quote:

Originally posted by Jimbo Jones:
Vindman probably watched M*A*S*H growing up, and saw the episode when Frank Burns applied for and received a Purple Heart for a "shell fragment" in his eye. From an EGG shell...

It may have been an injury from his red stapler.

Boy, the eyes on Schiff scream psycho!

[FLASH_VIDEO]


Link to original video: https://youtu.be/3uK5bRM_5Eg [/FLASH_VIDEO]

Jim Jordan is now unleashing on this POS Amb Sondland. He's nailing him about leaving out of his 23 page opening statement the part where President Trump said in response to Sondland asking him what he wants, "I want no Quid pro quo. I want him (the Ukranian president) to do the right thing; I want him to do what he ran on."

Sondland had some weak excuse about not having the time to include it...in a 23 page opening statement.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Jim Jordan is now unleashing on this POS Amb Sondland....
Sondland had some weak excuse about not having the time to include it...in a 23 page opening statement.

Amazing, ain't it? BTW, Sondland is a Jeb Bush republican, so he would probably enjoy backstabbing the President if he thought he could get away with it.



.

HA! That's perfect!

“IT’S VINDI-MA’AM!

Denny Heck just mentioned the Holocaust and Sondland's family escaping through Uruguay.

Oh No!!!! Please cite the relevance to his testimony and the wholesale mass-slaughter of people.

quote:

Originally posted by Ackks:

Yet if you look at Drudge or the other news sites he is the key witness implicating him

It's amazing to watch how Matt Drudge went from enthusiastic booster to sour-grapes-loser in like 2 years. Very similar to how Andrew Napolitano turned out, I wonder if Matt was promised something that didn't pan out and now he's bitter like the judge is?

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman was caught exaggerating his resume

So he was only the Assistant to the Regional Manager...not the Assistant Regional Manager.

Got it.

I don't think he has enough flair on his uniform.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by Ackks:
Agree, but some days I'm curious what the various media sources are reporting.

Just a sidebar, hopefully Dan Bongino makes good on this announcement and can be successful with it...

Dan Bongino Announces Intention to Compete With Drudge Report
Dean Garrison - November 14, 2019 0

On Tuesday Dan Bongino made a big announcement.

He intends to go into competition with Matt Drudge and Drudge Report.

Bongino is upset with the anti-Trump bias on Drudge and has made a commitment to go into direct competition.

https://dcdirtylaundry.com/vid...-with-drudge-report/

I can't see this working. Bongino has some good and interesting points to make, but he takes forever to make them and then he makes them, and makes them, and makes them...

Don't bother trying to call into any talk show he's hosting. He so likes hearing the sound of his own voice, none other has room.

Americans Should Demand an End to This Impeachment Absurdity

There was never a legal basis to it and there is no longer even an entertainment justification for it. It merely makes the United States appear ridiculous—to itself and to the world.

- Conrad Black
November 19th, 2019

It has now become a frequent occurrence to wonder if I have taken leave of my senses and am imagining the unutterable nonsense being uttered by apparently normal, functioning news readers and commentators on television and in print.

This began when the Washington Post reported the “Republican talking point” two-and-a-half years ago that the Steele dossier had been commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. I had just finished Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened about the election, the outcome of which she attributed to Trump’s “treason” with the Russians and being “shivved in the back three times by Jim Comey.” I wandered aimlessly, like a zombie, through the media, looking for confirmation that the Russian collusion whopper had been abandoned and that its authors were testing the nation’s air raid shelters for refuge.

Comey was negligent in not taking Clinton’s evidence under oath. He exceeded his authority in overlooking her lies and in saying she would not be prosecuted. When her victory seemed secure, he went through the charade of briefly reopening the inquiry. Presumably, he will be prosecuted and disbarred and further punished according to the law, but not for giving Clinton the shiv. It will be a spectacle worth waiting for, given Comey’s bloated sanctimony. And if he imagines his lawyer, Patrick Fitzgerald, will be of much use to him, with his long record of dishonest prosecutions, Comey’s disillusionment will be becoming. The film rights will be valuable.

It hardly need be noted that the Steele fiasco, an admitted pastiche of lies and defamations, not “unverified intelligence” or even, as Hillary henceforth described it, “campaign information,” simply vanished but the criminal assault on the Trump presidency by those whom it had displaced, burbled on for more than a year. The country was still recovering its balance from the atmospheric decompression of the Mueller inquiry, not even defended by its geriatric nominal chief author, when the “whistleblower” emerged. Everyone knows his name, and that the whistleblower protocols had to be altered to permit his hearsay to qualify.

