The more I hear about Ciaramella, the more I despise him

https://www.washingtonexaminer...ower-eric-ciaramella

Alleged Ukraine whistleblower Eric Ciaramella was close friends at the White House with an official who is now a key aide to Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman leading the Democratic push to impeach President Trump.

Sean Misko, 37, was the director for the Gulf States at the National Security Council from 2015 until the first half of 2018. Ciaramella, 33, a career CIA analyst, was Ukraine director on the NSC from at least 2016 until the summer of 2017. Both officials arrived during the Obama administration and left during the Trump administration.

the complaint was filed on Aug. 12

Misko joined Schiff's staff in August 2019. Six months earlier, Schiff had hired Abigail Grace, another former NSC official who worked for both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Ciaramella and Misko were described to the Washington Examiner as workplace friends who had similarly antagonistic attitudes toward the Trump administration and were witnessed by a former National Security Council official, like Ciaramella, a nonpolitical appointee, to frequently be around one another.

“My understanding was that they were friendly with one another,” said the former official, who was senior to Ciaramella. “They would walk around the halls. Get lunch together and stuff like that." He described them as "very much cut from the same cloth," and their friendship as “bro-like."

The former official described Ciaramella as “very hostile” toward him when they first met, and he asked the CIA officer about the type of competitive strategies he had put in place to compete with the Russians. “And he looked at me like, 'What are you talking about? We don't do that stuff here. We don't take on our adversaries here. We invite think tanks here to talk about issues .'”

According to the former official, Trump's first national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, who was fired by Trump after 24 days, wanted to “actually take the fight to our enemies and have real strategies, and it was such a contrast because whatever the hell the Obama NSC was doing, they were not taking on our adversaries.”

He said, “There was this weird cultural hostility to me asking him, 'You know, are you guys doing your job here?' He had a lot of arrogance about him,” adding that Ciaramella behaved like he had protection at the NSC, so he could be insubordinate to a more senior official.

“He had a lot of questions that were not about policy or strategy, but like, 'Who are you? Where are you coming from? Are you here as a political appointee? Are you detail?' These are things you ask if you want to be able to get dirt on somebody or you want to be able to figure out how powerful this person is. He was clearly an operator, not a person that's there to do the job.”

Neither Ciaramella nor a spokesman for Schiff responded to Washington Examiner requests for comment.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"we don't take on our adversaries"

unless the adversary is President Trump

Ciaramella is still staying low w no public comment. I really hope his life is ruined.

I'm assuming everyone at this point knows that Vindman was apparently the source of the leak to Eric Ciaramella that started this BS Ukrainian impeachment charade. At least that is what it looks like after Vindman refused or was not allowed by Schiff to reveal that intel person he spoke to after the phone call that we all know is the "whistleblower." Pretty blatantly obvious. Anyway, so knowing that, Vindman is up there testifying basically for the democrats in order to "corroborate" the fake whistleblower's complaint. Right? Well, isn't he the source of it? So isn't he basically there corroborating himself? How ridiculous is that? Like I said before, I feel like I'm in a Joseph Heller novel.

It's like the fake dossier that the media used for its reporting and then saying the dossier is corroborated by what's in the news. Pure absurdity.

Nunes closing:

"Now turn out the lights and put the kids to bed as I yield to Chairman Schiff...for story time hour..."

I was rolling.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:

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.

FALSE! Black bear.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Nunes closing:

"Now turn out the lights and put the kids to bed as I yield to Chairman Schiff...for story time hour..."

I was rolling.

Ha! I wasn’t expecting that. Too funny.

quote:

Originally posted by RAMIUS:

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Nunes closing:

"Now turn out the lights and put the kids to bed as I yield to Chairman Schiff...for story time hour..."

I was rolling.

Ha! I wasn’t expecting that. Too funny.

I missed that. Gonna have to go treasure hunting for that clip now.

quote:

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

Hah!!!

Saw what you did there

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:


I missed that. Gonna have to go treasure hunting for that clip now.

Yeah, if someone can find it, I'd love to see it again. I literally caught it by the skin of my teeth as I walked into my office and saw Nunes speaking and quickly unmuted the TV.

The Impeachment Clock

https://www.nationalreview.com...g-against-the-clock/

Time is not on Adam Schiff’s side.

Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry is incoherent. Given the impossibility of a senatorial conviction, the only strategy is to taint the president with the brand of impeachment and weaken him in the 2020 election.

