At this writing (late Sunday night), it’s the calm before the storm. The Inspector General’s report about FISA abuse by the FBI is scheduled for a Monday release. And after spending the weekend in “dress rehearsals” (I am not kidding), the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are moving forward with more impeachment hearings on Monday. According to THE NEW YORK TIMES, they had two "lengthy prep sessions" with Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Tribe, whom you might recall said in December 2016 that Trump’s impeachment “should begin on Inauguration Day,” based on his reading of the Emoluments Clause. Five months into Trump’s adminstration, Tribe called him a “danger to our system of government.” Now there’s an objective voice.
So you can imagine what we’re in for this week. (Remember, we watch the hearings so you don’t have to!) Monday’s hearing will happen even though Democrats did a massive weekend “document dump” --- so many thousands of records that not only the Republicans but even the Democrats will have no way to read through them beforehand.
According to ranking member Doug Collins of Georgia, whose request for a stay was refused, “...they’re going to have scripted questions to a bunch of high-priced consultants that they brought in to present their reports” when, “we can read the reports.” Talking with Maria Bartiromo on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES, he said Democrats should be “ashamed” for presenting this hearing as informative and factual when it’s really an attempt to adjust public opinion. He also complained that Democratic leaders Pelosi and Schiff are using the Judiciary Committee as a “puppet” to do their bidding.
Well, what else are they gonna do when they have no actual evidence to present, just lies and hearsay?
But the media are happy about the continuing hoopla, because it will help them take the focus off something extremely serious that Adam Schiff did: not only go after phone records of President Trump’s personal attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow; Congressman Devin Nunes of California, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee; investigative journalist John Solomon and others, but also release them in his impeachment report. Talk about “abuse of power” --- in trying to tar President Trump with that accusation, he has shown himself to be guilty of it.
You’d think that with the invasion of Solomon’s privacy, other journalists would be incensed. But most of them don’t consider Solomon to be one of their own. In one sense, I agree with them: they’re not even close to being in his league, as he does the job they should be doing but don’t. That has certainly placed him not just on Schiff’s political “Schiff list” but on theirs, too. We’ve been saying for a long time that Solomon is a target because he’s been sniffing around too close to the smelliest parts of the swamp. They’re out to take him down, just as they’ve been working to discredit Attorney General Barr ever since he said he believed spying did occur.
Wonder how Trump’s adversaries would like it if a Republican Congress went after THEM and got THEIR phone records. As Jeff Crouere in the CANADA FREE PRESS has noted, “These records should never have been released to Schiff or any politician and should never have been included in his impeachment report.”
Can you believe it? It takes a New Orleans reporter writing for a Canadian publication to chastise NYC and DC “journalists” for not being more upset about governmental abuse of power. That says a lot.
Apparently, even though it was highly unethical, it was technically legal for Schiff to get these records. There’s a loophole in privacy law called “the third-party doctrine,” which, according to Sen. Rand Paul, says, “Your records are not your records if they are held by a third party –- like a phone company, an internet service provider, a credit card company, or a physician.” (In this case, the phone company, stunningly, chose to be Schiff’s accomplice when it could have challenged him.) But Schiff went way beyond obtaining the records: he used information from them (which Devin Nunes says is inaccurate; in fact, Nunes is suing) in his committee’s report and drew all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from them. And in publicizing Giuliani’s and Sekulow’s records, he certainly violated Trump’s attorney-client privilege.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/devin-nunes-adam-schiff-phone-records-impeachment-fantasy-land
Hey, if you want more of this kind of abuse going on in our society, just elect more Democrats to office, because it’s in their very nature. Remember Hillary in the White House, with Craig Livingstone and the cache of raw FBI files? What we’ve seen to this point is only the beginning if the “machine” takes complete power once again.
Kim Strassel of the WALL STREET JOURNAL was right when she said Schiff’s action “trampled law and responsibility...it was a disgraceful breach of ethical and legal propriety.” (That article is behind a paywall, but much of it is excerpted here):
Of course, that’s nothing new for Schiff, who apparently sees such behavior as part of his job description. He does more of that before 9AM than most people do all day.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/hold-the-phone-call-records-released-by-adam-schiff
Wow, and here’s what we WON’T be seeing in the impeachment hearings: any Republican witnesses. Yes, it turns out that Jerrold Nadler’s kangaroo court has rejected them all as “irrelevant.” For example, he says Adam Schiff is an irrelevant witness because “he didn’t witness anything.” Question: since when did any of the Democrats’ witnesses actually witness anything? Schiff should testify because he and/or his staff were actively involved with the person making allegations against Trump. Nadler spoke on CNN about the issue, and listening to him, it’s hard to believe this is actually happening in America.
Finally, if at this point we’re still waiting for the release of the IG report, Joe diGenova has a worthwhile 7-minute video that he made in anticipation of it. Good use of time...
Exclusive: Everything You Need To Know About The IG Report, According To Joe DiGenova
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