Chilean Crime Gang Arrested on Long Island

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This is pretty outrageous—how did this whole gang of international crooks even gain entry to the US in the first place?  And, why are we never given any information about which of our many ways of gaining entry was exploited?

From Chile, not the usual Mexican or Central American gang either!

Thanks to reader Jonathan for the tip:

From News 12 Long Island:

Police: 3 members of Chilean burglary crew strike homes in Nassau

(Don’t miss the news clip where authorities suggest they may have taken advantage of new bond laws.)

Three people were arrested Tuesday in connection to numerous home burglaries in Nassau County.

Police say the suspects arrested were part of a burglary organization from Chile.

Police arrested Boneek Alexander Quintero-Baeza, 32, Alexandra Ivonne Pizarro-Blanche, 23, and Levy Frank Maury Brugman, 23, at a residence in College Point, Queens. Police say all three are from Chile and were taken into custody after authorities received tips about a burglary in Hewlett Harbor.

According to police, Quintero-Baeza broke into the Hewlett Harbor home in September and stole $25,000 in cash, designer bags and jewelry. Quintero-Baeza and Brugman also committed a burglary in New Jersey and had been released without bond.  [Imagine that, an arrest of foreign nationals for burglary and they were released!—ed]

Prosecutors said in court that Quintero-Baeza has a long criminal record of burglaries in Spain and Argentina. [And, we let him in!—ed]

[….]

Authorities say they recovered jewelry, hand bags, electronic devices and clothing believed to have been taken from homes. Police say multiple identifications were recovered and are believed to be aliases for the defendants allowing them to operate within the United States.

Police say a fourth suspect, Bryan Maldonado, is still at large. Police believe Maldonado is the ring leader and say he is also from Chile.

Nassau police believe the Chileans may be part of a larger criminal operation that stretches across the U.S. They say detectives are now working with federal authorities.

More here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Frauds, Crooks and Criminals column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Impeachment Day 7 — Alan Dershowitz, ‘Nothing in the Bolton manuscript would rise to the level of an abuse of power or impeachable offense’

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Highlights:

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz:

Nothing in the Bolton manuscript would rise to the level of an abuse of power or impeachable offense.

You cannot turn conduct that is not impeachment into impeachable conduct simply by using words like quid pro quo and personal benefit. It is inconceivable that the framers [of the Constitution] would have intended so politically loaded and promiscuously deployed a term as ‘abuse of power’ to be weaponized as a tool of impeachment. It is precisely the kind of vague, open-ended, and suggestive term that the framers feared and rejected.

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi:

Not even 10 days after Hunter Biden joins the [Burisma] board, British authorities seize $3 million in British bank accounts connected to the oligarch Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma.

Did Hunter Biden leave the board then? No. The British authorities had also announced that it had started a criminal investigation into potential money laundering. Then, only then, did the company choose to announce that Hunter Biden had joined the board.

Hunter Biden [was] paid over $83,000 a month, while the average American family of four during that time each year made less than $54,000

Hunter Biden had no experience in natural gas, no experience in the energy sector, no experience with Ukrainian regulatory affairs. As far as we know, he doesn’t speak Ukrainian. So naturally, the media has asked questions about his board membership.

Eric Herschmann:

The House managers say that President Zelenskyy did not want to get mixed up in U.S. politics, but it precisely the Democrats who politicized the issue. Last August, they began circling the wagons trying to protect Vice President Biden and they are still doing it in these proceedings. They contend that any investigation into the millions of dollars in payments by a corrupt Ukraine company, owned by a corrupt Ukraine oligarch, to the son of the second highest officeholder in our land, who was supposed to be in charge of fighting corruption in Ukraine, they are calling that kind of inquiry a sham, debunked. But there has never been an investigation. So how can it be a sham? Simply because the House managers say so?

Ken Starr:

We are living in what can aptly be described as the age of impeachment.

In the House, resolution after resolution, month after month, has called for the president’s impeachment. How did we get here? With presidential impeachment invoked frequently in its inherently destabilizing as well as acrimonious way.

Presidential impeachment has become a weapon to be wielded against one’s political opponent.

© All rights reserved.

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Confronting Trump Derangement Syndrome

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My wife Mary and I spent a wonderful weekend in California with fellow Trump supporters filming the music video for my Trump Train 2020 song. We boarded our flight back home to the east coast Sunday at 8pm, arriving at BWI airport in Maryland on Monday at 10:30am. We were exhausted.

The taxi driver taking us to our car was listening to NPR. A radio show host and his caller were lying about Trump, venomously declaring him a serial liar. Perhaps it was because I was so tired that I had zero tolerance. I spouted, “Those guys are lying jerks!” I launched into a rant defending my president.

The taxi driver pounced. In a heavy Middle-Eastern accent, with a smirk, he said,

“You actually believe the president is not a liar? I have lived in this country for 40 years. I am not stupid. Bush left Obama a horrible economy. Obama made things better for everyone.”

My feisty wife jumped into the conversation, passionately educating the duped driver. I tapped Mary on the leg, signaling her to stop talking because as their exchange grew more heated, the driver began flailing, taking his hands off the wheel and eyes off the road. I wanted him to calm down and focus on driving. Clearly, our taxi driver was crazed with fake news media inducted Trump Derangement Syndrome. He was not open to hearing truth. Some people are stuck-on-stupid.

Trump deranged black family and friends believe I am a traitor to my race for not worshiping Obama and supporting Trump. They ignore the truth that blacks moved economically backwards under Obama.

Blacks are thriving under Trump, enjoying the lowest black unemployment in U.S. history. And yet, my siblings are routinely asked by fellow blacks, “What is wrong with your brother who supports Trump and votes Republican?” Either these blacks are infected with Trump Derangement or stuck-on-stupid.

I’m a former Baltimorian. Several Baltimore blacks insist on remembering their Trump hating late Congressman Elijah Cummings as a hero. Because Cummings was black, they accuse me of betraying my race for writing about Cummings’ corruption. Cummings received over $15 billion in federal funds to clean up his rat-infested, record-breaking black on black homicide district which has endless blocks of rundown vacant houses. The federal funds magically disappeared without fulfilling its purpose. Cummings’ loyalists absurdly say I am the bad guy, an Uncle Tom tool of Trump and Republicans. These blacks are stuck-on-stupid.

The shocking truth is Elijah Cummings did not give a rat’s derriere about improving the lives or empowering blacks. The same thing is true about the Democrat party, NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, fake news media and other faux advocates for blacks. To these leftists, blacks are nothing more than a faithful monolithic voting-bloc of useful idiots.

It does not take a genius to recognize that everything good, liberating and economically empowering for blacks is vehemently opposed by a coalition of leftist faux civil rights activists. The Evil Civil Rights Empire roll-out the red carpet, welcoming illegals which harms blacks economically.

The Evil Civil Rights Empire opposes school choice, sentencing urban black students to suffer in failing violent schools. They oppose traditional marriage and defunding Planned Parenthood which focuses on killing black babies. http://bit.ly/384GwBI They also oppose academic standards and black behavioral accountability.

By their bigotry of lowered expectations, the Evil Civil Rights Empire insinuates that blacks are inferior. They always insist that standards be lowered to make things fair for blacks. Remember, the insulting Democrat lie that requiring a photo ID to vote disenfranchises black voters?

When Trump announced at the State of the Union that black unemployment was at an historic low, the Congressional Black Caucus sat on their hands stone-faced while everyone else in the chamber applauded and cheered. The CBC does not care about blacks. The Evil Civil Rights Empire only cares about gaining power to control every aspect of Americans’ lives to implement their socialist/progressive and anti-Christian agenda.

