4 Big Moments Before the Senate’s Vote Against New Impeachment Witnesses

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In the lead-up to the Senate vote not to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, another John Bolton bombshell dropped, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska rendered the debate moot, and the Senate chaplain almost stole the show.

About 5:40 p.m. Friday, the Senate voted 51-49 against calling witnesses, meaning the inevitable vote to acquit Trump on two articles of impeachment will come soon. How soon is uncertain, but the final vote likely will be Wednesday.

Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, joined all Democrats and two Independents in voting for new witnesses as Democrats sought to convict and remove Trump from office nine months before the presidential election.

The House impeached Trump on Dec. 18, alleging abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and accusing Trump of tying military assistance to Ukraine to its agreement to investigate interference by the former Soviet republic in the 2016 U.S. election and the dealings there of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

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 >>

After the vote against calling new witnesses, senators went on to confer about finishing the Senate trial by Wednesday, which would be after Trump delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., noted the House had numerous witnesses and 28,000-plus pages of documents already in evidence, which he said is enough for a Senate trial.

“There is no need for the Senate to reopen the investigation, which the House Democratic majority chose to conclude and which the [House impeachment] managers themselves continue to describe as ‘overwhelming’ and ‘beyond any doubt,’” McConnell said in a formal statement.

“Never in Senate history has this body paused an impeachment trial to pursue additional witnesses with unresolved questions of executive privilege that would require protracted litigation,” McConnell said. “We have no interest in establishing such a new precedent, particularly for individuals whom the House expressly chose not to pursue.”

Here are highlights from the day on which the Senate heard arguments over calling witnesses.

1. Murkowski Decides

Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, was among four Republicans considering voting to call witnesses, particularly after The New York Times reported Sunday that a forthcoming book by Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, says Trump told Bolton that he sought to have the Ukraine government get information on Democrats.

To call new witnesses in addition to the 17 who testified in the House impeachment proceedings, it would have taken four Republicans to join the 47 senators in the Democrats’ caucus.

Romney announced that he would vote to hear new witnesses, after Collins already had done so.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., had announced late Thursday that he would vote against calling witnesses, saying: “The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.”

Alexander’s announcement signaled that Democrats would not be able to gain a majority for witnesses.

However, House Democrat managers argued that Chief Justice John Roberts could break a tie, based on precedent from the 1868 Senate trial of President Andrew Johnson.

Just before 2 p.m., ending speculation about a tie, Murkowski announced on Twitter and in a formal statement that she would not vote for witnesses. She explained her reasons in a thread of five tweets in which she concluded that “the Congress has failed.”

2. Flap Over Chaplain’s Prayer

The Senate chaplain, Barry Black, who has opened each day of the trial with a prayer, made news with a prayer Friday that spurred media and social media speculation that Black was pushing senators for witnesses or a specific outcome.

“Remind our senators that they alone are accountable to you for their conduct,” Black said in the prayer. “Lord, help them to remember that they can’t ignore you and get away with it. For we always reap what we sow.”

Black, a retired Navy rear admiral, became the 62nd Senate chaplain in 2003.

The Baltimore native was commissioned as a Navy chaplain in 1976. His first duty station was the Fleet Religious Support Activity in Norfolk, Virginia.

 3. New Bolton Revelations

Before the Senate debate on witnesses, The New York Times dropped another big story about Bolton, who Democrats wanted to call as a witness. Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador who resigned last year as Trump’s national security adviser, has a book coming out in March.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., leader of the seven House impeachment managers, read parts of the Times article on the Senate floor. Later, excerpts were shown on a large screen.

“Today,” Schiff said, “we were greeted to yet another development in the case when The New York Times reported with a headline that says,  ‘Trump told Bolton to help his Ukraine pressure campaign, book says.’”

“According to The New York Times, more than two months before he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate, President Trump directed John R. Bolton, then his national security adviser, to help with his pressure campaign to extract damaging information on Democrats from Ukrainian officials, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton.,” Schiff said, reading from the Times.

The Times reported that the meeting included Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

Cipollone leads the president’s defense team at the Senate trial.

“You will recall Mr. Cipollone suggesting that the House managers were concealing facts from this body. He said all the facts should come out,” Schiff said. “Well, there is a new fact, which indicates that Mr. Cipollone was among those in the loop. Yet another reason why we ought to hear from witnesses.”

House manager Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., warned senators about the judgment of history, since all the facts will come out sooner or later.

“The truth continues to come out, again in an article today, more information,” Crow said. “The truth will come out—and it’s continuing to. The question here, before this body, is what do you want your place in history to be? Do you want your place in history to be let’s hear the truth, or that we don’t want to hear it?”

4. Trump Should ‘Prove’ Innocence

Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, argued that if Trump really is innocent, he would want witnesses:

If the president is telling the truth, and he did nothing wrong, and the evidence would prove that, then we all know he would be an enthusiastic supporter for subpoenas. He would be here probably himself if he could, urging you to do subpoenas if he had information proving he was totally not in the wrong. If he is innocent, he should have nothing to hide.

