make things right by conservatives,” said the source.
“I think he’s been genuine in hoping that might happen,” the source continued. “Sometimes I think the headwinds are so strong in Palo Alto that I don’t think even he can succeed.”
Leftist critics, meanwhile, vented their spleen while pointing to previous overtures, including an audit conducted earlier this year by former Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.
“Zuckerberg’s efforts to bend over backwards to please Republicans frothing over conspiracy theories that Facebook systematically silences conservative voices aren’t exactly new,” whined Gizmodo. “The company’s half-hearted efforts to fight rampant disinformation has reportedly long been plagued by fears of right-wing backlash.”
Newsweek used negative reaction on Twitter to attack the dialogue, noting that the #DeleteFacebook hashtag was trending.
I stopped actively posting on @Facebook in 2016 after it was revealed that it helped elect the orange fecal smear. Now #DeleteFacebook seems like the best course of action. Yes, I’m still on IG but I feel it does less to push the trump agenda. Less older white supremacists. 👌🏻 https://t.co/D5jOTqjyAQ
‘I noticed I was in a very unique position in space and time to just do something to protect the republic…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Conservative undercover investigative outfit Project Veritas exposed far-left CNN President Jeff Zucker in the first of a series of reports that it promised would be the biggest of 2019.
The report catches CNN officials like media coordinator Nick Neville admitting on camera what was long suspected: that Zucker “has a personal vendetta against Trump.”
Among the disclosures are Zucker appearing to direct the network’s staff to push a one-sided angle on impeachment rather than providing a balanced narrative.
In a preview of the new series, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said the revelations on one of the Left’s favorite mouthpieces would eclipse even its shocking Google exposé earlier this year.
The Google report was raised in congressional hearings on internet security and helped inspire President Donald Trump to organize a social media summit in July.
“A major aspect of this story is the heroic actions of an insider,” O’Keefe said of the new investigation.
Cary Poarch, a satellite upload technician with CNN’s Washington DC Bureau, secretly recorded the 9 a.m. rundown meetings directly overseen by Zucker.
“Its not politics that motivates me—it’s basically me wanting the news to be what they used to be: news, and not infotainment or a game show or chasing the ratings,” said Poarch, who began working at the network two years ago and considered it his “dream job” at the time.
“CNN purports it to be facts first, and that’s clearly not the case,” he added.
The Project Veritas report blends Poarch’s recordings with additional hidden-camera work conducted by the activist watchdog group.
Ironically, Zucker attacks rival network Fox News, accusing it of a conservative tilt, while demonstrating little self-awareness of his own network’s propagandist tendencies.
“The fake conspiracy nonsense that Fox has spread for years is now deeply embedded in American society,” Zucker complains, “… and, frankly, that is beyond destructive for America.”
Far surpassing run-of-the mill media bias, CNN has been suspected of actively colluding with deep-state government officials to leak sensitive and classified information that would damage Trump.
It hired several of the Obama administration’s top intelligence leaders—including former Director of National Security James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe—despite their already facing official criminal investigations into leaking information to left-wing media outlets.
Jeff Zucker/IMAGE: YouTube
While Zucker’s personal animus toward the U.S. president may steer CNN’s policies, he is not alone in it, said Poarch.
The culture within the network itself includes a “strong groupthink that permeated through the halls,” he said.
The meetings Poarch recorded also included Virginia Moseley, CNN’s senior vice president of newsgathering, and David Chalian, the network’s political director. They went out to executive producers and news staffers across the country.
Even when presented with alternative left-wing storylines, such as an MSNBC-sponsored forum on gun control, Zucker called on the network to “just stay focused on impeachment.”
Poarch said many of his colleagues shared his reservations about the over-the-top liberal agenda being promoted but “they just felt trapped that they couldn’t say it.”
Several of the network’s loyal footsoldiers, like CNN floor director Hiram Gonzalez, admitted that CNN’s effort to sensationalize the 2016 race by promoting Trump had helped vault him into the spotlight.
“Between you and I, we created this monster, and now we’re eating him full plate every single day,” said Gonzalez.
Another staffer, CNN media coordinator Christian Sierra, noted the network’s obvious slant—which it perplexingly refuses to acknowledge, claiming instead to be impartial and unbiased.
“Our Democratic interviews are like softballs compared to the Republicans,” he said. “… [E]very time we ask questions to Republicans, like, it’s always a little tougher.”
Poarch said he was prepared for the potential fallout against him from his (soon to be former) colleagues and had wrestled long and hard over whether to come forward as a public whistleblower.