The disgusting dirty secret is the Evil Civil Rights Empire want blacks solely dependent upon government and uneducated regarding their constitutional freedoms. They want blacks believing the lie that a majority of Americans are white supremacist, obsessed with concocting ways to suppress blacks. Their bogus, divisive, destructive and insidiously evil narrative is vote for Democrats to keep rabidly racist white America at bay.

Be of good cheer folks. I am extremely pleased to announce great news. Shockingly, 34% of blacks say they support Trump. Wow! That is awesome!

To blacks who have seen the light, welcome aboard the Trump Train! To blacks who insist on staying on the Democrats’ government plantation, “You can’t fix stupid.”

Even though the taxi driver was annoying, we tipped him.

© All rights reserved.

The Method to Their Madness

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“America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln.   January 27, 1838.

For different reasons and perhaps unknowingly, the leftist-supported LGBTQ movement and Islam are allied in a common goal of ridding the West of its Judeo-Christian ethos.  The former would abandon America to the tyranny of unrestrained freedom, the latter to the prison of a mullahcracy – strange bedfellows united by a common goal.

Our school systems countrywide have long been moving away from our Biblically-inspired culture – gradually eliminating our own values to make way for the chaos of the Left and the tenets of dehumanizing Islamic laws, sharia.  It began in the 1960s, but it was never so insidious and efficient until the Obama years and the implementation of Common Core standards and other deviations from our Founding Principles and Virtues.

With an influence on all aspects of students’ lives, schools have been discouraging close friendships within the classroom for quite some time, preparing the children for dependency on and development of a group mentality, in which opinions are insinuated into the entire class rather than encouraged to be formed by the individual.  Longer time spent on computers and away from critical peer interaction stunts the brain development necessary to form and defend their own thoughts.  Kept from reading quality literature that would expose them to the experiences and hard-won wisdom of previous generations, they are instead confined to the propaganda du jour.

Further disengagement from amity is accomplished with the introduction of intersectionality, whereby the children are emotionally divided into conflicting groups determined by superficial characteristics, such as race, religion, ethnicity, sex/gender, social or political group membership.  The  dissimilarities rouse their distrust, envy and intolerance, which in turn trigger their resentment, anger and violence.  Their rational judgment abandoned, they look to the leader (schools, textbooks, instructors) for protection.  This becomes the “wolf pack” from which they gain their relevance, acceptance, power and invincibility.  Their blind need for harmony overrides all desire for alternative ideas and viewpoints.  The product of their schooling, implemented long before we understood the Left’s control over academia, is more stressing and devastating than we had imagined.

The removal of literature authored by “old white men” has decreased their language skills and reading comprehension, killing the inspiration that once empowered further investigation and learning.  It was also used to instill a resentment for the “old white men” – our Founding Fathers and all Caucasians.  The reading skills of many of today’s high school graduates are no better than fourth-grade level.  They cannot read their own diplomas, but have been promoted in the name of “equality,” and disposed to listening to mind-bending oration on whom to hate and blame for their plight, their incompetence, unemployability, and social station – the true culprits being their educators.

Hearing a persuasive speaker can preclude research and critical thinking, and prevent the development of the vital ability to discern fact from misinformation. Consequently, they are rendered defenseless against, for example, the simpler Arabic-published, antisemitic material that damns Israel and Jews worldwide.  The unrelenting emphasis on equality has leveled the learning field and produced mediocrity in the students.  The resultant “Brave New” American unexceptionalism is indistinguishable from the capabilities of the Third World, and is fatally vulnerable to the confident assertions of Islam.

Beware of Islam, but beware equally of an education that disarms our youth.

The other attack is against the essence of the children’s identity, their family heritage, their ability to bond with others in a mutually supportive friendship or marriage and parenthood, their God-ordained role in human society.  Leftist-controlled academia have been laying the groundwork for this destruction patiently over time, eroding the core and spirit of their personality, even to removing their sexual identity, making them vulnerable to assaults, humiliation, and total dominance.  Although homosexuality and its various effects are publicly considered haram (prohibited, impure and sinful) in Islam, some unspoken acceptance exists, so that, even here, these two evils of Islam and Marxism (the Green-Red Axis), may still work conjointly – at least until the final accounting.

With homosexuality and deviance now becoming acceptable, the exposure of the very young to bizarre behaviors, the appearance of Drag Queens at libraries’ Storytime, the gay-rights activists are being allowed to condition our young children (including Kindergartners) to accept masturbation, transgenderism (to some deadly results) and pedophilia.  The behavior of a pedophile, now innocuously termed a MAP (Minor Attracted Person), is being hailed as acceptable, without giving thought to the victimized child.  We need not leave it up to imagination to consider the effects of rape at an early age.

In the Islamic world, the mother has complete control over her son for his first seven years, during which time she may take him to the local bathhouse where he will be assaulted, raped and humiliated, and bond violently to sexual relations.  The result is a lack of intimacy and empathy, animosity toward his mother’s betrayal, feelings of aggression against all women, and confusion that extends into his adulthood.  The act becomes synonymous with power, control and domination.  The infamous mass attacks and sexual assaults by Arab migrants on the women in Cologne, Germany, have revealed the Arab man’s sick relationship with women.  His rage is nurtured by his family life and encouraged by imams and Mahmoud Abbas’s Days of Rage, and western cultures are still denying this form of combat.  The Islamic woman who is raised to be subservient is valued only when she has borne a son and when he has been martyred in suicide while murdering the perceived enemy of Islam.

The objectification of children is a commonality shared between the Left and Islam, the attitudes now being overtly introduced into our culture as we descend into a godless darkness.   The LGBTQ community’s activists, supported by the Left and Islam, have no reservations about allowing pedophiles to conduct a dehumanizing assault on our most vulnerable.  Robbed of their childhood, these children are to be exposed to a deviance for which they are disastrously immature, so that they, too, may react with terrible fear, abandonment, shame and degradation, their anger paralleling that of the jihadi’s.  Pedophiles and their victims are to be added to the progressives, anarchists, communists, prematurely released criminals, uncontrolled migrants, Antifa, Black Lives Matter – the mainstream media’s darlings – as the homegrown warriors rise up against capitalism, citizen sovereignty, freedoms and individuality.

Abraham Lincoln warned us to beware that we could be destroyed from within, but never, in his wildest nightmares, could he have envisioned how it would be attempted.  Those who are so fearful as to remain in denial may never know what hit them.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: How Drag Queen Story Hour Expanded Across America–

What comes after transgender theories? Radical feminists have a game plan for destroying the family.

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Today’s dispatch comes from two remote outposts of stellar gender gobbledegook in the Galaxy of Improbable Lunacy. It suggests that some academics are navigating so deep in space that  they have outpaced even the light emitted by the transgender supernova.

Feminism is a broad church. There are feminists who are strongly pro-family and pro-life; they fight for the human and spiritual dignity of women. There are feminists who are pro-choice and pro-divorce; they fight to right injustice and for absolute autonomy. But you can have a conversation with them.

And then there are ultra-radical feminists who will not rest until they have destroyed femininity, motherhood and the family. This calls for a certain amount of ingenuity, or loopiness. A conversation with them is almost unimaginable.

Here are two recent examples culled from academic publications.

Consider surrogacy. Some feminists argue, à la The Handmaid’s Tale, that it is sheer exploitation of desperately poor women. But others contend that surrogacy is the quintessence of bodily autonomy and choice.

No better example of the latter can be found than Sophie Lewis, a British theorist living in Philadelphia. Last year she published Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, a blistering attack on the family from a Marxist perspective.