Yet Schiff seems to have no sense that the worm has already turned. Far from tormenting Trump and the Republicans by a long-drawn-out Schiff extravaganza, Trump’s supporters are beginning to feel that the longer the farce, the better the optics. Polls show that Trump is almost back to where he was in popularity when Schiff unleashed his late-September Ukrainian caper. And the point, after all, was again to drive down Trump’s popularity and render him politically inert.

From the day Schiff reemerged after his licking his wounds in hibernation, following the Mueller implosion, his efforts have insidiously gone downhill. Once Trump released the transcript of his July 25th call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, the nation learned that the Schiff’s gold-standard whistleblower was no such thing. Instead, he seems a rank partisan and sloppy leaker whose machinations and background are already boomeranging back on those who put him up to this present circus.

Schiff never expected that Trump would release a classified transcript of his own presidential call — Democrats expected secrecy and coverup, much as the deep-state intelligence-agency miscreants acted unethically and illegally on the presumption that Hillary Clinton would be easily elected and their dishonest efforts would be rewarded and kept quiet.

One of the strangest developments of the opening inquiry was Schiff’s own doubling-down admission that he didn’t know the name of the whistleblower. After previously lying that neither he nor his staff had contact with the whistleblower (“We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower”) — he now ups the ante, apparently assuming that neither his staff nor the whistleblower will testify under oath.



Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry is incoherent. Given the impossibility of a senatorial conviction, the only strategy is to taint the president with the brand of impeachment and weaken him in the 2020 election.

Yet Schiff seems to have no sense that the worm has already turned. Far from tormenting Trump and the Republicans by a long-drawn-out Schiff extravaganza, Trump’s supporters are beginning to feel that the longer the farce, the better the optics. Polls show that Trump is almost back to where he was in popularity when Schiff unleashed his late-September Ukrainian caper. And the point, after all, was again to drive down Trump’s popularity and render him politically inert.

From the day Schiff reemerged after his licking his wounds in hibernation, following the Mueller implosion, his efforts have insidiously gone downhill. Once Trump released the transcript of his July 25th call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, the nation learned that the Schiff’s gold-standard whistleblower was no such thing. Instead, he seems a rank partisan and sloppy leaker whose machinations and background are already boomeranging back on those who put him up to this present circus.

Schiff never expected that Trump would release a classified transcript of his own presidential call — Democrats expected secrecy and coverup, much as the deep-state intelligence-agency miscreants acted unethically and illegally on the presumption that Hillary Clinton would be easily elected and their dishonest efforts would be rewarded and kept quiet.

One of the strangest developments of the opening inquiry was Schiff’s own doubling-down admission that he didn’t know the name of the whistleblower. After previously lying that neither he nor his staff had contact with the whistleblower (“We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower”) — he now ups the ante, apparently assuming that neither his staff nor the whistleblower will testify under oath.

Schiff’s astounding assertion that he doesn’t know the whistleblower’s name is as hard to believe as Robert Mueller’s own congressional testimony that he was not familiar with Fusion GPS — the font of the entire Steele dossier that itself fueled the collusion fantasy that led to Mueller’s own appointment.

Unlike the Nixon and Clinton impeachment proceedings, Schiff has no special prosecutor’s finding of felonious presidential behavior. Instead, he has a veritable exoneration from the failure of the ill-starred special counsel to find either collusion or actionable obstruction of such a non-crime.

Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian collusion and related matters in the 2016 election. Twenty-two months, over 20 lawyers and investigators and $35 million later, Mueller folded his tent without criminal referrals or findings of presidential crimes, and then he more or less embarrassed the entire investigation in an enfeebled, deer-in-the-headlights congressional testimony.

At this point, the country would not put up with yet another special prosecutor entrusted to investigate “Ukrainian collusion.” They would know the post-Mueller drill in advance: A Washington “wise man” icon would follow the Mueller script of finding no such crime, while ignoring quite considerable crimes, with the Bidens now playing the role of Hillary Clinton’s bought-and-paid-for Christopher Steele.

Most of Schiff’s witnesses in this inquiry were incoherent in the same critical sense: They never cite knowledge of presidential crimes but feel that Trump is dangerous, given their own disagreements with his supposedly reckless policy. And their chagrin in the end boils down to their empty charges that Trump is appeasing Russia at the expense of the Kurds and Ukraine. Apparently their supposedly superior ancestries, pedigrees, and education should supersede the foreign-policy prerogatives of the president of the United States.

