Conservative Treehouse

Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, Alexandra Chalupa, Tim Morrison, David Hale, Kurt Volker, Nellie Ohr and the “Whistleblower”.

I don't see how the the Democrats could possibly allow Nellie Ohr or Alexandra Chalupa to testify under oath with Republicans asking the questions. Those two alone would blow SpyGate wide open. The "Whistleblower" (probably Ciaramella) would expose himself as a political hack and likely was also involved in SpyGate. Hunter Biden would expose himself as an ignorant idiot making a living on his dad's political office (and likely expose lots of other politicians doing similar things).

Sundance at Conservative TreeHouse has a theory.

Daily Pundit quoting Idaho Statesman quoting Reuters

“Almost one in four participants with firearms at home kept at least one gun loaded and unlocked — the type of storage most associated with accidental injuries and suicide,” Reuters reported.

Also the type of storage most associated with ready to use at short notice for self-defense.

This case is about a man whose guns were seized because he was old, allegedly had dementia, allegedly was not storing them safely (not illegally, mind you, just not up to some ninny's idea of safe storage).

Also, he allegedly threatened to shoot anyone who came to his home, or so claimed his family when they reported him to the police. And yet he surrendered his guns to the police "voluntarily" without shooting anyone.

It's my bet some leftist in his family lied to the police.

Same person who requested government monitoring for those reporting on SpyGate. The potential perjury is related to the whistleblower complaint and Yovanavitch's contact with Democrat staffers about it.

Sara Carter

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s much anticipated report on his investigation into the FBI’s probe into President Trump’s campaign is expected to be made public before Thanksgiving and the outcome is alleged to contain several criminal referrals, according to sources who spoke with SaraACarter.com.

This is more like it. I'm fed up with reports that it will give people indigestion, bar trouble, bad public relations experience or a limp dick with the illicit FBI lovergirl.

I want criminal referrals, followed by indictments, prosecutions, and convictions.

Ukraine foreign minister said no quid pro quo. This is on top of Trump saying no quid pro, the president of Ukraine saying no quid pro quo, the ambassador saying no quid pro quo (walking back previous testimony that he sourced to the New York Times), and the transcript says no quid pro quo. The only people saying there was one were those three or four people removed from the call where it supposedly happened. And even if there had been one, foreign aid for US policy objectives is entirely legitimate, and investigating admitted Ukrainian government interference in our 2016 election is legitimate, and investigating what seems like admitted corruption with regard to the Biden family is also entirely legitimate.

If I wanted to speculate, I would speculate that someone with a bigger whistle than brain overheard rumors about Trump investigating some of his own activities in Ukraine and decided to blow himself in a bid to protect himself from retaliation, and then in order to support his claim, organized people to make suggestive but baseless text inquiries with the idea that that would provide credibility to the story.

Except, you know, Trump did nothing wrong and released the transcript to prove it.

Specifically they are telling Ukraine to avoid getting involved in the investigations Trump requested of Ukraine's interference in the 2016 elections -- things that would put them at personal risk if properly investigated. And, basically, trying to set their own foreign policy. Sundance at CTH, linked about, describes this as the coup going from soft to hard. That may be overstating it a bit, but it is certainly improper and a firing offense to counsel a foreign nation to ignore the requests of the sitting president. Since the people involved are military, it's probably a court-martial offense as well -- effectively criminal.

Remember, this is not about Trump trying to interfere in 2020. It's about Trump trying to investigate the interference in 2016, and the public admissions of corruption by Biden and his family. The so-called whistleblowers here are scrambling to protect themselves.

This is justice. I blogged about the incident when it happened.

When a police officer makes a mistake that would get an ordinary person in trouble, they should face the same consequences.

Everything is a Russian plot now.

Real Clear Investigations lays out the involvement of John Brennan with SpyGate, both before the start of the official FBI investigation and after the election.