The yawning history of so-called “unassisted” bio-kin provides the statistics, poems, songs, pamphlets, and novels detailing the discomfort, coercion, molestation, abuse, humiliation, depression, battery, murder, mutilation, loneliness, blackmail, exhaustion, psychosis, gender-straitjacketing, racial programming, and embourgeoisement. The private family is the headquarters of all of these.

Yes, surrogates are terribly exploited, she says. But we need more surrogacy, not less!

If more children are born to surrogates, the capitalist notion that children “belong” to those whose genetics they share will break down. Collective responsibility for children would radically transform our notions of kinship, “until they dissolve into a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all.”

Lewis wants to reimagine pregnancy “as something to be struggled in and against towards a utopian horizon free of work and free of value”. She looks forward to the dissolution of the mother-child bond and to embracing “polyparental abundance.” Unsurprisingly she also wants to dissolve the notion of “woman” and “female”.

Some readers will probably have noticed by now that the terms “women” and “female” appear only infrequently in this text. The reason for that is simple: I feel there’s no call for them. The formulation “pregnant people” is just as good as the alternative “pregnant women, men, and non-binary people,” and it is more precise than “expectant mothers” or “pregnant women.” Precision is important, I firmly believe, because there can be no utopian thought on reproduction that does not involve uncoupling gestation from the gender binary.

So what does she think about Margaret Atwood’s novel? The dystopian tale presents a very dark vision of surrogacy. Religious conservatives in the United States point to the US$1 billion surrogacy industry and lament that “we’re already living in The Handmaid’s Tale”. It seems that Atwood’s fans are victims of “false consciousness”, as Marxists put it. Defining misogyny as “womb-farming” conceals less artistic forms of violence against women based on class, race and binary gender.

“In the mood created by The Handmaid’s Tale, fans can instrumentalise commercial gestational surrogates fleetingly as mascots for reproductive rights and quintessential victims of patriarchy, without ever feeling the need to engage a critique of capital.”

Full Surrogacy Now is a bracing read, with something to offend nearly everyone.

And what about ectogenesis, or gestating babies in artificial wombs? This was, you may recall, the way that children entered the world in the dystopian novel Brave New World.

Women will never be free until they have been freed from the tyranny of reproduction. This was the audacious claim made by 1970s radical feminist Shulamith Firestone.

This utopia seemed unimaginably distant then, but technology could make it a reality with ectogenesis, or artificial wombs, contends Kathryn McKay, of the University of Sydney. She published her proposal in Bioethics.  This is not feminist samizdat photocopied on yellowing paper, but an influential academic journal. Here’s what she has to say:

… a foundational piece of women’s oppression is the conceptual link to female reproductive function, and this link should be targeted for destruction. … ectogenesis holds the potential to radically challenge dominant notions of gender categories and family roles by allowing us to break the conceptual links between ‘woman’, ‘mother’ and female biology.

In fact, McKay argues not simply that ectogenesis is a good idea, but that “we have a moral imperative to develop ectogenesis as a means to assisted gestation”. Apart from being part of patriarchal oppression, natural childbirth is risky and dangerous. The alternative, gestational surrogacy, is dangerous and exploitative, and “contribute[s] to the maintenance of pronatalist social pressures to produce genetically related offspring”.

Ectogenesis would also help to destroy the patriarchal disaster that is the nuclear family by eliminating “motherhood” as an exclusively female experience.

Insofar as adoptive, kinship, and same‐sex parents are already pushing against pronatalist and geneticist assumptions, ectogenesis will further put pressure on this view. Ectogenesis reveals the possibility that what has hitherto been a major component of female reproductive function—gestation—might not involve a woman at all. If an infant might not be ‘carried’, or ‘birthed’ by anyone as such, then carrying and birthing are undermined as relevant factors in being a woman or mother.

Ectogenesis, therefore, is the ideal means of reproduction in a society which accepts fluid gender roles:

If an infant is not of woman born, but ‘decanted’ from an artificial womb, then the primary caring role cannot be determined de facto by who gave birth to it. So, it encourages an understanding of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ as social roles, not as specifically gender‐ or biologically‐determined identities.

Alas! The reality of ectogenesis is still a distant possibility at the moment. But McKay points out that the mere possibility of it puts pressure on oppressive patriarchal norms. Imagining it is a thought experiment which underscores the absurdity of biologically-based gender norms.

Where do these people live, you might ask. Their proposals are so absurd that they could have been written by aliens from a distant galaxy. It makes one despair of a university education if people with PhDs are scribbling such nonsense.

But they are a painful dig in the ribs for people who believe in the vital importance of the nuclear family. No, abortion is not the end of the world. No, same-sex marriage is not the end of the world. No, transgenderism is not the end of the world. The end of the world will confront us with scenarios even more bizarre – the abolition of marriage, of motherhood, of procreation, of sexuality. It’s worthwhile fighting on these other issues, because if we lose those skirmishes, something much worse awaits us.

COLUMN BY

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

I am a pro-life Democrat, preparing to hold my nose and vote for Trump

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There seems to be no place for people like me in the party.

I am a pro-life Democrat. From where I sit, I continue to be horrified by the Democratic Party leadership. They seem to be behaving in ways calculated to drive away all but the most ideologically committed members.

Let’s start with Hillary’s defeat in the 2016 elections and the victory of Donald Trump. This came as a terrible shock because if political reality had been what they thought it was, she should have won by a landslide. Identity politics and the phantom of the “rainbow coalition” had a firm grip on Democrats. Women should rally to the first female presidential candidate and she thought she could depend on those who had traditionally been the backbone of the Democratic Party to remain loyal. But, surprise! Identity politics backfired. Trump was able to appeal to the interests and viewpoint of working-class white people (male and female), who were fed up with the sort of elite superciliousness shown by the leadership of both parties. Plebeian white people had an identity as well that could be appealed to.

That issues like abortion and same sex marriage are hot button issues about which many Democrats differed passionately should have inspired the Democrats to search for some sort of compromise.  Instead they “doubled down” on the most controversial issues, attempting to throw pro-life democrats out of the party, thereby driving enormous numbers of Democrats out of the party entirely into the arms of the Republicans. Their behavior since continues to show an extraordinary lack of a sense of political reality.

Among the proposed Democratic candidates for 2020 there is not one seriously pro-life candidate, and most of them favor more extreme positions, such as requiring tax payer funded abortion (Biden), or expansion of “abortion rights” to a point where it is indistinguishable from infanticide. Elizabeth Warren, whom some regard as “Hillary lite” spent her birthday at Planned Parenthood and said she would wear a scarf showing her support of them at her inauguration (if she wins). The fear of giving any moral weight to the life and health of the fetus in the womb has even led  Democrats to oppose environmental regulations that would protect wanted children in the womb. Then, we have a supposed “progressive” who thinks the human extinction movement has a point – hardly a cause for which people are going to run to the barricades – and one which makes nonsense of the idea of progress.This sort of behavior is hardly calculated to make peace among warring factions.

The Democrats then decide to launch a campaign for Trump’s impeachment before he has even taken office. And, when they do get a majority in the House of Representatives, for some unaccountable reason, they fail to bring into it the important issues which cause many people to oppose him, such as Trump’s treatment of immigrants or his horrible environmental policies.  Instead, they decide to focus on obscure issues about the Ukraine and Russia, attempting to revive the Cold War. They argue that that we need to support the Ukraine to protect us against the Russians. The idea that the Russians still entertain aspirations to world dominance is silly. They can barely maintain control within their borders.