Guess What? The President Gets To Conduct Foreign Policy As He Sees Fit

We know he wasn’t a whistleblower, just a former Biden political helper misrepresenting what he had been told of a conversation the president had with the president of Ukraine. First, he said, President Trump had threatened to withhold aid Congress had approved if the authorities in that country did not investigate the activities of Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. In fact, the money was not withheld, the request and the aid were not related, the Bidens haven’t been investigated, the Ukrainian president has denied there was any pressure, the Democrats will not allow the so-called whistleblower to testify and be questioned, Trump did not direct findings on the Bidens—he just wanted to know what happened, and the president has a perfect right to conduct foreign policy as he wishes.

At first, we were told Trump was using government money to extort a smear of Biden, but there was no connection and he wanted the facts, not a smear and didn’t even get that. Again, warped by the observation that sophisticated societies will respond rationally to emergent facts on matters of public interest, I awaited the evaporation of this latest farrago of desperate partisan nonsense. But the Democratic National Committee made no secret of the fact that it consulted a public relations firm and went through focus groups and the like to find that the most damning charge against the president was “bribery,” the crime used along with “treason” in the Constitution to justify recourse to impeachment. Treason hadn’t worked and back they all came, like synchronized Radio City choristers, with incantations of “bribery” directed at the president.

Now they say he bribed the Ukrainian president with aid in exchange for the presumed campaign advantage of learning why the young Biden was getting the unheard-of fee of $87,000 a month from a notoriously corrupt energy company, an industry in which Hunter Biden had no experience. This, they said, was the bribe, even though Congress voted the aid, and President Trump never got the information he was seeking—the facts not a smear, a question all politically interested Americans would also like to have answered; and there is no persuasive evidence of any connection between the aid and the request for the facts anyway: not a bribe, not a crime, nothing wrong.

The Media Are Complicit in the Farce

The polls don’t move, the airwaves are empurpled with gasps of horror at these unnewsworthy banalities. The most inveterate liar in the history of American politics, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who makes Joseph R. McCarthy seem like a soothsayer, continues as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to deny Republicans the right to cross-examine or call their witnesses. Meanwhile, the media just romp along like a pantomime horse nodding at this relentless avalanche of imbecilities and outrages.

Fox News host Chris Wallace solemnly stated that Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, was a “powerful witness.” A “powerful witness” to what? She had no evidence of any illegality committed by the president, and this is an inquiry into whether the president committed “high crimes.” Schiff started to read to her a tweet the president had just sent out saying that everywhere this ambassador had gone had turned out badly and that she was a partisan opponent of his and was disliked by the government to which she had been accredited. Schiff called it “witness intimidation.” She responded that she did not know the president’s motives but that she felt “very intimidated.”

Again, I thought my ears were deceiving me; Ukraine is a wild and woolly place and if she was intimidated by that, Trump didn’t get her out of there fast enough. Let’s have more robust ambassadors!

It might have been understandable if Yovanovitch had said she found it intimidating to be a featured witness where she didn’t have any relevant evidence for this spurious kangaroo court and publicity-fest. Schiff and the rest of the lynch mob not only want to defame and impeach with no evidence, but they also want to turn the White House into a judgment-free zone where the chief resident can’t express an opinion, like in a kindergarten for challenged children.

Save What’s Left of the Nation’s Dignity

Reports that the Republican Senate leaders will prolong the trial to inconvenience the six Democratic senators running for their party’s nomination are nonsense. The country would resent it, the Trump campaign has no fear of any of them, and only Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders still have their heads above water anyway.

If the Democrats actually vote this out for an impeachment trial in the Senate, they will pay for it at the polls. But if they do, it is so feeble and ludicrous, I suspect the Republican majority will refuse to hear it, or will send it to the Supreme Court for referral, contending it does not reach the constitutional threshold of possible conviction to bring the country’s business to a stop for six weeks, especially in a year where the people themselves will decide whom they wish to be president.

Americans should pause to remember how far this has sunk: the idea is that the president’s request to know the facts about the Bidens’ financial involvement in Ukraine, after congressionally voted aid funds to Ukraine had been resumed, with no demonstrated connection between them, as the Ukrainian president affirms the absence of pressure, is held to be offering a bribe to elicit information American voters would wish to have but which has not been produced, within the president’s authority over the conduct of foreign policy, and that this should be judged by two-thirds of U.S. senators to be a “high crime” on the scale of bribery or treason, and President Trump should be removed from office because of it.