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow later countered that the House prosecution team seems to suggest the president must prove his innocence, which is not how the system works.

“You’re not going to have a witness wand here, where we say, OK, you’ve got a week to do this and get it done,” Sekulow said. “There is no way that would be proper under due process.”

Sekulow noted that the House had 17 witnesses, 13 of whom testified in public. Further, he said, 192 video clips were shown from that public witness testimony during the course of the Senate trial.

Only the House took testimony. Sekulow said that for a fair trial, the president’s legal team would have the right to cross-examine each witness:

Due process is supposed to be for the person accused and they are turning it on its head. They brought the articles [of impeachment] before you. They are the ones who rushed the case up and then held it before you could actually start the proceedings. They are the ones who passed the articles before Christmas.

Sekulow added that the House Intelligence Committee, which Schiff chairs, opted not to subpoena Bolton, fearing it would delay a House impeachment vote into the new year.

Sekulow appealed to the Senate, saying it wasn’t their job to clean up after the House’s lack of a thorough investigation.

“How many constitutional challenges will we have in this body because they placed a burden on you that they wouldn’t take themselves in putting their case forward?” Sekulow said.

“We look at our constitutional framework and our constitutional structure. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” he said.

Ken McIntyre contributed to this report.

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.

Other coverage of the impeachment trial for The Daily Signal by White House correspondent Fred Lucas includes:

7 Questions and Answers From Day 9 of Trump Impeachment Trial

6 Scenes From Day 8 of Trump Impeachment Trial

‘Danger, Danger, Danger’: 4 Highlights From Final Day of Defense Arguments in Impeachment Trial

Under Bolton Shadow, 6 Big Moments From Day 6 of Trump Impeachment Trial

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

7 Big Moments in Democrats’ Final Arguments to Remove Trump

7 Highlights From Day 3 of the Trump Impeachment Trial

5 Flash Points From Impeachment Trial’s Opening Arguments

What to Know About Democrats’ 7 Impeachment Managers

RELATED ARTICLES:

Stomp Them Out: Senate Republicans Block Democratic Push For New Trump Impeachment Witnesses

Amid Impeachment, Pompeo Visit to Ukraine Underscores US Support

RELATED VIDEO: Pro-Impeachment Protesters Have a Meltdown After They Find Out Senate Votes Against Witnesses

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 Questions and Answers From Day 9 of Trump Impeachment Trial

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Chief Justice John Roberts declined to read a sensitive question from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in the Senate impeachment trial Thursday, as other senators asked about the withholding of U.S. aid to Ukraine and about Joe Biden and his son’s employment by a Ukrainian energy company.

The ninth day of the impeachment trial was the second straight day in which President Donald Trump’s defense team and House prosecutors took turns answering questions from senators.

Senators submitted 93 questions Wednesday and were on track to ask about as many Thursday.

The Senate is set to vote Friday on whether to call witnesses for the impeachment trial, which Democrats want.

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 >>

Most reports of head counts say not enough Republican votes will be there to continue the trial with witnesses. That outcome would make this the shortest presidential impeachment trial in history, following an abbreviated House impeachment inquiry that lasted about 70 days.

Trump’s acquittal is a near certainty, as it takes 67 senators, or a two-thirds majority, to remove a president.

Here are seven key highlights of the proceedings Thursday, the ninth day of the Senate trial.

1. Roberts v. Paul

Reports surfaced Wednesday that Roberts, presiding over the Senate impeachment trial as chief justice, would not expose the anonymous whistleblower who first complained about a phone conversation July 25 between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump withheld $391 million in aid.

In opening the session Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, without being asked: “We’ve been respectful of the chief justice’s unique position in reading our questions, and I want to be able to continue to assure him that that level of consideration for him will continue.”

Early in the day, Roberts called on Paul.

“The senator from Kentucky,” the chief justice said.

“I have a question to present to the desk for House manager [Adam] Schiff and for the president’s counsel,” Paul said.

Schiff, D-Calif., is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which led the impeachment inquiry targeting Trump. He is the leader of the seven House managers, or prosecutors, making the case for the Senate to remove Trump.

When the card with Paul’s question was brought to Roberts, he looked at it for 11 seconds, then said: “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

Paul reportedly was upset and at one point left the chamber and, talking to reporters, criticized Roberts for censoring questions.

The Kentucky Republican, an ally and former rival of Trump’s, sent out several tweets repeating the name of the person widely reported—without confirmation—to be the whistleblower. This first tweet, however, did not:

“My question today is about whether or not individuals who were holdovers from the Obama National Security Council and Democrat partisans conspired with Schiff staffers to plot impeaching the President before there were formal House impeachment proceedings,” Paul tweeted, before naming someone widely reported to be the whistleblower.

Paul later tweeted:

My question is not about a ‘whistleblower’ as I have no independent information on his identity. My question is about the actions of known Obama partisans within the NSC [White House National Security Council] and House staff and how they are reported to have conspired before impeachment proceedings had even begun.