It being inconceivable that Hillary should lose, they tried to blame it on the Russians. But American voters, especially white working-class people and African-Americans, did not need the Russians to tell them to be dissatisfied with the failures of the Obama administration.

Then, stoking the fires of racial resentment and white self-hatred, they have put forward a ludicrously inaccurate version of history called the 1619 Project, according to which slavery and racism are at the core of our national identity, so that the United States as a country began to exist only when the first African slaves were brought here, that the slaves fought alone for their freedom (forget about the Union army) and that racism is in the American DNA.  (For a detailed critique see the interviews the World Socialist Website, wsws.org.) Again, hardly a theory likely to inspire anyone to change; if we are racist in essence, there is nothing we can do about it but die. It merely adds guilt to the pot to pressure people to go further down the path toward divisive programs such as affirmative action and, perhaps even reparations, for which the white working class, as usual, will be asked to pay.

Any one of these blunders would be enough to make me hesitant to get on board for electing a Democrat, but putting them all together I fear they lead to despair. Merely obsessing about how they hate Trump will get them nowhere. The way the Democrats have been behaving could make even the most devoted Democrat hold her nose – hard – and vote for Trump.

COLUMN BY

Celia Wolf-Devine

Celia Wolf-Devine is a retired philosophy professor (www.celiawolfdevine.com). See also her blog http://www.celiawolfdevine.com/prolife/ titled Progressive, Pro-Woman, Pro-life.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Tlaib retweets “Palestinian” propagandists’ tweet blaming Israelis for death of boy who apparently drowned

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Rep. Tlaib has nearly 900,000 followers on Twitter. Hundreds of thousands likely saw her initial tweet before she took it down. She did not retweet the retraction.

“Tlaib deletes retweet blaming Israelis for death of boy who apparently drowned,” Times of Israel, January 26, 2020:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib retweeted then removed a tweet falsely blaming Israelis for the death of a Palestinian child.

Tlaib, a Palestinian American who is a Michigan Democrat and one of only two lawmakers to back the boycott Israel movement, retweeted a tweet by Hanan Ashrawi, a top Palestinian official, who was quote-tweeting an account, realSeifBitar, that accused Israeli settlers of kidnapping, assaulting and throwing into a well an eight-year-old child. “The heart just shatters,” Ashrawi said.

In fact the boy, Qais Abu Ramila, appears to have drowned accidentally in a reservoir of rainwater in eastern Jerusalem. Israeli first responders found him on Saturday and tried to revive him.

Tlaib removed her retweet, and Ashrawi eventually apologized for “retweeting something that’s not fully verified.” Tlaib did not retweet the retraction.

Dani Dayan, the Israeli consul general in New York, took Tlaib to task for spreading what he called a “blood libel.”

“I am always extremely cautious in criticizing US elected officials,” Dayan said on Twitter. “However, when an American elected official retweets an unfounded blood libel against Jewish Israelis, I cannot remain silent. Congresswoman @RashidaTlaib just did.”

Abu Ramila had apparently slipped into and drowned in the pond, formed after days of rain in the city’s Beit Hanina neighborhood, police sources said….

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Trump Administration countering Iran’s influence in Latin America and winning key support

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“The Trump administration’s push to counter Iran’s influence in South America won key support from leaders in the region in recent days, with three Latin American nations officially declaring Lebanon’s Tehran-backed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.”

The work of Iranian jihadist proxies worldwide is underrated and under reported. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo captures the magnitude of the Iranian proxy problem well in this statement:

 When you see the scope and reach of what the Islamic Republic of Iran’s regime has done, you can’t forget they tried to kill someone in the United States of America. They’ve conducted assassination campaigns in Europe. This is a global phenomenon.

And the phenomenon of narcoterrorism is linked to Iranian proxy Hizballah, as indicated in this exposé by the Washington Times: “Hezbollah moving ‘tons of cocaine’ in Latin America, Europe to finance terror operation.”

“Trump administration homing in on Iran-backed operations in Latin America,” by Guy Taylor, Washington Times, January 23, 2020:

The Trump administration’s push to counter Iran’s influence in South America won key support from leaders in the region in recent days, with three Latin American nations officially declaring Lebanon’s Tehran-backed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras have now officially joined with Paraguay and Argentina in recognizing the designation, with the new conservative government in Bogota joining with Washington in declaring Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization as well.

At a counterterrorism conference in Bogota this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other U.S. officials underscored the global reach of Lebanon-based Hezbollah — a Shia Muslim militant-political movement and a part of the Lebanese political establishment that Washington has listed as a terrorist organization since the late 1990s.

Hezbollah was a big winner in the political upheaval that has gripped Lebanon this month, with new government made up of appointees nominated by Hezbollah and its allies — a development that has worried both the U.S. and Israel, Lebanon’s neighbor. Counterterrorism analysts consider the well-armed Hezbollah one of Tehran’s most effective military proxies in the region.

Heading into this week’s conference in Bogota, State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Nathan Sales told the Miami Herald and Nuevo Herald that U.S. officials “know that Hezbollah operatives and facilitators and finance leaders are active” in the loosely governed “Tri-Border Area” between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

U.S. and Israeli officials say Hezbollah orchestrated and executed a 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people, as well as a 1994 attack on a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that left 85 people dead…..

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

MUST WATCH VIDEO: U.S. Senate: Impeachment Trial — President’s Lawyers Lay Waste to Democrats

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The following is the January 25, 2020 C-SPAN video of the impeachment trial which contains two hours of testimony by President Trump’s legal team. This is a must watch video:

© All rights reserved.

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5 Big Points by Trump’s Lawyers as Defense Opens in Impeachment Trial

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RELATED VIDEO: A friendly reminder of who interfered with foreign elections while the Trump impeachment trial winds up.

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: The Party of Marx, Mao and Mohammed

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EDITORS NOTE: This is the seventh in a series titled Decadent Democrats. You may read the previous installments here:

DECADENT DEMOCRATS — From Pedophilia to Sex with Animals

DECADENT DEMOCRATS — From Electing a Dream ‘Queer Latina’ Candidate to No Incarceration For Drug Use of Any Kind

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: The Enemies of America are Our Best Friends Forever

DECADENT DEMOCRATS — From Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globe Diatribe to Abortion to Climate Change [+Videos]

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: From Creating Weak Men and Disorderly Women to Making Sex a Biological Reality Illegal

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: From the Party of Abortion and Allah Akbar to the 2020 Right to Life March and death of terrorist Soleimani

On December 1, 2015 in a column titled “The neo-Democrat Party: Devout followers of Marx, Mao and Mohammed” I wrote:

Numerous writers and political pundits have written on President Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform America” when elected in 2008.

I believe what President Obama has truly done is fundamentally transformed the Democratic Party of JFK to the Democrat Party of BHO. I use the word Democrat because the Party of Obama is not Democratic, as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. The membership of the neo-Democrat Party are made up primarily of the devout followers of Marx, Mao and Mohammed.

Those who oppose Obama and the neo-Democrat Party, including JFK Democrats, are subject to ridicule, rejection and bullying.

Extremism in the name of the collective is the over riding strategy of the neo-Democrat. Radicalism is the tactic. The more extreme the ideal, the more it is embraced. This leads to what some have labeled a form of political insanity. I call it political suicide. History teaches us that tyrants and tyranny ultimately lose the support of the masses. Why? Because the policies implemented harm the masses.