“This is exposing probably the biggest media conglomerate in the world,” he said. “I lose sleep over it, but this is—I decided to wear the camera because I didn’t see any other option, because I noticed I was in a very unique position in space and time to just do something to protect the republic.”
He called on others to take up the mantle and follow in his footsteps by going public with their accounts of the Left’s corrupt, dishonest and anti-democratic practices.
“My goal with this, aside from getting CNN to return to its old greatness, is to inspire literally the dozens of people I’ve had this same conversation with—not only at CNN, but at different outlets,” Poarch said.
Calling Poarch “one of the bravest people I’ve ever met,” O’Keefe also encouraged future whistleblowers to reach out by emailing [email protected].
‘If Trump gets away with his blanket noncompliance, the Constitution’s impeachment provision, as it concerns presidents, will be effectively repealed…’
Will cast aside all of the arguments that invalidate House Democrats’ partisan impeachment probe against President Donald Trump.
Rather, the NeverTrumper‘s latest column sought to normalize the ongoing witch hunt, with little evidence, as a constitutionally supported check on the executive branch.
“If Trump gets away with his blanket noncompliance, the Constitution’s impeachment provision, as it concerns presidents, will be effectively repealed,” Will panicked, “and future presidential corruption will be largely immunized against punishment.”
Many have speculated that Will harbors a deep-seated personal grudge against Trump, or else that he is threatened by the president’s disruption of DC’s delicate ecosystem of back-scratching influence-peddlers.
Not only would Trump’s efforts to push back against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff—both California Democrats—be tantamount to shredding the U.S. Constitution, but Will warned it would exact a heavy toll on any GOP congressmen who followed their conscience by refusing to throw Trump under the bus.
“In 13 months all congressional Republicans who have not defended Congress … should be defeated,” Will said.
“If congressional Republicans continue their genuflections at Trump’s altar, the appropriate 2020 outcome will be a Republican thrashing so severe—losing the House, the Senate and the electoral votes of, say, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and even Texas—that even this party of slow-learning careerists might notice the hazards of tethering their careers to a downward-spiraling scofflaw,” he continued.
Democrats already have been targeting the four vulnerable, once solid-red states, where migration has led to alarming demographic shifts— entirely unrelated to Trump’s conduct.
Will’s column seemed to acknowledge that the only impeachable “offense” that had yet presented itself publicly was the president’s refusal to cooperate.
“This refusal, which is analogous to an invocation of the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, justifies an inference of guilt,” attacked Will, in an unusual twist on the concepts of jurisprudence and due process.
House Democrats thus far have conducted their latest Trump inquiry as a secret tribunal, while selectively cherry-picking snippets of evidence and testimony to leak in support of their claims.
Trump’s attorneys last week outlined the clear reasons for their refusal to support it—including the fact that the House never voted to move forward on an impeachment probe.
Barring a formalization of the impeachment process, under their general oversight duties, House committees must be able to demonstrate a legislative purpose in order for their subpoenas to have the weight of law behind them.
The House followed this process in both of the prior modern-era impeachment investigations, against former presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Like Trump, both were accused of obstructing the investigative efforts.
Despite the weight of ‘smoking gun’ evidence against Nixon and Clinton—the Watergate tapes and Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress, respectively—neither was removed from office. Nixon, a Republican, resigned before the House could vote to impeach; Clinton, a Democrat, was impeached but acquitted by a narrow, party-line vote in the Senate.
The latest probe—involving a so-called whistleblower’s complaint over Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—appears increasingly to have been orchestrated by Schiff in coordination with deep-state CIA staffers, who also likely maintained ties with former Vice President Joe Biden and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Nadler and Elijah Cummings / IMAGE: ABC News via Youtube
The probe was hastily implemented in September after the two-year Mueller investigation and a litany of other House fishing expeditions failed to gain any traction in the Left’s brazenly overt efforts to remove Trump from office, leaving them scrambling for a salient plan of attack with the 2020 election looming.
Some also have speculated that the ploy was intended to be a pre-emptive strike against two pending Justice Department investigations that will outline vast evidence of Democrat collusion centered around the 2016 election and the subsequent Mueller probe.
A lengthy report by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to be released this Friday, following other IG reports that found unethical—and in some cases, illegal—misconduct among the FBI’s top brass to undermine the president.
If their legal recourse against the White House fails, Will called on Democrats to use any means necessary to punish Trump and his Republican allies for refusing to bend to their demands.
“The canine loyalty of Senate Republicans will keep Trump in office. But until he complies with House committee subpoenas, the House must not limply hope federal judges will enforce their oversight powers,” Will said.