2. Schiff Won’t Answer About Coordinating With Whistleblower

Paul rephrased his question about Schiff later in the hearing, and Roberts was willing to read it this time:

Recent reporting described two NSC [National Security Council] staff holdovers from the Obama administration attending an all-hands meeting of NSC staff held about two weeks into the Trump administration, and talking loudly enough to be overheard saying, ‘We need to do everything we can to take out the president.’

On July 26, 2019, the House Intelligence Committee hired one of those individuals, Shawn Misko. The report further describes relationships between Misko, Lt. Col. [Alexander] Vindmand and the individual alleged as the whistleblower. Why did your committee hire Shawn Misko the day after the phone call between President Trump and Zelenskyy, and what role has he played throughout your committee’s investigation?

Vindmand, an Army officer, testified about his concerns with the Trump-Zelenskyy call during the House impeachment hearings.

Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which led the impeachment inquiry, took the microphone on the Senate floor to respond, looking and sounding indignant.

“First of all, there have been a lot of attacks on my staff. As I said when this issue came up earlier, I’m appalled at some of the smearing of some of the professional people that work for the Intelligence Committee,” Schiff said, adding:

Now, this question refers to allegations in a newspaper article, which are circulating smears on my staff and asks me to respond to those smears. I will not dignify those smears on my staff by giving them any credence whatsoever.

Nor will I share any information that I believe could or could not lead to the identification of the whistleblower.

3. Conflicting Stories From Bidens on Burisma

House Democrats voted Dec. 18, without a single Republican vote, to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

The House based its two articles of impeachment on Trump’s July 25 phone call to Zelenskyy and the president’s refusal to allow certain executive branch witnesses or provide certain documents for House hearings.

According to a White House transcript of the Trump-Zelenskyy call, released by the president, the two leaders briefly talked about Trump’s interest in Ukraine’s investigating former Vice President Joe Biden’s dealings there and the role of his son, Hunter Biden, on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

Trump also asked Zelenskyy to look into whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

Zelenskyy did not know at the time that Trump had put a hold on $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine to help it counter a Russian invasion. Trump would release the funds in September.

House Democrats allege that Trump withheld the military aid to pressure Zelenskyy into initiating politically motivated investigations.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, submitted a question on behalf of himself, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

Roberts, saying the question was for both sides, read:

USA Today reported that when asked about it [his son’s employment by the Ukrainian company], Biden said quote, ‘He hadn’t spoken to his son about his overseas business.’ That account was contradicted by Hunter Biden, who told The New Yorker that he told his father about Burisma and ‘Dad said I hope you know what you’re doing, and I said I do.’ Why do Joe and Hunter Biden’s stories conflict? Did the House ask either one that question?

Trump lawyer Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida who days earlier had laid out the Biden-Burisma timeline, took the podium on the Senate floor to answer.

“It is very interesting he said he never spoke to his son about overseas dealings; his son said different things,” Bondi said. “Joe Biden was the [Obama administration’s] point man for Ukraine. At the time, Ukrainians were investigating a corrupt company, Burisma.”

In 2016, Biden has said publicly, he pressured the government of Ukraine to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, where Biden’s son had been on the board since 2014.

During on-camera remarks in 2018, Biden said he threatened Ukraine’s leaders that the country would not get $1 billion in U.S. assistance unless the government fired Shokin within hours.

Bondi noted that Burisma reportedly paid Biden $83,000 per month, although he had no qualifications in the energy sector. She said Burisma’s owner, oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, was known for being part of corruption in Ukraine.

“The entire time Joe Biden knows that this oligarch is corrupt. Everyone knows that. There are news reports everywhere. No one will dispute that,” Bondi said. “In fact, it raised eyebrows worldwide that the vice president, by his account, never once asked his son to leave the [Burisma] board. Instead, he started investigating the prosecutor who was going after Burisma and this corrupt oligarch, who they say was corrupt even by corrupt oligarch standards.”

“Then we hear the video of Joe Biden bragging about firing the prosecutor, linking it to aid,” Bondi added.

Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., one of the seven House impeachment managers, or prosecutors, steered away from a direct answer.

“I know you have asked about a conversation between a father and his son,” Demings said. “And what I can tell you is, probably like just about everyone in this chamber, there are probably some conversations that I can’t repeat about my conversations with my son. So I don’t know the answer to your question.”

She then said the Senate needed to hear from “fact witnesses,” and sought to pivot to familiar talking points of the prosecution team.

“We have no evidence to point to the fact that either Biden has anything at all to tell us about the president shaking down a foreign power to help him cheat in the next election, the precious election, trying to steal each individual’s vote,” Demings said.

4. Who Pays Rudy?

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., submitted a question that read: “It has been reported that President Trump has not paid Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney, for his services. Can you explain who has paid for Rudy Giuliani’s legal fees, international travel, and other expenses in his capacity as President Trump’s attorney and representative?”

Schiff, D-Calif., the leader of the House prosecution team, stood  to answer the question.