Any American adult who believes any substantial part of that should seek psychiatric help at once, regardless of his healthcare plan. Henry Kissinger is fond of quoting Metternich that public “policy is a drama that ends by following the script to its conclusion or because the audience mounts the stage and stops it.” What is left of American national dignity requires that the audience mount the stage, stop the media auto-da-fé and let their congressmen and senators know that this farce must end. There was never a legal basis to it and there is no longer even an entertainment justification for it. It merely makes the United States appear absurd, to itself and to the world.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/1...peachment-absurdity/

Just caught Schitt's closing comments. Lemme paraphrase: "We didn't wanna impeach him, he's making us do this!"

These witnesses are showing that the swamp isn't left or right, it's the entrenched bureaucrats in all parts of the government, press and private sector that don't want anyone to rock their boat.
They're fighting for their way of life and livelihood right now.

Quid pro quo and all that schiff aside, is it not the same to ignore an alleged crime as it is to pursue it if there is a political advantage either way?

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
I don't think he has enough flair on his uniform.

Aside from being close enough to an IED in Iraq to get a Purple Heart, he's just your standard staff-puke, bean counter.

Alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella shakes hands with Barack Obama in Oval Office

https://www.washingtonexaminer...in-oval-office-photo



A Republican close to the White House said the photo was evidence Ciaramella supported Obama and its selection for the wedding website indicated he considered the Oval Office image a "glamour shot." "This photo confirms that career intelligence and foreign service officials serving at the highest ranks of the Trump White House have their own agenda and their own policy viewpoints," the Republican source said.

The website for the September 2018 wedding of Mat Calabro, a Connecticut high school friend of Ciaramella, is now defunct. The two friends traveled through Central and Eastern Europe together in the summer of 2005, and Ciaramella was a best man at Calabro's wedding in Newport, Rhode Island.

An Obama photograph was prized by White House staff during his time in office. When aides departed the NSC, they were given the chance to have a photo with the president, according to former aides. Staff still at the council when Obama left office were given the chance to get a photograph. It appears this was the occasion for Ciaramella to secure his keepsake image. Trump discontinued the tradition of routinely posing with departing staff.

“This picture raises serious questions about how this sham impeachment process started,” a senior Trump administration official said. “It’s no surprise that [House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam] Schiff has now changed his story about letting the falsely labeled whistleblower testify.”

Ciaramella, 33, is a career CIA analyst who is now a deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia on the National Intelligence Council under the director of national intelligence. From 2015, Ciaramella was the NSC's Ukraine director, the post currently occupied by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who has testified against Trump and with whom Ciaramella still has professional dealings. The Washington Post has suggested that Vindman spoke to the whistleblower about the July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Early in the Trump administration, Ciaramella was briefly acting NSC senior director for European and Russian affairs, while still Ukraine director, before Fiona Hill took over. During recent congressional testimony, Hill was unable to recall Ciaramella's name. Ciaramella was cited in a key passage of special counsel Robert Mueller's report in connection with the meeting between Trump and Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after James Comey was fired as FBI director.

The CIA officer worked with Joe Biden, then vice president, on Ukraine policy and was Biden's guest at a State Department banquet in October 2016. Ciaramella finished his White House assignment as assistant to national security adviser H.R. McMaster in June 2017.

Before he left the White House, Ciaramella came under attack from prominent right-wing figures on social media who believed he opposed Trump. Some White House officials suspected him of leaking, but one person familiar with his work under Trump called Ciaramella a “nonpartisan patriot” who was unfairly smeared by “wack jobs.”

A whistleblower submitted a complaint to the Intelligence Community's inspector general on Aug. 12 that said Trump pressed Zelensky during the July 25 phone call to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter.

Republicans, led by Trump, are focused on the whistleblower amid a second week of televised impeachment hearings. They claim that the whistleblower coordinated his efforts with Schiff’s staff, which he contacted for guidance before filing the complaint.

The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, said during a Tuesday hearing that Democrats flip-flopped on whether the whistleblower should testify. “It’s as if the Democrats put the whistleblower in their own witness protection program,” he said.

Mark Zaid, an attorney for the whistleblower, recently told the Washington Examiner that one potentially favorable outcome would be similar to former FBI official Mark Felt, who disclosed he was “Deep Throat” in his '90s. Felt had been named in press accounts before Richard Nixon’s resignation, but a lack of confirmation kept people guessing.

The whistleblower’s legal team has declined to confirm or deny reports purporting to name its client. The attorneys and Democrats say his identity is irrelevant. The whistleblower had only secondhand knowledge of details, whereas lawmakers now are questioning witnesses with firsthand knowledge. Republicans believe it is important to establish the origins of the complaint against Trump.

Ciaramella and Calabro did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Britt Hume:

Adam Schiff keeps saying the whistleblower has a “statutory right to anonymity.” He said it again this morning. It is nonsense. Only the IC official who receives a whistleblower complaint is required to withhold the name, and not in all circumstances.