“Instead, the House should wield its fundamental power, that of the purse, to impose excruciating costs on executive branch noncompliance.”
Will did not elaborate on how the House might use its budgetary powers, although a government shutdown crisis like the one initiated last December could prove as costly to House Democrats as their GOP counterparts.
‘We submit that the Times should publicly answer for these failures in reporting on this pressing issue…’
Rudy Giuliani (screen shot: Fox News/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Both Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani answered setbacks in the unfolding Ukraine drama with counterpunches of their own this week.
The former New York mayor has been hot in pursuit of information surrounding the former vice president’s role in a corrupt quid-pro-quo scheme that involved Biden’s son Hunter, a board member with Ukraine’s Burisma energy company.
That investigation has now become central to the latest efforts by partisan Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach President Donald Trump.
While two Ukrainian associates who had met with Giuliani were arrested for alleged campaign finance violations, Giuliani pressed forward with a new bombshell revelation—based on evidence from a Ukrainian member of parliament—that Biden had been paid $900,000 in lobbying fees by Burisma.
“Biden, his son and his brother had a 30-year-long scam to make money, millions, selling his public office,” Giuliani told Fox News host Sean Hannity, according to the New York Post.
The documents Giuliani cited were from Ukrainian official Andriy Derkach, who said Hunter Biden’s consulting firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was transferred the substantial fee for “consultative services.”
Whistleblowing the Whistleblower?
If Giuliani’s allegations prove meaningful, they would represent Biden’s second attempt this week to conceal damaging conflicts of interest in the case.
Another revelation on Thursday was that the anonymous whistleblower—whose complaint over a phone call between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, triggered the House probe—had professional ties to Biden.
The Washington Examiner broke the story, based on the account of a retired CIA officer with inside knowledge of the agency where the anti-Trump informant reportedly worked.
“From everything we know about the whistleblower and his work in the executive branch then, there is absolutely no doubt he would have been working with Biden when he was vice president,” said the source.
Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi / IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube
Democrats have attempted to suppress leaks about the so-called whistleblower and keep much of the testimony in their investigations under tight seal.
That has included closed-door testimony from former Ukrainian envoy Kurt Volker and Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
While Atkinson refused to divulge details about the identity of the accuser to Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was revealed that he had changed whistleblower policies to accommodate the individual’s complaint.
Atkinson also facilitated the complaint process by allowing the whistleblower and his left-wing attorneys to coordinate their efforts with Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who is now leading the impeachment probe.
Schiff, after initially denying that he had advance knowledge of the whistleblower complaint, received a four-Pinocchio rating from The Washington Post when it came to light that he had supported the deep-state operation from the outset.
Biden has vigorously fought back against the coverage of his own scandalous conduct by taking a page from Trump’s own playbook—hounding the fake news for having the audacity to report on damaging details.
By and large, mainstream media journalists have fallen in line with Biden and his denials, repeatedly claiming there is “no evidence” of his misconduct in Ukraine but failing to provide the appropriate context on ethical breaches that Biden himself has admitted to.
The conservative investigative journalist has been at the forefront of reporting on Biden’s pay-to-play scandals in Ukraine and China. The March release of his Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends first brought the conspiracies to national attention.
In his Wednesday op-ed, Schweizer noted that Hunter Biden’s agreeing to serve on Burisma’s board for a monthly pittance of $50,000 was not, in and of itself, illegal—even though he was struggling with major drug and and sex addictions at the time and had no relevant experience apart from his family name.
Joe Biden / IMAGE: Late Show with Stephen Colbert
However, Schweizer criticized the elder Biden for engaging in “self dealing” by allowing the conflicts of interest to occur.
After a former prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, began investigating Burisma, Biden threatened to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee if the Ukrainian president did not fire Shokin.
In response to Schweizer’s piece, Biden’s campaign accused the Times of engaging in disinformation similar to the false stories propagated by Russian operatives on social media during the 2016 campaign, reported the Washington Examiner.
“Are you truly blind to what you got wrong in 2016, or are you deliberately continuing policies that distort reality for the sake of controversy and the clicks that accompany it?” Biden campaign spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield complained to the Times.
“We submit that the Times should publicly answer for these failures in reporting on this pressing issue fairly, accurately, and in a way that prioritized truth and judiciousness over sensationalism,” she continued, “as well as why, after the glaring mistakes of 2016, the Times has again given an underhanded hack the validation of its platform.”
The Times stood by the reporting as being “fair and accurate.”
‘There’s a civic duty to engage and do the right thing—but having an opinion on sovereign matters in other countries, it’s for those people to decide…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A billionaire investor and NFL franchise owner said U.S. sports figures should focus on criticizing their own country but not others.