“I don’t know who is paying Rudy Giuliani’s fees,” Schiff said, adding:

If he is not being paid by the president to conduct this domestic political errand, for which he has devoted so much time, if other clients are paying and subsidizing his work in that respect, it raises profound questions, questions we can’t answer at this point.

There are some answers that we do know. As [Giuliani] has acknowledged, he’s not there doing foreign policy. So, when counsel for the president says this is a policy dispute, [that] you can’t impeach a president over policy, what Rudy Giuliani was engaged in has nothing to do with policy.

Schiff gave a hypothetical:  What if Giuliani, a former New York mayor and federal prosecutor, brokered a quid pro quo with the Chinese? He argued that the president’s defense team would claim that would be OK.

“So, who is paying the freight for it?” Schiff asked. “I don’t know who is directly paying the freight for it, but I can tell you the whole country is paying the freight for it because there are leaders around the world who are watching this and saying the American presidency is open for business.”

With that comment, Schiff walked right into a rebuttal from Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow.

“What came out of the manager’s mouth: open for business,” Sekulow said, adding:

I’ll tell you who was open for business. You want to know who was open for business? When the vice president of the United States was charged by the then-president of the United States with developing policies to avoid and assist in removing corruption from Ukraine, and his son was on the board of a company that was under investigation … And you are concerned about what Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, was doing when he was over trying to determine what was going on in Ukraine?

Sekulow, however, did not say who was paying Giuliani.

5. White House Counsel: ‘Pelosi Was Right’

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., submitted a question on behalf of himself and several other Senate Republicans about something House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said.

Roberts read the question, which was directed only to the president’s counsel:

On March 6, 2019, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: ‘Impeachment is so divisive that unless there is something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country.’

Alexander Hamilton also warned in Federalist 65 against the ‘persecution of an intemperate or designing majority of the House of Representatives with respect to impeachment.’

In evaluating the case against the president, should the Senate take into account the partisan nature of the impeachment proceedings in the House?

White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who is leading Trump’s defense, responded: “Absolutely, you should take that into account.”

“Speaker Pelosi was right when she said that. Unfortunately, she didn’t follow her own advice,” Cipollone said. “We’ve never been in a situation where we have the impeachment of a president in an election year, with the goal of removing the president from the ballot. As I’ve said before, that is the most massive election interference we’ve ever witnessed. It’s domestic election interference. It’s political election interference. And it’s wrong.”

During a morning press conference, before the Senate convened, Pelosi suggested she would not accept the Senate’s verdict on the president if no witnesses are called.

“He will not be acquitted,” Pelosi said. “You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial. You don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation and all of that. Does the president know right from wrong? I don’t think so.”

6. Obama and Bush Comparisons

Roberts read a question about abuse of power from Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, that brought up Trump’s two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

“Under the standard embraced by the House managers, would President Obama have been subject to impeachment charges based on his handling of the Benghazi attack, the Bergdahl swap, or DACA?” Roberts read. “Would President Bush have been subject to impeachment charges based on his handling of NSA surveillance, detention of combatants, or use of waterboarding?”

Cipollone, the White House counsel, answered the question, saying that the House managers are making an argument with “no standard.”

“Presidents would be subject to impeachment for exercising long-standing constitutional rights even when the House chose not to enforce their subpoenas,” Cipollone said, adding: “You might want to get a lock on that door, because they are going to be back a lot if that’s the standard.”

The White House counsel continued:

I try to seek areas of agreement. I think we all agree they don’t allege a crime. That’s why they spend all their time saying you don’t need one. … No crime is necessary.

That’s not what impeachment is all about. This is dangerous. It’s more dangerous because it’s an election year. So, yes, under the standardless impeachment, any president could be impeached for anything and that’s wrong.

By the way, they [the House prosecutors] should be held to their own articles of impeachment. A lot of what they are trying to sell here, their own House colleagues weren’t buying. They didn’t make it into the articles of impeachment.

7. Campaign Finance Violation

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., submitted a question citing two Federal Election Commission opinions that anything of value given by a foreign country to a political campaign would be an illegal campaign contribution.

“How valuable would a public announcement [by Ukraine] of an investigation into the Bidens be for President Trump’s reelection campaign?” she asked.

Stabenow directed her question to both sides.

“The idea that these investigations were something of value was specifically examined by the Department of Justice, as I explained the other day,” Cipollone said. “… They announced back in September that there was no election law violation, because it did not qualify as a thing of value.”

The White House counsel added: “There would be tremendous First Amendment implications if someone attempted to enforce the laws that way.”

Schiff strongly challenged this view.

“How valuable would it be for the president to get Ukraine to announce his investigations? The answer is immensely valuable,” Schiff said, adding:

If it wasn’t going to be immensely valuable, why would the president go to such lengths to make it happen? Why would he be willing to violate the law, the Impoundment Control Act? Why would he willing to ignore the advice of all his national security professionals? Why would he be willing to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from an ally at war if he didn’t think it was going to really benefit his campaign? You have only to look at the president’s actions to determine just how valuable he believed it would be to him.