THE PARTY OF MARX, MAO AND MOHAMMED

In today’s Democrat Party we find a growing number of candidates and elected officials who are followers of Marx, Mao and Mohammed. You can name them from the follower of Mohammed Keith Ellison, to Socialists Bernie Sanders, Andrew Gillum, candidate for Governor of Florida, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

DECLASSIFIED reports:

The Communist Party USA explained plans on May 23 [2018] to subvert the Democratic Party, alongside socialist and communist organizations including Democratic Socialists of America, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, LeftRoots, and others. In some U.S. states, communist party members are barred from becoming elected officials, yet through this latest effort, democrats may unwittingly vote communists into office.

Pew Research Center found:

Muslims constitute a strongly Democratic [Party] constituency. Three-quarters of Muslim voters say they cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and two-thirds of U.S. Muslims overall say they disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president.

[ … ]

Fully two-thirds of U.S. Muslims identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (66%). Far fewer say they are Republican or lean Republican (13%), while one-in-five say they prefer another party or are political independents and do not lean toward either major party. Muslim Americans’ partisan composition is little changed over the last decade, and they remain much more strongly Democratic than the public as a whole.

INTERSECTIONALITY

The Marxist, Maoist and Islamic Democrats have embraced “intersectionality” as their fundamental political strategy. Here is Ben Shapiro explaining what intersectionality really means:


Pew also noted how Muslims have embraced intersectionality stating:

There has, however, been one notable change in the social and political views of U.S. Muslims: They have become much more accepting of homosexuality over the past decade, matching a similar shift that has occurred among the public overall. Indeed, the share of Muslim Americans who say homosexuality should be accepted by society has nearly doubled since 2007.

Yet Islam condemns sodomy. Abu Dawud’s authoritative hadith collection records a report from Abdullah ibn Abbas:

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done (38:4447).

This is intersectionality at work.

UNCONTESTED ABSURDITIES

Ayn Rand wrote:

“The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”

Here are some of the absurdities that have become the official ideology of the Democrat Party:

  • The greatest national security threat is climate change (i.e. formerly global warming).
  • White Christian men are a greater threat than the Islamic State, Iran and the Black Lives Matter movement.
  • Spending on social programs is more important than spending on national security.
  • Engagement and dialogue with America’s enemies (i.e. Iran) is preferred to any form of confrontation.
  • Nationalized health care (the Affordable Care Act) is affordable.
  • Deficit spending is good for the economy and will create jobs.
  • Putting more Americans on the public dole is good for creating more government jobs.
  • Anyone who disagrees with the neo-Democrat Party policies is racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and a national security threat.
  • People don’t kill people, guns kill people (e.g. need to outlaw guns).
  • Public schools must teach children what to think, not how to think (i.e. Common Core).
  • Aborting the unborn and selling their body parts is noble.
  • Bigger government, more regulations and centralized powers and greater control over the behaviors of citizens is good.
  • Coal, oil and natural gas are evil.
  • Saving the planet is more important than saving the human race.
  • A weak America is good for world peace.
  • The Judeo/Christian God is dead.

CONCLUSION

The Democratic Party of JFK has morphed into the Democrat Party by dint of constant pressure from the radicals and the constant retreat of the Jeffersonian Democrats.

Today the Democrat Party has fundamentally transformed into the party of Marx, Mao and Mohammed.

It is a struggle between the civilized man and the uncivilized man (savage).

If you disagree please do so in the Comments section below.

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US government hands out tens of millions to Muslim orgs linked to Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood

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This is no doubt the work of swamp creatures, i.e., entrenched federal bureaucrats who are happy to defy the Trump’s administration’s agenda. The swamp needs draining, but is fighting back furiously.

“US Gov’t Hands Out Tens of Millions to Islamist Organizations,” Clarion Project, January 23, 2020:

The U.S. government under the Trump administration has handed out tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to Islamist organizations, according to research by Sam Westrop at Middle East Forum (MEF).

As MEF noted, “between 2017 and 2018, the amount of taxpayers’ money given to organizations either influenced or controlled by Islamist activists more than tripled from $4 million to $13.5 million. Under the Obama administration, the amount given to Islamist-linked organizations averaged a mere $1.7 million each year.”

Most recently, in October 2019, the government awarded the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) with $100,000 in federal grant government money.

CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest-ever terror funding case in American history. The government officially ended all partnerships with the organization in 2009 because of CAIR’s connection to funding the Hamas terror group.

Yet, CAIR was recently the recipient of the $100,000 Department of Homeland Security grant as part of its DHS’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program.

In addition to monies given to CAIR, MEF found that the government  gave:

  • $57,000 to the Muslim American Society (MAS). In 2008, federal prosecutors said that “MAS was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. Last year, children from an MAS school recited poetry about the killing of Jews
  • $100,000 to Dar al-Hijrah, an extremist mosque in Virginia. A 2002 Customs and Border Protection document stated that DAH is “operating as a front for Hamas operatives in U.S.” A December 2007 document said DAH “has been linked to numerous individuals linked to terrorism financing.”  Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki was DAH’s imam from 2001 to 2002. Al-Awlaki’s sermons were attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers and Nidal Hassan, who later shot 13 soldiers to death in a jihadi attack at Fort Hood in 2009.
  • $41 million in federal grants to Islamist radicals since 2007 (not including grants given in the  last few months)….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Impeachment: Here Today, Yawn Tomorrow

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If the impeachment drudgery is putting the senators to sleep, it’s no wonder Americans are tuning it out. According to the latest Nielsen ratings, millions of viewers are changing the channel — and based on the president’s growing approval rating, they wish House Democrats would too.

Even after marathon sessions — 12 and 13 hours — nothing Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) party has produced smacks remotely of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” threshold the Constitution sets. Still, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has kept his word on the “fair and even-handed process” — forcing Republicans to sit and listen through days of painfully uncompelling testimony. “Everyone can see now there’s nothing there,” Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) told me on “Washington Watch” Thursday. “I mean, God bless them, Tony. They don’t have anything to present. And they’ve got to fill somehow two full days with such a bad case. They did it to themselves. But here we are.”

As for the senators themselves, Mike says, there’s a reason the cameras are trained on the people at the podium. While some senators nap, others have been seen passing notes, doing crossword puzzles, even making paper airplanes. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) even gave the GOP members fidget spinners, just to keep their hands busy. Even the famous “candy desk” is taking a hit, after hungry senators demolished the stash.

“Anecdotally,” Congressman Johnson said, “I can tell you that many of them are having a very hard time staying awake. It is so dreadfully boring…” Which is no wonder, he says, since “this is the most vapid evidence-free case for impeachment that has ever been presented certainly in the history of this country.” And regardless of how much ranting and raving the case managers do on the Senate floor, there’s no suspense over the outcome of the trial. The only real suspense will be in November, when voters decide how severely Democrats should pay for this sham.

“It’s the first time a single party has ever advanced an impeachment case like this. And it’s specifically what the founding fathers and the framers of the Constitution warned us against, because they knew that it would weaponize the impeachment function of the Constitution. They were they were terribly afraid of that outcome because they knew would open a Pandora’s box. And that’s what they’ve done here. So they can’t walk it back. It’s too late. They’re trying to do as much damage as they can to President Trump going into the election cycle, hoping against hope that it will have some sort of effect in the election outcome and the turnout. I think it’s going to backfire.”

At the very least, Mike pointed out, Pelosi’s party won’t have a single accomplishment to run on. “… We haven’t done any work of substance in the House for almost a year because they’ve been on this impeachment quest. The American people want us to get back to work.” Meanwhile, work is all the administration has done — protecting life, religious freedom, securing our borders, improving our international relations, negotiating better trade deals, boosting the economy, creating jobs. As White House counsel Pat Cipollone said, “We should end this ridiculous charade and go have an election.” But an election is exactly what Democrats are trying to avoid. And after the disaster of these past 11 months, who can blame them?