Shad Khan—who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars, as well as a British soccer team—weighed in Thursday on the NBA’s caving to Chinese pressure not to condemn its violent suppression of Hong Kong protests.
“I think players, and every human being, has a right to speak what their opinion is,” Khan said at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit, according to Fox Business.
“There’s no issue as far as that goes, whether it’s NFL or anybody else,” he continued. “We are American citizens, we have a social, civic responsibility to be active in causes we believe in.”
However, he added, it was different when those in the U.S. were called to condemn global affairs.
“Do we have that same responsibility to opine on sovereign matters in other countries?,” he asked. “That’s the critical issue.”
Khan, who immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan at age 16, lived a rags-to-riches tale after founding the auto-manufacture franchise Flex-N-Gate and designing the first one-piece bumper. His estimated worth is more than $7 billion.
Still, the freedoms and opportunities he benefited from are not for everyone, Khan said.
“I want to have an opinion in America—there’s a civic duty to engage and do the right thing—but having an opinion on sovereign matters in other countries, it’s for those people to decide.”
He said he was previously pressed as a businessman with seven Flex-N-Gate plants in Spain to take a stance on clashes in the Catalan region (where four of the plants are located) over independence.
“I didn’t think, as an American, I should really be having an opinion on it, even though a lot of people wanted us to,” Khan said.
One thing that likely informed Khan’s current position was the fact that he also has Chinese business interests.
Undoubtedly, he preferred not to get sucked into the same boondoggle as those in the basketball league, where the backlash has taken a heavy toll on its developing market.
“I have a factory in China,” he said. “And there are thousands of other people who have factories and operations in China, and they do very well. But you have to respect the norms.”
The NFL has faced its own share of controversies on the domestic front in recent years over players asserting their right to kneel during the national anthem.
Many encouraged it to heed the NBA’s model by putting its business interests first and pressuring players to keep their political opinions private—or at least find an appropriate off-the-field forum for them.
After facing political and financial blowback from offended fans, the football league nominally sought to rein in the players’ on-field demonstrations but later backpedaled.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was criticized for statements that he would continue to force his players to comply with team policy to stand during the anthem.
Another team owner, the Miami Dolphins’ Stephen M. Ross, was met with boycotts of his businesses afteranthem-kneeling wide-receiver Kenny Stills condemned him on Twitter for hosting a fundraiser in support of President Donald Trump.
Stills was traded shortly thereafter to the Houston Texans.
‘None of us are perfect and we all have different issues that we have to get to…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) San Francisco‘s Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA due to Steph Curry’s point-scoring prowess, but head coach Steve Kerr proved with his massive deflection on the league’s China controversy that the strongest offense may be an aggressive defense.
“Part of having free speech is also electing not to speak,” Kerr said at a press conference Thursday, claiming he lacked the knowledge to address global matters like the human rights abuses in China’s suppression of Hong Kong protestors.
“I hope that you appreciate my right to not, uh, answer that question, because all it does is create a headline and a soundbyte, and I choose not to be a soundbyte,” he continued. “Probably too late for that anyway. I choose not to be that soundbyte.”
The NBA became embroiled in the controversy after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protestors’ struggle against their communist occupiers.
The former British colony, which was handed over to the Chinese in 1997 after more than 150 years of Western rule, is seeking greater autonomy over its legal and political affairs, but the long-simmering protests have cascaded amid China’s violent attempts to silence dissenters.
As the NBA’s market in China continues to grow, the league faced immediate backlash over the pro-Hong Kong message. Morey was compelled to delete his tweet, and the Rockets’ star player, James Harden, was dispatched to do damage control with an apology on Monday.
“We love China. We love playing there,” Harden said. “I know for both of us individually, we go there once or twice a year. They show us the most support and love. So we appreciate them as a fan base and we love everything they’re about and we appreciate the support that they give us individually and as an organization.”
Nonetheless, former Rockets star Yao Ming, head of the Chinese Basketball Association, announced that he was suspending ties with the popular franchise, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver treaded lightly on the matter to avoid further economic fallout.
Other NBA figures, like Kerr, have been uncharacteristically mute over China, despite their zeal to condemn U.S. policies with loaded language, often painting them as human-rights atrocities.
The Warriors’ preachy play-caller hasn’t shied away from espousing views on hot-button political issues like Black Lives Matter and extreme gun control.
Kerr’s father, Malcolm, a prominent Middle Eastern scholar in Beirut, was murdered by Islamic jihadists in 1984 during the Lebanese Civil War.