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. Ken McIntyre contributed to this report.

Other coverage of the impeachment trial for The Daily Signal by White House correspondent Fred Lucas includes:

6 Scenes From Day 8 of Trump Impeachment Trial

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

7 Big Moments in Democrats’ Final Arguments to Remove Trump

7 Highlights From Day 3 of the Trump Impeachment Trial

5 Flash Points From Impeachment Trial’s Opening Arguments

What to Know About Democrats’ 7 Impeachment Managers

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.

6 Scenes From Day 8 of Trump Impeachment Trial

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Wednesday was question-and-answer day in the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, and it included a thought exercise in which Barack Obama asks Russia to investigate election rival Mitt Romney.

Senators acting as jurors, and in some way judges, submitted questions in writing to Chief Justice John Roberts. He then read them out loud for answers from the president’s lawyers or from House Democrats’ impeachment managers led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

Here are highlights from the eighth day of the impeachment trial,  which is to be followed by another day of questioning Thursday.

1. Schiff’s Parody of a Romney Probe

In previous days, the president’s lawyers contrasted the charges against Trump with what they say was a much more questionable open-microphone incident in 2012, when President Barack Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” on Eastern Europe missile defense after the upcoming U.S. election.

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 >>

Schiff picked up on the point, offering an imaginary scenario in which Obama asks for a Russian investigation of his 2012 election opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney,  who now is a Republican member of the Senate.

“Let’s use that analogy and make it more comparable to today and see how you feel about this scenario,” Schiff said, adding:

President Obama, on an open mic, says to Medvedev, ‘Hey, Medvedev, I know you don’t want me to send this military money to Ukraine because they are fighting and killing your people.’

‘I want you to do me a favor, though. I want you to do an investigation of Mitt Romney. And I want you to announce you found dirt on Mitt Romney. If you’re willing to do that, quid pro quo, I won’t give Ukraine the money they need to fight you on the front line.’

Do any of us have any question that Barack Obama would be impeached for that kind of misconduct? Are we really ready to say that that would be OK if Barack Obama asked Medvedev to investigate his opponent and withhold money from an ally that needed to defend itself to get an investigation of Mitt Romney? That’s the parallel here.

House Democrats voted Dec. 18 to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The two articles were based on Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which the two leaders briefly talked about Trump’s interest in Ukraine’s investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and the role of his son, Hunter Biden, on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

Unknown to Zelenskyy at the time, Trump had put a hold on $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, which he would lift in September.

Joe Biden has boasted that in 2016, while serving as vice president overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine unless the government fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma, which reportedly paid Hunter Biden $83,000 per month.

Later in the hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, submitted a related question to the chief justice.

“In Mr. Schiff’s hypothetical, if President Obama had evidence that Mitt Romney’s son was being paid $1 million per year by a corrupt Russian company and Mitt Romney had acted to benefit that company, would Obama have authority to ask that that potential corruption be investigated?” Roberts read.

Schiff, responding to Cruz’s question, asserted that whether an investigation of Romney were justified or unjustified, it would still be impeachable for Obama to ask for it.

“The reality is [that] for a president to withhold aid from a military ally, or in the hypothetical to withhold it to benefit an adversary to target their political opponent, is wrong and corrupt,” Schiff said. “End of story. If you allow a president to rationalize that conduct, rationalize jeopardizing the nation’s security to benefit himself because he believes his opponent should be investigated by a foreign power, that is impeachable.”

The California Democrat added:

Now, if you have a legitimate reason to think any U.S. person has committed an offense, there are legitimate ways to have an investigation conducted. There are legitimate ways to have the Justice Department conduct an investigation. … But under no circumstances do you go outside of your own legitimate law enforcement process to ask a foreign power to investigate your rival.

2. A Question of Burden Sharing

Schiff asserted that Trump wasn’t concerned with burden sharing by other nations to help Ukraine, but only with benefiting his own reelection.

Consulting the official White House transcript of the call between Trump and Zelenskyy, Schiff read Trump’s words: “I need you to do us a favor, though.”

“Does that sound like burden sharing? Of course not,” Schiff said on the Senate floor.

However, deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin pointed to a June 24 email with the subject line “POTUS follow-up” and its contents on the Trump administration’s concerns that the United States provides Ukraine with 10% of its military budget and that other European countries are not doing enough.

Philbin also read from the transcript of the call between Trump and Zelenskyy.

Quoting Trump’s words in the transcript, he read:

We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time, much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than we are. Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it’s something that you should really ask them about.

Philbin added: “He’s raising burden sharing, and President Zelenskyy agreed with him.”

3. Are All Quid Pro Quos Equal?

Another Trump lawyer, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, asserted that a quid pro quo in foriegn policy is not unusual.

“Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the rolling out of a peace plan by the president of the United States regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Dershowitz said. “And I offered you a hypothetical the other day: What if a Democratic president were to be elected and Congress were to authorize much money to either Israel or the Palestinians, and the Democratic president were to say to Israel, ‘No, I’m going to withhold this money unless you stop all settlement growth.’ Or, to the Palestinians, ‘I will withhold the money Congress authorized to you unless you stop paying terrorists.’”

“And [what if] the president said quid pro quo. ‘If you don’t do it, you don’t get the money. If you do it, you get the money.’ There is no one who would regard that as unlawful.”

However, in talking about a hypothetical Romney investigation sought by Obama, Schiff argued that not all quid pro quos are the same:

We condition aid all the time for legitimate reasons, yes. For legitimate reasons, you might say to a governor of a state, ‘You should chip in more for your own disaster relief.’ But if the president’s real motive in depriving a state of disaster relief is because that governor won’t get his attorney general to investigate the president’s political rival, are we ready to say the president can sacrifice the interest of the people of that state—or in the case of Medvedev, the people of our country—because all quid pro quos are fine, it’s carte blanche?

Is that really what we are prepared to say, with respect to this president’s misconduct or the next? Because, if we are, then the next president of the United States can ask for an investigation of you.

4. Elected President, Unelected Bureaucrats

Philbin, one of Trump’s lawyers, pointed to criticism from Schiff and the House’s other six impeachment managers, or prosecutors, that Trump did not follow the suggestions of his advisers in his phone conversation with Zelenskyy.

“They say that the president defied and confounded every agency in the executive branch. That is a constitutionally incoherent statement,” Philbin said, adding:

The president cannot defy the agencies within the executive branch that are subordinate to him. It is only they who can defy the president’s determination of policy. What this all boils down to is that it shows this case is built on a policy difference, and a policy difference where the president is the one who gets to determine the policy, because he’s been elected by the people to do that.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the House impeachment managers, argued that it wasn’t the point.

“The president surely does not need the permission of his staff about foreign policy. That information is offered to you as evidence of what he thought he was doing,” Lofgren said. “He did not appear to be pursuing a policy agenda. He appeared, with all of the evidence, to be pursuing a corruption, a corruption of our elections that’s upcoming, a high crime and misdemeanor that requires conviction and removal.”

5. Schiff as a Witness

Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow suggested that Schiff could be called as a witness, similar to how then-independent counsel Ken Starr was a House witness in 1998 to explain his investigation of President Bill Clinton. Starr is now one of Trump’s lawyers.

Sekulow was responding to Schiff’s suggestion that Roberts, presiding over the trial, should decide whether Trump may cite executive privilege to prevent witness testimony.

“In the Clinton [impeachment] proceeding, the witnesses that actually gave deposition testimony were witnesses that had either been interviewed by deposition in the House proceeding or grand jury proceedings,” Sekulow said.

“There was another statement from Chairman Schiff, Manager Schiff, that the chief justice make a determination on executive privilege,” he said, adding:

If we get to the point of witnesses, for instance, if one of the witnesses to be called by the president was Adam Schiff, in the role basically of Ken Starr. Ken Starr … made the presentation before the House of Representatives, had about 12 hours of questioning. If Rep. Schiff is called as a witness, would in fact issues of [constitutional] Speech and Debate Clause privilege be decided by the presiding officer? Would it go to court? Maybe they would waive it? Those would be the kind of issues that would be very, very significant.

6. ‘You’re Not a King’

Schiff said that Trump, by not providing documents to House investigators, is behaving as if he is the state:

I think if you look at the pattern of this president’s conduct and his words, what you see is a president who identifies the state as being himself. When the president talks about people that report his wrongdoing, for example, when he describes a whistleblower as a traitor or a spy, the only way you can conceive of someone who reports wrongdoing as committing a crime against the country is if you believe you are synonymous with the country, that any report of wrongdoing against the president, the person of the president is a treasonous act.

You have the argument that subpoenas aren’t valid before the resolution. Then, with respect to subpoenas issued after the House resolution, like to [acting White House chief of staff Mick] Mulvaney, well, those are no good either. You’ve heard the argument ‘We have absolute immunity.’ And the court that addresses this says, ‘No, you don’t. You’re not a king.’

Philbin responded that Schiff and the other House managers were having it both ways.

“If they think they can sue [to secure documents and testimony], they have to take that step. Because the Constitution, the courts have made clear, requires incrementalism in disputes between the executive and legislative branch,” Philbin said. “So, if they think the courts can resolve that dispute, that’s the next step, they should do that and have that litigated. Then things can proceed on to a higher level of confrontation. But, to jump straight to impeachment, to the ultimate constitutional confrontation, doesn’t make sense.”

Philbin added:

They’ve decided [that] in this impeachment, they don’t want to do litigation. It’s because they had a timetable. One of the House managers admitted on the floor they had to get the president impeached before the election, they had no time for the courts, for anyone telling them what the rules were, and they had to get it done by Christmas. And that’s what they did.

Then they waited around for a month before bringing it here. That shows you what’s really behind the claims of, ‘Oh, it’s urgent, but then it’s not urgent.’ It’s urgent when it’s our timetable to get it done by Christmas, but then it’s not when we can wait for a month because we want to tell the Senate how to run things.