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC Action podcast and column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

7 Big Moments in Democrats’ Final Arguments to Remove Trump

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In their final day of arguments that the Senate should remove President Donald Trump from office, House Democrats questioned the president’s character and defended former Vice President Joe Biden.

The seven House Democrats who are impeachment managers, acting as prosecutors, finished their allotted 24 hours on their third day of arguments on the Senate floor.  The Senate adjourned just before 9 p.m.

Trump’s legal defense team is scheduled to begin counterarguments Saturday at 10 a.m., but is expected to use only a few hours of the allotted 24 hours. The team includes White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow; constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz; and former independent counsel Ken Starr.

After each side presents its case, the Senate will vote on whether to call witnesses to testify. It takes a two-thirds majority, or 67 senators, to remove a president from office.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Here are highlights from Day 3 of the Democrats’ arguments:

1. ‘Imagine It Wasn’t Joe Biden’

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., leader of the House managers, made an impassioned plea to the senators to put themselves “in someone else’s shoes,” in this case, those of Joe Biden.

“Let’s imagine it wasn’t Joe Biden. Let’s imagine it was anyone of us,” Schiff said, adding:

Let’s imagine the most powerful person in the world was asking a foreign nation to conduct a sham investigation into one of us.

What would we think about it then? Would we think that’s a good U.S. policy? Would we think he has every right to do it? Would we think that’s a ‘perfect’ call?

In 2016, Biden, as vice president, threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid from Ukraine unless the Eastern European nation fired Viktor Shokin, the state prosecutor who was investigating the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, held a high-paying job on the board of Burisma at the same time his father was the Obama administration’s point man for Ukraine policy.

In a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the two men briefly discussed Trump’s interest in Ukraine’s investigating the matter along with Ukraine’s possible meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

At the time, unknown to Zelenskyy, Trump had put a hold on $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine to counter Russian aggression, which he would lift in September.

Both presidents say there was no pressure on Ukraine to begin investigations.

During his argument Friday on the Senate floor, Schiff brought up former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump recalled to the United States on May 20, the day of Zelenskyy’s inauguration. Yovanovitch continues to work for the State Department.

“Would you think he [Trump] was abusing the power of his office? And if you would, it shouldn’t matter that it wasn’t you,” Schiff continued. “It shouldn’t matter that it was Marie Yovanovitch. It shouldn’t matter that it was Joe Biden. Because I’ll tell you something; The next time, it just may be you.”

Schiff warned that Trump likely wouldn’t be loyal to his own Republican allies in the Senate if it didn’t benefit him.

“Do you think for a moment, no matter what your relationship with this president, no matter how close you are to this president, do you think for a moment that if he felt it was in his interest, he wouldn’t ask you to be investigated?” Schiff said.

“If somewhere deep down below, you realize that he would, you cannot leave a man like that in office when he has violated the Constitution. It shouldn’t matter that it was Joe Biden. It could have been any of us. It may be any of us,” he said.

Schiff later added, referring to the elder Biden: “Yes, he’s running for president. He’s still a U.S. citizen, and he deserves better than that.”

2. Attack on American Character

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said Trump’s conduct represented an assault on the character of the country.

“There’s a toxic mess at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and I humbly suggest that it’s our collective job on behalf of the American people to try to clean it up,” Jeffries said. “President Trump tried to cheat. He got caught, and then he worked hard to cover it up.”

Jeffries went so far as to talk about impeachment in the context of the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, the Jim Crow era, and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“America is a great country. We can handle adversity better than any other nation in the world, but what are we going to do about our character?” Jeffries asked, adding:

President Trump tried to cheat and solicit foreign interference in an American election. That is an attack on our character.

President Trump abused his power and corrupted the highest office in the land. That is an attack on our character.

President Trump tried to cover it all up and hide it from the American people and obstruct Congress. That’s an extraordinary attack on our character.

Schiff later made a similar point.

“You don’t realize how important character is in the highest office in the land until you don’t have it, until you have a president willing to use his power to coerce an ally to help him cheat, to investigate one of our fellow citizens,” Schiff said.

3. President Disparaged as ‘Dictator’

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., an impeachment manager who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called Trump “a dictator” who must be removed for not cooperating with the House’s impeachment inquiry.

“President Trump is an outlier. He’s the first and only president to declare himself unaccountable and to ignore subpoenas backed by the Constitution’s impeachment power,” Nadler said, adding:

If he is not removed from office, if he is permitted to defy the Congress entirely, categorically, to say that subpoenas from Congress in an impeachment inquiry are nonsense, then we will have lost, the House will have lost, the Senate certainly will have lost, all power to hold any president accountable.

Nadler, not mentioning that House Democrats didn’t try to enforce their subpoenas through the courts, also said:

This is a determination by President Trump that he wants to be all powerful. He does not have to respect the Congress. He does not have to respect the representatives of the people. Only his will goes. He is a dictator. This must not stand. That is another reason he must be removed from office.

4. Military Consequences 

Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a former Army Ranger, pushed that military role in buttressing Democrats’ national security argument.

“This defense would be laughable if this issue wasn’t so serious,” Crow said on the Senate floor, in anticipation of an argument the president’s lawyers will make. “No, the delay wasn’t meaningless. Just ask the Ukrainians sitting in trenches now.”

Crow suggested that former national security adviser John Bolton, who Democrats want as a witness in the trial, might have quit because of the hold on aid to Ukraine.

“Ambassador Bolton could shed light on that himself if he were to testify,” Crow said.

Schiff also noted, while on the Senate floor, the huge reliance Ukraine had on the United States, which provides 10% of the country’s military budget.

“Withholding aid has real consequences on real soldiers and their families,” Schiff said, adding the hold only “emboldened Russia.”

Trump ultimately followed through on military aid to Ukraine to defend itself from Russia, while President Barack Obama did not, Trump’s defenders note.

5. Drawing Roberts Into Case

Chief Justice John Roberts is presiding over the trial, as is his constitutional duty. Going back to his confirmation hearing, Roberts generally has said he only calls balls and strikes.

However, on Friday, Schiff broached the subject of having Roberts make the final decision on calling witnesses. Most reports indicate the 45 Senate Democrats and two independents will have a tough time getting four Republicans to join them for a majority to vote for calling witnesses.

Schiff cited Senate precedent from the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, which ended in acquittal. In that trial, Chief Justice Salmon Chase cast a tie-breaking vote.

“We have a very capable justice sitting in that Senate chamber empowered by the Senate rules to decide issues of evidence and privilege,” Schiff told reporters. “So if any of these witnesses have a colorable claim that they wish to make or the president on their behalf, we have a justice that is able to make those determinations.”

6. Prepping for Trump Lawyers

Crow said he was anticipating the arguments of the president’s defense team, set to begin Saturday.

“Now since we won’t have an opportunity to respond to the president’s presentation, I want to take a minute to respond to some of the arguments that I expect them to make,” Crow said.

The Colorado Democrat said the president’s lawyers likely will say that Ukraine eventually got the $391 million in security assistance from the U.S.

“Regardless of whether the aid was ultimately released, the fact that the hold became public sent a very important signal to Russia that our support was wavering,” Crow said. “The damage was done.”

Crow warned senators that the Trump defense team will “cherry-pick” evidence and advised: “Don’t be fooled.”

Ukraine received the $391 million in military aid only after news broke of a whistleblower complaint about the Trump-Zelenskyy phone call, he said.

“The scheme was unraveling. He only released it after he got caught,” Crow said of Trump.

Schiff dismissed the often-repeated line from Trump defenders that the president had sought to address corruption in Ukraine before delivering the aid.