Bearing Arms

The truth is, the person responsible for this shooting shot himself in the head after trying to murder his classmates. I don’t know or care what this 16-year old’s political beliefs are. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are to blame for today’s shooting. However, it’s a fact that you can have universal background checks, a ten day waiting period on firearms purchases, background checks on ammunition purchases, an “assault weapons” ban, microstamping, a “high capacity” magazine ban, red flag laws, “safe storage” laws, age restrictions on purchasing firearms, and dozens of other gun control laws and still have an attack like this happen.

For every politician trying to use this tragedy to push their gun control agenda, there should be a dozen reporters asking them why, if all of California’s gun control laws didn’t prevent an attack like this, they claim that a federal universal background check or ban on semi-automatic rifles would?

Enough said. I won't belabor the point.

John Solomon

A State Department official who served in the U.S. embassy in Kiev told Congress that the Obama administration tried in 2016 to partner with the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden but the project was blocked over corruption concerns.

George Kent, the former charge d’affair at the Kiev embassy, said in testimony released Thursday that the State Department’s main foreign aid agency, known as USAID, planned to co-sponsor a clean energy project with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden as a board member.

At the time of the proposed project, Burisma was under investigation in Ukraine for alleged corruption. Those cases were settled in late 2016 and early 2017. Burisma contested allegations of corruption but paid a penalty for tax issues.

So in other words, Burisma was corrupt and while the Obama Admin was partially blocked from its attempt to partner with them, Biden's son was not. And before you point out that the corruption allegations were dropped in a settlement, remember that Biden got the prosecuter fired to achieve exactly that outcome.

Why only partially blocked? Well, there are some documents...

While Marie Yovanovitch testifies to the House's impeachment circus today, we should take pains to remember that she blocked Giuliani's investigators from visiting the US to provide information about Ukraine election interference. She may well have been protecting herself, and her participation in the House impeachment farce is likely similarly motivated. A lot of effort is being made to interfere with Giuliani's investigations.

At what point does the DOJ call this what it is -- obstruction of justice?

UPDATE: John Solomon has some essential questions for the witness.

UPDATE: I am reminded that this witness ordered monitoring of journalists reporting heavily on SpyGate.

The Daily Mail comes through where US media won't.

And here's a FOIA request on Vegas shooting that has been sitting in my backlog for a slow news day that never arrived.

Hat tip to Irons in the Fire for the first story.

Ever since Trump became a serious candidate people, especially those on the Republican side who in theory should be supporting him, have been using his manners, mannerisms, and mode of speech as a kind of disclaimer. "I don't like the way he talks, but..." "He's vulgar, but..." At its core that sentiment is an expression of class distinction. Despite his wealth, Trump does come across as unsophisticated, lower-class, more like the working men and women than the elites who imagine they run government from their office chairs and cocktail parties.

But.

That's the argument the Left will use in 2020 to shut him down. You can already see signs of it, especially in online forums. YouTube bans videos discussing gender transitions as hate speech. Twitter shuts off political ads entirely.. except for the media exception, and we all know which way they lean.

So what's going in happen in 2020?

Trump will say something like "We need to stop the illegals, the criminals, coming into our country, because Mexico is becoming a shithole country where the drug lords can defeat their military." (Not a real quote, but a plausible one). And YouTube will ban his whole speech for that sentence, while Twitter will run weeks of media ads decrying it as racist, and Facebook will put a mandatory fact-check banner under every post that mentions it claiming not all illegal aliens are criminals even though they all entered the country illegally and also calling it racist.

If we allow Trump's speech -- blunt, honest, sometimes hyperbolic -- to be broadly categorized as improper, we will never know what he actually said to judge for ourselves. They will call it hate speech, they will call it vulgar, they will call it triggering, they will call it whatever they need to in order to justify banning it.

Sometimes strong opinions need strong words, and the American people -- especially the Trump voters among them -- are not shrinking violets who need to be protected from a real world in which language is far from the harshest thing that could ever happen to you.