It’s all a political charade. That’s part of the reason, a major reason, the Senate should reject these articles of impeachment.

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.

Other coverage of the impeachment trial for The Daily Signal by White House correspondent Fred Lucas includes:

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

7 Big Moments in Democrats’ Final Arguments to Remove Trump

7 Highlights From Day 3 of the Trump Impeachment Trial

5 Flash Points From Impeachment Trial’s Opening Arguments

What to Know About Democrats’ 7 Impeachment Managers

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.

‘Danger, Danger, Danger’: 4 Highlights From Final Day of Defense Arguments in Impeachment Trial

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President Donald Trump’s lawyers briskly completed final arguments against removing their client from office Tuesday, taking a fraction of the 24 hours allotted to them in the Senate impeachment trial.

Their wrapup Tuesday after less than two hours—following two hours Saturday and eight hours Monday—was a stark contrast from House Democrats’ impeachment managers.

The Democrats logged three marathon days in the Senate, arguing for more than 21 hours in all for Trump’s ouster for abusing his power and obstructing Congress in connection with a July 25 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Next, senators will be able to submit questions in writing for the prosecution and defense teams to answer for up to eight hours Wednesday and Thursday.

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 >>

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced late Tuesday that Democrats so far may have enough Republican votes to call witnesses in the trial.

Here are highlights of the Trump team’s closing arguments.

1. Bolton and ‘Unsourced Allegations’

During their phone conversation in July, Trump and Zelenskyy briefly discussed Trump’s interest in Ukraine’s investigating the dealings there of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

The younger Biden joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, while his father was President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine policy.

Trump also told Zelenskyy that he would like Ukraine to investigate whether that nation interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

At the time, Ukraine’s president didn’t know that Trump had put a hold on $391 million in military aid, which he would release in September.

Early on Tuesday, Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow took on revelations reported over the past day about a Ukraine-related passage in former Trump national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming book.

The book, The New York Times and others reported, will say that Trump told Bolton he put a hold on the military aid to Ukraine because he wanted the former Soviet republic to investigate the Bidens.

“You cannot impeach a president on unsourced allegations,” Sekulow said.

He cited another of Trump’s lawyers, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said the night before that even if true, the incident did not rise to the level of impeachment.

“I want to be clear on this, because there is a lot of speculation out there,” Sekulow said. “With regard to what John Bolton has said … here’s what the president said, in response to that New York Times piece: ‘I never told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.’”

Sekulow was reading from Trump’s tweeted response to the Times’ story Sunday. He also invoked Alexander Hamilton’s sentiment on cautious impeachments.

“What we are involved in here as we conclude is the most solemn of duties under our constitutional framework: the trial of the leader of the free world and the duly elected president of the United States. It is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Sekulow said.

“Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray,” he said. “This is the greatest deliberative body on Earth.”

2. End ‘Era of Impeachment’

White House counsel Pat Cipollone gave the last argument, in which he made the case against continuing the trial with witnesses.

Cipollone called on senators to end what another Trump lawyer had called the “era of impeachment” on Monday.

“The Senate cannot allow this to happen,” the White House counsel said, adding: “This should end now, as quickly as possible. Reject these articles of impeachment for our country and for the American people.”

3. ‘Danger, Danger, Danger’

Sekulow argued that impeaching and removing a president through two articles of impeachment that do not allege a crime is a dangerous path to establish for future presidents.

He said the words “danger, danger, danger” at several points in his closing argument.

“In our presentation so far, you have now heard from legal scholars from a variety of schools of thought, from a variety of political backgrounds. But they do have a common theme with a dire warning: danger, danger, danger,” Sekulow said.

Sekulow said future presidents could be “paralyzed from their first day in office” if the Senate allows the impeachment standard for Trump to stand.

“To lower the bar of impeachment based on these articles of impeachment would impact the functioning of our constitutional republic and the framework of that Constitution for generations,” he said.

Specifically, Sekulow said, this could intrude on a president’s foreign policy by giving the legislative branch veto power if lawmakers question a president’s intentions:

The claim that foreign policy decisions can be deemed abuses of power—based on subjective opinions about mixed or sole motives that the president was interested only in helping himself–demonstrates the dangers of employing the vague, subjective, and politically malleable phrase ‘abuse of power’ as a constitutionally permissible criteria for the removal of a president.

4. Elections and the Executive Branch

Sekulow stressed that elections are supposed to determine the next president.

“You are being asked to remove a duly elected president of the United States, and you’re being asked to do it in an election year,” he said, adding:

There are some of you in this chamber right now that would rather be someplace else. That’s why we’ll be brief. Why would you rather be somewhere else? Because you’re running for the nomination of your party. I get it. But this is a serious deliberative situation.

Elections are the reason a president runs the executive branch and not executive branch employees who work for a president, White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin said in making the first arguments of the day.