“He was not trying to end corruption in Ukraine,” Schiff said. “He was trying to aim corruption in Ukraine at Joe Biden.”

7. Making the Case for Obstruction

Trump’s refusal to cooperate with impeachment investigators could set a dangerous precedent, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., told senators, in arguing for removing the president from office for obstruction of Congress.

“All presidents after him with have veto power over Congress’ ability to conduct oversight and the power of impeachment,” Lofgren said.

“The House was not prepared to accept that, and that’s why the House approved Article 2,” she said, referring to the House’s second article of impeachment.

Lofgren was a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the 1998 impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton and a congressional staffer during the 1974 impeachment inquiry of President Richard Nixon.

Over two days of arguments, the seven House impeachment managers prosecuted the case for abuse of power against Trump. The first three hours of Friday’s proceedings closed out their arguments for that first article of impeachment.

Just before 5 p.m., Democrats began arguing that the Senate should remove Trump from office for obstruction of Congress, charging that the president didn’t cooperate with the House’s impeachment investigation.

The House sent several subpoenas during the investigation. Cipollone, the White House counsel, wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October saying that the White House would not provide any documents or witnesses.

The letter asserted that the impeachment investigation was an attempt both to overturn the results of the 2016 election and to influence the outcome of the 2020 contest.

Republicans, criticizing the second impeachment article, say House Democrats didn’t even attempt to enforce their subpoenas in court.

The House subpoenaed White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and various other officials, but not Bolton.

Still, Lofgren accused Trump of ordering nine witnesses to defy House subpoenas.

“In the history of our republic, no president ever dared to issue an order to prevent even a single government witness from testifying in an impeachment inquiry,” Lofgren said.

“President Trump abused the power of his office by using his official power in an attempt to prevent every single person who works in the executive branch from testifying before the House,” she said.

In fact, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which led the investigation, identified 17 current and former Trump administration officials who either were deposed behind closed doors or gave public testimony.

Trump made no attempt to cooperate with the House investigation, said Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, a former state judge.

“At President Trump’s order, agencies and offices refused to produce documents in response to the committee’s request,” Garcia said. “They refused to allow individual witnesses to do so either.”

“So let’s recap. No documents. Zero, goose eggs, nada, in response to over 70 requests and five subpoenas.”

Garcia continued:

No attempt to negotiate. No genuine attempt to accommodate. Categorial, indiscriminate, and unprecedented stonewalling. Again, never in my time as a lawyer or as a judge have I seen this kind of total disrespect and defiance of a lawfully issued subpoena, and all on President Trump’s orders.

This report was updated to include later developments.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: DeVos Hails Trump’s ‘Partnership’ With Historic Black Schools

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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos gave a pep talk Thursday to representatives and supporters of historically black colleges and universities gathered to discuss how to ensure they remain competitive in preparing students for a quickly changing job market.

Historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, defined in federal law, “are cultural institutions with storied legacies that are unique and remarkable,” DeVos said at The Heritage Foundation, which organized the forum.

“Today, I encourage you to think about how your institutions will be known decades from now, in addition to being an HBCU,” she said at the event at the think tank’s Capitol Hill headquarters, called the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Forum.

DeVos cited Johnathan Holifield, executive director of President Donald Trump’s HBCU initiative and a forum participant, saying that Holifield likes to ask how each of the roughly 100 designated schools will stay competitive.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

“A strong heritage, coupled with a strong vision for the future, can foster a competitive edge,” she said. “And I know that the question you are asking yourself every day is ‘How are we going to be relevant and distinctive five, 10, 20 years from now?’”

DeVos went on to say:

I know some HBCUs have opened public charter schools on their campuses, and others have forged partnerships elsewhere to improve the K-12 pipeline. Your competitiveness ultimately depends on your most valuable assets, your students. Helping them be better prepared before they walk your halls serves to strengthen their futures and your institutions. …

Educators, business leaders, community leaders, and, yes, even politicians must work in concert to put the success of students above everything else. After all, they are 100% of our future.

DeVos said the Trump administration’s work with historically black schools is a “valued partnership” and outlined what she called “a strong record of action for HBCUs and their students,” including:

—Trump’s signing of legislation, called the Future Act, designed to ensure consistent funding for HBCUs. Part of the new law simplifies the form for federal student aid, DeVos said, “making applying easier and reducing the compliance burden.”

“While others tried half measures or short-term fixes, we took the bold steps necessary to help students succeed in the long term,” she said.

—Resurrecting the HBCU Capital Financing Advisory Board and increasing spending for programs at black colleges, including those at faith-based schools that she said had been “unconstitutionally excluded.”

—Expanding Pell Grant eligibility so students may attend class year-round, as well as increasing the maximum a student may be awarded.

—“Reviewing, rewriting, or removing onerous regulations that are impediments to HBCUs and their missions.”

Among those scrapped was the Obama administration’s “gainful employment” rule, which DeVos said had given bureaucrats the “power to punish or even close colleges and programs that didn’t match the prior administration’s policies and preferences.”

—Modernizing student aid through initiatives such as the myStudentAid app, or software application, which she encouraged participants to download and try out.

—Updating the department’s College Scorecard so that information about higher education options is “way more useful for students to make informed decisions.”

DeVos took the opportunity to tout legislation to create Education Freedom Scholarships through a federal tax credit to support state-led efforts to expand choices for students and parents outside traditional K-12 public schools.

“We are very excited for the prospects of how this will provide rocket fuel to efforts that states already have engaged in and that some are on the verge of engaging in,” she said.

“Thank you for your commitment,” DeVos told her audience in closing. “President Trump and I value our continued collaboration.

COLUMN BY

Ken McIntyre

Ken McIntyre, a 30-year veteran of national and local newspapers, serves as senior editor at The Daily Signal and The Heritage Foundation’s Marilyn and Fred Guardabassi Fellow in Media and Public Policy Studies. Send an email to Ken. Twitter: @KenMac55.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

7 Highlights From Day 3 of the Trump Impeachment Trial

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House Democrats on Thursday, in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, argued that a crime isn’t necessary to remove a president from office and doubled down on their defense of Joe and Hunter Biden.

The seven House Democrats who are the impeachment managers, including Reps. Adam Schiff of California and Jerry Nadler of New York, have three days, with up to 24 hours, to make their arguments.

On Saturday, the president’s legal defense team, which includes White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow; and former independent counsel Ken Starr, begin their counterarguments.

After each side presents its case, the Senate will vote on whether to call witnesses to testify. The rules are similar to those used in the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, who was acquitted.

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It takes a two-thirds vote, or 67 senators, to remove a president from office.

1. Lighthearted Schiff

After a deeply partisan fight over Senate trial rules on Tuesday and speaking for about two hours in Wednesday’s opening argument, Schiff, the lead impeachment manager, was more lighthearted Thursday.

After Chief Justice John G. Roberts opened the day’s session, he said House impeachment managers have 16 hours and 42 minutes left to make their case to the Senate “jurors.”

Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, spoke first for his team.

“I am not sure the chief justice is fully aware of just how rare it is, how extraordinary it is, for the House members to be able to command the attention of senators sitting silently for hours—or even for minutes, for that matter,” he said. “Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the morning starts out every day with a sergeant-at-arms warning you that if you don’t, you will be imprisoned.”

2. Defending Joe and Hunter Biden

Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, spent much of her floor time defending former Vice President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat, and his son Hunter Biden.

“Common sense will tell us that this allegation against Joe Biden is false,” Garcia said, adding, “President Trump asked for the investigation into Biden, based on a made-up theory that no one agreed with—no one.”