Yet our shocked State Department experts somehow cannot explain why they were abjectly silent during the Obama administration when the “reset” proved to be virtual appeasement of Vladimir Putin; when Obama on a hot mic both offered the Russians a disturbing quid pro quo and then followed through on it; when Obama declined to send arms to Ukraine; and when Vice President Joe Biden took over as point man for Ukrainian policy only to leverage U.S. aid in exchange for Ukraine’s ceasing investigations of corruption that eventually would have targeted his own morally compromised son.

And why would these career experts be outraged by the Trump administration that at last fulfilled their wildest agendas: ending the reset, upping sanctions against Russians, killing hired Russian thugs in Syria, pulling out of the warped missile agreement with Russia, increasing American and NATO defense expenditures, pumping more oil to lower world prices to the detriment of Russia, and arming Ukraine?

What would have been the reaction in 2012 had an anonymous Bush holdover at the Obama National Security Council gone to the IG — but only after first consulting secretly with the staff of Devin Nunes — to claim third-hand knowledge of a confidential Obama phone call to Russia’s President Medvedev? The Bush-era whistleblower, a protégé of John Bolton and Dick Cheney, would then have claimed that he was told by an anonymous NSC leaker that Obama in the call had confirmed his prior hot-mic, quid pro quo promise to drop missile defense in Eastern Europe if Putin would in return give “space” to Obama before the 2012 election — with “space” perhaps defined as the Russians keeping quiet and making Obama’s foreign policy seem successful in the run-up to Election Day. Would there have been impeachment proceedings against Obama? Would Adam Schiff have pleaded to keep the “whistleblower’s” identity secret?

Most significantly, Schiff is now working against the clock.

Each day closer to the November 2020 election is one day nearer to allowing the American people to vote on their first-team president. There is no Nixonian or Clintonian argument that without impeachment, a second-term president could not be brought to heel. Schiff has essentially decided to abort the early 2020 campaign and substitute in its place his star-chamber impeachment.

Day-by-day Schiff’s ginned-up media hysteria has created a virtual news blackout of the Democratic presidential front-runners. We are well into the 2020 campaign and the public knows almost nothing about these would-be presidents other than that in toto they are a strange bunch. The media-starved peripheral candidates such as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker will go the way of the suffocated Beto O’Rourke until someone or something yanks Schiff offstage.

Each day that is wasted is another day that the new House majority did not, as it promised, address substantive issues. Since January 2018, it has not talked of infrastructure, recalibrated trade deals, budgetary compromises, drug prescription pricing, or anything else other than one iteration after another of attacking Trump. Certainly, if they really believed that Trump was an incompetent buffoon, the better strategy would have been to step aside, let him ruin the economy, and then run in 2020 against his incompetence.

Ironically, the longer Trump survives, the more likely he’ll grow stronger and dominate the news at the expense of the progressive front-runners. To get attention back from Schiff, the front-runners must become even shriller and crazier — from Bernie Sanders’s declaring an end to all deportations to Elizabeth Warren’s dreaming up an unhinged multi-trillion-dollar wealth tax to pay for “Medicare for all.” What will happen when these barnstorming senators are trapped in an impeachment farce in the Senate?

Schiff also knows that voters have an upcoming rendezvous with the reports of Michael Horowitz and John Durham. If sane, Schiff should hurry up; otherwise James Comey or Andrew McCabe might be indicted and smother his narrative. Horowitz is likely to have more criminal referrals, and Durham might well proceed with indictments — at precisely the time that Schiff is lecturing the nation that its president is a criminal who mysteriously was exonerated by a special counsel.

Schiff is also risking Trump exhaustion — the magical point at which the public tires of the serial psychodramas of the voting-machine ruse, the Electoral College–subversion gambit, removal of Trump by the 25th Amendment, the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, Mueller, Stormy, Cohen, the tax returns, recession, and now Ukraine — seasoned with 90 percent negative media coverage and celebrity outbursts about blowing up, decapitating, or incinerating Trump. In other words, the more Schiff pushes these serial whines, the closer he gets to Election Day, and the more the people shrug and think, “Enough already, just vote.”

Voters are also human. Schiff believes that the more chaos he creates, the more the collective public will fall into a fetal position, cover its ears, and scream, “Make Trump just go away.” But the opposite is more likely: At some point people sympathize not with the stoners of the declared public enemy, but with the stoned target who is ripped and bloodied by the mob. In the final scene from Braveheart, the once-hated Scottish hero William Wallace (Mel Gibson) is stretched, drawn and quartered, and variously tortured before an English crowd

that’s hissing and calling for more blood — up until a point.

Once the kings’ torturers exhaust their repertoire of savagery, even the anti-Scottish crowd gets repelled and begins yelling “Mercy!”