Trump speaks for us.

This seems like a minimum necessary step.

I'm betting this announcement is a response to this escalation.

And seriously, folks. The Deep State has escalated this nearly to the point of civil war. If elections can't be respected, what else is left?

Bloomberg

Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is being investigated by federal prosecutors for possible campaign finance violations and a failure to register as a foreign agent as part of an active investigation into his financial dealings, according to three U.S. officials.

We've seen this playbook before. They went after Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, for "campaign finance" violations that everyone agreed were bullshit. They did that to search his offices for anything they could find on Trump and to pressure Cohen to cooperate. They succeeded in pressuring Cohen but failed to find anything on Trump. They went after Flynn (and his company, etc) for failing to register as a foreign agent. They succeeded in pressuring him to plead guilty to their frame job by escalating to threats against his family, financial destruction, and leveraging conflicted counsel. Flynn may yet get those charges dismissed. And they tried to frame Papadopolous on the FARA charge, failing only because he was smart enough to smell a rat and leave the money outside the US. They still pressured him into pleading guilty to misremembering a date.

I have absolutely no doubt at this point that this whole investigation is a sham. It serves two roles: to threaten one of Trump's pieces on the board, and more importantly (I suspect) to enable FISA surveillance on Giuliani so the Deep State can wiretap him. And if we are hearing about it now, it's been in place for some time. The Deep State are desperate to know what Giuliani knows because that tells them what Trump knows and (by the two hop rule) would in theory allow them to evesdrop even on Trump himself. These guys don't care a whit about attorney-client privilege because they don't need to use any of it in court; all they care about is knowing what is going on and slowing Trump down.

The people commenting on the story are from the Southern District of New York, which has a well established animus for Trump. And the news story is from Bloomberg's news service, the owner, founder, and namesake of which recently filed to run for President on the Democratic ticket. And, of course, the story itself is attributed to leaks from anonymous officials. Those leaks are likely felonies, too.

Bloomberg

Giuliani could face charges related to extortion or other crimes stemming from trying to get Ukraine to open an investigation into the Bidens or into whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, said Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor.

That quote is particularly telling. Giuliani is being investigated for trying to get Ukraine to investigate their own government's interference in the 2016 election, and their own company's corrupt bargain with our last corrupt administration. Both of those are entirely legitimate.

This is coming out now because the FISA report is coming out in another week or two. If Barr has the balls we hope he does, a pair of great big brass ones, the people conducting this investigation will be up on obstruction of justice charges by the time it's over.

The Senate has been awfully quiet and boring, aside from confirming a lot of judges (and perhaps making the occasional deal with the Devil Democrats to do it). Contrast with the House holding impeachment hearings.

Why isn't the Senate calling witnesses and taking evidence about SpyGate, or the Biden corruption?

If I had to guess, it's because at least some of their prominent members were involved up to their necks in those issues or similar corrupt abuses of power.

Severely misplaced priorities.

It turns out she had a stomach bug. You know what makes you feel nauseous? Intensive chemotherapy.

UPDATE: I am reminded that I recently speculated that impeachment theater was intended, in part, as an argument to prevent Trump appointing a Supreme Court Justice to replace Ginsburg. This lends significant new weight to that argument.

The potential for bias is obvious, but at the same time, nebulous. Political enemies rather than personal enemies. Still, to avoid the appearance of impropriety, it seems to me a new juror would be wise.

That's basically an admission of falsehood.

Sebastian is worried, but Dave Hardy seems calmer, mostly because the litigation is at an early stage. My take on this is that it is disappointing, in that it opens a window for death by legal costs, but a denial of cert by the Supreme Court is not dispositive of the merits. Basically we are going to have to wait and see.

UK's National Health Service to deny care to "racists" and "sexists", because apparently, if you have opinions the government doesn't like you should just die. Which is actually a lot closer to Nazi Germany than most of the "racists" and "sexists" who would be affected by this policy are.