In 2016, Joe Biden, as vice president, threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid from Ukraine unless the Eastern European nation fired Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor investigating Burisma Holdings. Hunter Biden held a high-paying job on the board of  Burisma at a time when his father was the Obama administration’s point man for Ukraine.

Garcia said Shokin was corrupt.

“Calling for Shokin’s replacement would, in fact, increase the chances that Burisma would be investigated,” she said. “In other words, Shokin was corrupt and not investigating allegations against Burisma. So, Vice President Biden was calling for Shokin’s removal, advocating for a replacement, would actually increase the chances of Burisma’s investigation.”

Garcia said Trump wasn’t interested in the Biden allegations in 2017 or 2018, but only became interested in 2019, after Joe Biden became a presidential candidate.

“Vice President Biden’s conduct was uniformly validated by the witnesses in the House investigation, who confirmed his conduct was consistent with U.S. policy,” she said.

Garcia’s adamant defense of the Bidens opened the door to call them as witnesses, tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., so the Senate can get answers.

“WOW, House managers make extended argument that Hunter Biden’s work w/ Burisma entirely appropriate & no conflict of interest w/ Joe Biden getting rid of prosecutor that had jurisdiction over Burisma,” Hawley said. “If we call witnesses, gonna need to hear from both Bidens.”

3. George Washington, Nixon, and Trump

Democrats spent most of Thursday homing in on the first impeachment article; specifically, abuse of power.

Nadler said Trump’s conduct “captures the worst fears of our Founders.”

“Since President George Washington took office in 1789, no president has abused his power in this way,” he said. “Let me say that again: No president has ever used his office to compel a foreign nation to help him cheat in our elections. Prior presidents would be shocked to the core by such conduct.”

Trump has made frequent references to his record, reaching all the way back to George Washington, albeit typically in a more favorable way.

A July 25 phone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy led to the Democrat-controlled House’s voting, without support from a single Republican, to impeach Trump for alleged abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

During their call, Trump and Zelenskyy referred to Hunter Biden’s highly paid role on the board of Burisma at a time when his father, then the vice president, was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine policy.

According to a White House transcript of the call released by the president, Trump asked Zelenskyy “to look into” Joe Biden’s admission that he forced the firing of a Ukrainian state prosecutor—Shokin—who was investigating Burisma.

“This conduct is not ‘America First,’” Nadler said, taking a swipe at Trump’s 2016 campaign theme. “This conduct is Donald Trump first.”

Nadler followed with another presidential comparison.

“This presidential stonewalling of Congress is unprecedented in the 238-year history of our constitutional republic. It puts even President [Richard] Nixon to shame,” Nadler said. “Taken together, the articles and the evidence conclusively establish that President Trump has placed his own personal political interests first. He has placed them above our national security, above our free and fair elections, and above our system of checks and balances.”

4. Abuse of Power and Prior Impeachments

Nadler later defended the history of the term “abuse of power,” a charge often criticized as being too vague.

“All prior impeachment considered of high office have all included abuse of power,” Nadler said, and referred to the impeachment investigations of Presidents Andrew Johnson, Nixon, and Bill Clinton.

However, even left-leaning CNN fact-checked that comment and noted that abuse of power was not one of the 11 impeachment articles against Johnson in 1868. The House Judiciary Committee passed three articles of impeachment against Nixon in 1974, one of which was abuse of power. Nixon resigned the presidency before the full House voted.

The House Judiciary Committee, then run by Republicans, voted out four articles of impeachment against Clinton, a Democrat, in 1998, which included one for abuse of power. The full House only approved two impeachment articles, rejecting the abuse of power charge. The Senate acquitted Clinton in a 1999 trial.

5. ABCs of Impeachment

Nadler focused heavily on what he called the “ABCs of impeachment.”

“Abuse. Betrayal. Corruption. Here are each of the core offenses the Framers [of the Constitution] feared most,” Nadler said. “The president’s abuse of power, his betrayal of the national interest, and his corruption of our elections plainly qualify as great and dangerous offenses.”

Nadler said Trump abused his power by using the clout of his office to “solicit and pressure Ukraine to meddle in our elections.”

Regarding betrayal, the New York Democrat said, “He betrayed vital national interests; specifically, our national security, by withholding diplomatic support and military aid from Ukraine even as it faced armed Russian aggression.”

Regarding corruption, Nadler said, “President Trump’s intent was to corrupt our elections to his personal political benefit.”

“Article One thus charges a high crime and misdemeanor that blends abuse of power, betrayal of the nation, and corruption in elections into a single, unforgivable scheme,” he said. “That is why this president must be removed from office, especially before he continues his effort to corrupt our next election.”

6. Graham and Dershowitz Videos

Nadler explained that some Trump defenders note that neither article of impeachment is based on a criminal statute.

“In a last-ditch legal defense of their client, the president’s lawyers argue that impeachment and removal are subject to statutory crimes or to offenses against established law, that the president cannot be impeached because he has not committed a crime,” he said.

“This view is completely wrong. It has no support in constitutional text and structure, original meaning, congressional presence, common sense, or the consensus of credible experts. In other words, it conflicts with every relevant consideration,” he continued.

During his presentation, Nadler showed video from one of Trump’s chief advocates, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and one of the president’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz.

According to several reports, Graham had left the Senate chamber before a 1999 video clip in which he was featured was displayed.

The clip showed Graham, then a member of the House, on the Senate floor, acting as a House manager in the Clinton impeachment trial, explaining what he thought a “high crime” was.

“What’s a high crime? How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly, but I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes,” Graham said in the 1999 video. “Doesn’t even have to be a crime. It’s just when you start using your office, and you’re acting in a way that hurts people, you have committed a high crime,” Graham said in the clip.

Nadler also showed a clip of Dershowitz.

“It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime,” Dershowitz said of impeachment. “If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime.”

7. Phone Calls, Ambassador’s Recall

Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., laid out the case about an alleged conspiracy by Trump’s inner circle and his personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who was indicted and recently spoke out against Trump.

She attempted to play a recording of a voicemail between Giuliani and Parnas, but the audio didn’t work.

“Well, I was going to say it’s difficult to hear, but I’m sure you cannot hear that at all,” Demings said.

“According to phone records, Mr. Giuliani had a one-minute, 50-second call,” Demings, a former Orlando, Florida, police chief said. “Fifteen minutes after they hung up, the records also show that Mr. Giuliani placed three short phone calls to the White House. Shortly thereafter, the White House called Giuliani back. Giuliani spoke with someone at the White House for eight minutes and 28 seconds.

“I will just quickly note that at the time … the Intelligence Committee issued its report in mid-December, we did not know that eight-minute, 28-second call was from the White House.”

She said neither the White House nor Giuliani provided a recording or transcript of the call.

Demings said that Trump recalled Marie Yovanovitch from her job as ambassador to Ukraine out of fear that Yovanovitch, a holdover from the Obama administration, would stop the investigations of the Bidens and into suspected Ukraine election meddling in 2016.

Yovanovitch remains employed with the State Department at no change in pay and teaches at Georgetown University. But Demings said the ambassador’s removal created uncertainty among U.S. diplomats and State Department officials.

“So, why did President Trump remove a distinguished career public servant and an anti-corruption crusader and a top diplomat in the State Department?” she asked rhetorically.

“We know why. The answer is simple. President Trump removed Ambassador Yovanovitch because she was in the way,” Demings said. “She was in the way of the sham investigations that he so desperately wanted. Investigations that would hurt former Vice President Biden and undermine the Mueller investigation into Russia election interference, investigations that would help him cheat in the 2020 election.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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