So too, with Trump. After the Dems decided to wage a three-year-long presidential abortion, and attacked Trump’s wife, children, family, businesses, and associates, 24/7, the public has begun finally to wonder at what point enough is enough. People will begin to think the target of unhinged vituperation must be doing something right to warrant such unattractive enemies, and that he is therefore worthy of empathy.

It is perhaps cruel but nonetheless accurate to note that the more Adam Schiff, who has replaced AOC as the new face of the Democratic party, goes before the cameras, the more the transitory attention goes to his head, the more he lies, habitually proves unethical, and becomes morally compromised. And the more the public becomes repulsed by him.

In just this latest impeachment iteration, Schiff has already lied about his staff’s prior contacts with the “whistleblower,” read into the record a complete rewriting of the presidential call transcript, and leaked supposedly secret statements from his partisan witnesses. In other words, the more one sees and hears Adam Schiff, the more one is likely to dislike him — including his own party’s presidential candidates.

Nancy Pelosi wants to wrap up impeachment as soon as possible before the debates resume in earnest and the primaries start, before the Horowitz and Durham reports, before the bored public wonders where exactly is the smoking gun, and before Trump’s polls get into the high forties. But mostly she just wants to get the off-putting Schiff off the national stage and to end his career as the icon of current progressivism.

When Democratic inquisitors are reduced to lecturing the nation that “hearsay can be much better evidence than direct” testimony, and when Adam Schiff looks into the cameras and swears he has no idea who the whistleblower is, then it’s time to pack up the circus and leave town.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:


I missed that. Gonna have to go treasure hunting for that clip now.

Yeah, if someone can find it, I'd love to see it again. I literally caught it by the skin of my teeth as I walked into my office and saw Nunes speaking and quickly unmuted the TV.

Shortest version of it here:

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/...f-burns-devin-nunes/

quote:

Nunes closing:

"Now turn out the lights and put the kids to bed as I yield to Chairman Schiff...for story time hour..."

Ha! I wasn’t expecting that. Too funny.[/QUOTE]

I missed that. Gonna have to go treasure hunting for that clip now. [/QUOTE]

Here you go LOL


https://twitter.com/i/status/1197318976914763776

^^^^That twitter feed is something else. My god.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:

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.

Is that a pledge pin on his uniform?

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
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.

That's an interesting point but the key question, to me, is whether or to what extent the swap/deep state/bureaucracy must have its will done. Is a president bound by the bureaucrats' approach to a given situation?

When asked, the bureaucrats seem to SAY, "no - the president sets policy."

But in these hearings, they act out a different attitude.

Conventional approaches seem to only have taken us so far in diplomacy. And, President Trump seems to have made some progress by doing things quite different from apology tours - all while emphasizing the need for unpredictability.

President Trump has his own style of negotiating with a strong emphasis on a carrot and a stick.

Maybe rather than impeachment, they should debate whether any president MUST yield to career bureaucrats as the "right" way to engage in diplomacy.

This seems to be what Schiff's hearings are mustering statements about.

That's not a bipartisan inquiry preceding impeachment. It's bureaucrats saying they would have done it differently.

Thank you for your opinion but the American people chose, right or wrong, the one who would be chief diplomat.

Schiff merely wants a political result on any basis: sully the president. Or, if luck may stumble across some pretext , remove him all together.

The salient question to me is: Whether where President Trump asked for investigation in a corrupt country that has as a necessary component of that investigation an investigation of a political rival, a rival's status as a rival insulates the rival from presidential inquiry such that mere inquiry is an impeachable offense?

It is not. These hearings largely do not get to that question.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
^^^^That twitter feed is something else. My god.

At first I thought they were tongue in cheek...

Then I read it again. I'm amazed...

quote:

Originally posted by mark_a:

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
^^^^That twitter feed is something else. My god.

At first I thought they were tongue in cheek...

Then I read it again. I'm amazed...

Yeah, it's disheartening that so many are unable, or unwilling, to think and converse with logic, reason, and objectivity, and that there is no self-awareness of their blatant hypocrisy. It's an amazing display of ignorance that shows how far gone these people are.

I didn't see any of the testimony as I was working, but just the few snips of the news that I've seen the message is "Absolutely Quit Pro Quo under DIRECT ORDERS from the President and EVERYONE KNEW IT!!!!.... (but Trump said don't do it, no quid pro quo for anything)"

The media is spoon feeding this B.S.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
^^^^That twitter feed is something else. My god.

Yeah. It's an echo box for the Leftist crud--not a sane person on there.

flashguy

Let's move on, please.