Well, it’s now public. The House Intelligence Committee released their impeachment report on Donald Trump and his July phone call with the Ukrainians, where the president supposedly threatened to withhold military aid unless a corruption probe was opened into Hunter Biden’s board position at Burisma, an energy company. Hunter has zero experience in this sector but was being paid $50,000/month allegedly being there selling access to then-top-level Obama officials. You see Hunter got this gig when daddy Biden was VP and leading efforts to root out corruption in the country.
All we know is that the phone call took place. This quid pro quo allegation is shoddier than Russian collusion, but House Democrats needed to go on this because the election is right around the corner and they promised their base they would impeach Trump. So, here have a 300-page report detailing the horrid and impeachable offense of Trump…making a phone call. It really doesn’t get more pathetic than this, especially after the so-called witnesses Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the committee chair, dragged before his kangaroo court. There literally was no smoking gun that was unearthed. It was just career bureaucrats who disagreed with Trump on Ukraine and decided to join the Democrats’ hyper-partisan witch-hunt to oust him. The one who listened in on the call, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, eventually admitted that the president could temporarily withhold aid to a nation. Nothing illegal occurred. Maybe Trump was a little inappropriate—fine. That’s not an impeachable offense. Schiff’s report is garbage. Whatever Democrats say about this whole affair is trash because this has been their wet dream since Trump’s inauguration.
To make things even nastier, it appears that Schiff ordered secret subpoenas of phone records of his political opponents, specifically ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA). Nunes and the Republicans on the committee were aggressive in pushing back against Schiff’s show trial. It looks like the chairman got his petty revenge, releasing the calls in the report though nothing about its contents. Schiff was digging up dirt on his opponents, which supposedly is why Trump needs to be removed from office. I guess that the circus act now has expanded towards Republicans in Congress because the Trump Derangement tantrum hasn’t subsided. It’s also a reminder to Republicans that they need to be brutal and merciless against Democrats next year. If that means ending friendships, then so be it. We’re at war. The Wall Street Journal editorial board raked Schiff over the coals over this revelation:
Recommended
1) Still waiting for my fellow members of the media to express their deep outrage and alarm that Intelligence Chair Schiff snooped thru and published phone records of member of the free press. The silence is deafening.
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) December 4, 2019
Adam Schiff’s 300-page House Intelligence impeachment report doesn’t include much new about Mr. Trump’s Ukrainian interventions. But it does disclose details of telephone calls between ranking Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes, Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, reporter John Solomon, former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, the White House, and others. The details are “metadata” about the numbers and length of the calls, not the content.
The impeachment press is playing this as if the calls are a new part of the scandal, but the real outrage here is Mr. Schiff’s snooping on political opponents. The Democrat’s motive appears to be an attempt to portray Mr. Nunes, a presidential defender and Mr. Schiff’s leading antagonist in Congress, as part of a conspiracy to commit impeachable offenses.
“It is, I think, deeply concerning, that at a time when the President of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” Mr. Schiff told the press on Tuesday. Complicit in what? Doing his job of Congressional oversight? Talking to Mr. Trump’s lawyer to get a complete view of the Ukrainian tale? Apparently Mr. Schiff now wants to impeach Members of Congress too.
This is unprecedented and looks like an abuse of government surveillance authority for partisan gain. Democrats were caught using the Steele dossier to coax the FBI into snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign. Now we have elected members of Congress using secret subpoenas to obtain, and then release to the public, the call records of political opponents.
Our sources says Mr. Schiff issued a subpoena in September to AT&T, demanding call logs for five numbers—including Mr. Giuliani’s. Subsequent subpoenas to AT&T and Verizon demanded more details. Republicans were told of the subpoenas, yet under rules of committee secrecy couldn’t raise public objections.
[…]
Mr. Schiff’s metadata disclosures hardly bear on his impeachment case. Mr. Giuliani had broadcast to the world that he wanted Ukraine to investigate Hunter and Joe Biden, but he is also Mr. Trump’s personal attorney. Does Mr. Schiff have a legal opinion saying he could ignore attorney-client privilege? Mr. Schiff published a select log of Mr. Giuliani’s calls, but he presumably has a record of everyone Mr. Giuliani spoke to for months. Imagine the political outrage if Republicans had snooped on Bill Clinton’s attorneys.
Mr. Schiff’s accusations against Mr. Nunes are even more suspect. The Democrat doesn’t know the content of Mr. Nunes’s conversations, and the Republican says he believes his spring talks with Mr. Giuliani related to the Mueller report. Mr. Nunes can speak to whomever he likes, and Mr. Schiff has no authority to investigate fellow Members.
What a sniffling little baby, but this isn’t shocking. Remember how we got here. This so-called whistleblower filed the complaint that set this thing into motion. This person is a reported CIA agent, a registered Democrat, and had worked with a 2020 candidate. Oh, and contact was made with Schiff’s staff prior to filing the formal complaint; Schiff probably knows this person and prepared to weaponize its contents to push the Trump impeachment scheme even further. Talk about collusion. Talk about the anti-Trump deep state. Talk about Adam Schiff utilizing and carving out his own small slice of a secret police state on Capitol Hill.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member