“I know what it feels like to have a family member ended by a bullet,” Kerr said at Thursday’s press conference.
But when pressed on the discrepancies between the NBA’s business interests and China’s human-rights record, he quickly pivoted back into safer territory.
“It has not come up in terms of people asking me about it, people discussing it—no,” he said. “Nor has our record of human rights abuses come up either—you know, things that our country needs to look at and resolve. That hasn’t come up either, so none of us are perfect and we all have different issues that we have to get to.”
After seamlessly executing his China evasion and deflection to U.S. criticism, Kerr went for broke with a cross-court buzzer-beater, insisting that even though he had the inalienable right to use his position to spout his anti-U.S. opinions, coaches on the international stage were better off sticking to sports.
“Saying that is my right as an American—doesn’t mean that I hate my country—it means I want to address things, right?” Kerr said.
“But people in China didn’t ask me about uh, you know, people owning AR-15s and mowing each other down in a mall,” he added. “I wasn’t asked that question.”
Firearms are strictly regulated by the Chinese government, and penalties for private gun-ownership violations can result in seven years’ imprisonment.
Video earlier this month of Chinese police opening fire on an 18-year-old student protestor at close range added fuel to the recent outrage in Hong Kong. Chinese officials claimed it was self defense.
Kerr suggested that expecting him to understand all the nuances of the Chinese government’s response and other complicated global issues was simply beyond his pay grade.
“We can play this game all we want and go all over the map and, you know, there’s this issue and that issue,” he said. “You know, the world is a complex place, and there’s more gray than black and white.”
‘I enjoyed a very good relationship with Jim Clapper, we got along fabulously…’
James Clapper (screen shot: The View/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Investigative journalists on Wednesday linked the attorney representing one—and possibly two—anonymous, partisan whistleblowers to disgraced former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
The Federalist reported that Andrew Bakaj, an attorney representing the so-called whistleblowers, was assisted by Charles McCullough, who previously held the role of inspector general of the intelligence community (ICIG) and reported directly to Clapper.
“I enjoyed a very good relationship with Jim Clapper, we got along fabulously,” McCullough told a DC news channel in December.
McCullough, now an attorney with Compass Rose Legal Group, was the chief auditor and ombudsman for the Obama administration’s vast network of spy agencies at the time when they became embroiled in several corruption scandals of their own.
Increasingly, in ethically dubious matters such as the commissioning of the notorious Steele Dossier and in the attempts to smear Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, partisan operatives acting as attorneys have conspired with powerful left-wing clients to wage political warfare under the auspices of privileged counsel.
The reporting from The Federalist would seem to confirm that some of the same deep-state players involved in the earlier Russia collusion hoax are behind the new ‘whistleblower’ complaint that President Donald Trump sought an improper quid-pro-quo arrangement with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a July phone call.
McCullough said he had initially assisted with the whistleblower complaint but had now separated himself from the process.
“I am not part of the whistleblower legal team,” he told The Federalist. “I assisted Andrew with process issues at the very beginning, and then withdrew.”
Whatever conflicts of interest he may have perceived, however, did not extend to fellow members of his law firm—including Bakaj, a former staffer for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, as well as Hillary Clinton during her time as a New York senator.
The anonymous whistleblower who initiated the complaint is also said to have had professional ties to one of Trump’s current opponents running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, noted Washington Examiner columnist Byron York.
It is widely believed that Democrats’ latest impeachment efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives reflect something of a pre-emptive strike to discredit the White House and Justice Department in anticipation of the soon-to-be-released report from the investigation being led by special prosecutor John Durham.
Clapper—himself likely under investigation by the Justice Department for his role in the Russia hoax—most recently garnered headlines for trying to pin the blame onto his former boss, then-President Barack Obama.
Now a CNN national security analyst, Clapper previously was known to have lied to Congress regarding mass surveillance and data collection by intelligence agencies—which only came to light, ironically, due to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures to The Guardian.
Yet, Clapper also played a large role in crafting the whistleblower protection policies that are now being weaponized for use against the Left’s political adversaries.
Current ICIG Michael Atkinson, meanwhile, who succeeded McCullough in the role, has come under fire for modifying those whistleblower policies to allow complaints involving secondhand information to be reported to Congress.
Atkinson reached out directly to House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., to inform him of the complaint prior to its public release, but he has continued to with withhold information about the whistleblower from GOP leaders in the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Atkinson’s judgement and allegiances also came under scrutiny due to the fact that he had dismissed calls to investigate a suspicious tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton.
At the time, Lynch was overseeing the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling and deletion of State Department emails that were stored on a private server.