“For two centuries, the president has been regarded as the sole organ of the nation in foreign affairs. So the idea that we are going to find out when the president had the wrong subjective motives by comparing what he did to the recommendations of some interagency consensus among staffers is fundamentally anti-constitutional,” Philbin told the senators.

The House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report to the House Judiciary Committee criticized Trump for acting in his own interest when he did not follow the recommendations of foreign policy advisers regarding his conversation with Zelenskyy.

“It inverts the constitutional structure. It’s also fundamentally anti-democratic because our system is rather unique in the amount of power that it gives to the president,” Philbin said, adding:

The executive here has much more power than in a parliamentary system. But part of the reason that a president can have that power is that he is directly, democratically accountable to the people. There is an election every four years to ensure that the president stays democratically accountable to the people. But those staffers in the supposed interagency who have their meetings and make recommendations to the president are not accountable to the people.

There is no democratic legitimacy or accountability to their decisions or recommendations. That is why the president is the head of the executive branch. That is why he has the authority to actually set policy and make determinations regardless of what the staffers may recommend.

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.

Other coverage of the impeachment trial for The Daily Signal by White House correspondent Fred Lucas:

Under Bolton Shadow, 6 Big Moments From Day 6 of Trump Impeachment Trial

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

7 Big Moments in Democrats’ Final Arguments to Remove Trump

7 Highlights From Day 3 of the Trump Impeachment Trial

5 Flash Points From Impeachment Trial’s Opening Arguments

What to Know About Democrats’ 7 Impeachment Managers

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.

THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY: Peace to Prosperity — A Vision to Improve The Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People

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“The Trump administration’s approach to the issue of peace in the Middle East differs from that of previous US administrations in that it is based on facts on the ground as they have evolved over time. The US peace team appears to have jettisoned both the historical “blame game” and the contradictory narratives of the Palestinians and the Israelis, which have combined to frustrate all prior peace initiatives.” – The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

On January 28, 2020 President Donald J. Trump released Peace to Prosperity — A Vision to Improve The Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People. The Peace to Prosperity contains two components:

  1. A Political Framework.
  2. An Economic Framework.

According to WhiteHouse.gov/PeaceToProsperity:

This Vision is the most realistic solution to a problem that has plagued the region for far too long.

It creates a path to prosperity, security, and dignity for all involved. If the parties can agree on this framework as a basis for negotiations, the potential for both the Israelis and the Palestinians and the region is unlimited.

The Political Framework

Palestinians and Israelis alike deserve a future of peace and prosperity. A realistic two-state solution will protect Israel’s security, fulfill the aspirations of self-determination for the Palestinian people, and ensure universal and respectful access to the holy sites of Jerusalem.

This Vision would achieve mutual recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the nation-state of the Palestinian people—each with equal civil rights for all its citizens. The plan designates defensible borders for the State of Israel and does not ask Israel to compromise on the safety of its people, affording them overriding security responsibility for land west of the Jordan River. For Palestinians, the Vision delivers significant territorial expansion, allocating land roughly comparable in size to the West Bank and Gaza for establishing a Palestinian State. Transportation links would allow efficient movement between Gaza and the West Bank, as well as throughout Palestine. The plan does not call for uprooting any people, Arab or Jew, from their homes.

The Economic Framework contains 3 Parts:

  1. Unleashing Economic Potential. Peace to Prosperity will establish a new foundation for the Palestinian economy, generating rapid economic growth and job creation. This part of the plan will create a business environment that provides investors with confidence that their assets will be secure by improving property rights, the rule of law, fiscal sustainability, capital markets, and anti-corruption policies.
  2. Empowering the Palestinian People. Peace to Prosperity will unlock the vast potential of the Palestinian people by empowering them to pursue their goals and ambitions. This part of the vision will support the Palestinian people through education, workforce development,  and an improved quality of life.
  3. Enhancing Palestinian Governance. While implementing Peace to Prosperity will require significant international support, no vision for the Palestinians can be realized without the full support of the Palestinian people and their leadership.

Here is our take on President Trumps initiative:

  • Peace to Prosperity (The Plan) is historic in its breath and depth of detail.
  • The Plan provides for a Palestinian state within the state of Israel.
  • The Plan is subject to mutual negotiation on the details.
  • The Plan puts pressure on the Palestinians because the Israelis have already agreed to the plan.
  • The Plan requires the Palestinians to reject terrorism in all of its forms.
  • The Plan provides for a Jewish capital (Jerusalem) and a Palestinian capital (East Jerusalem).
  • The Plan is embraced by multiple Arab nation states.
  • The Plan provides incentives for both sides to win.
  • The Plan ends the false narrative that there is any “occupied territories” in Israel.
  • The Plan must be implement in 4 years. This would mean that on January 28, 2024 the agreement must be finalized.

The unanswered questions are:

  • Will the Palestinian leadership negotiate in good faith or will they continue down a path that has lead to death and destruction?
  • Will key Arab nations support the plan?
  • Will the European Union support the plan?
  • Will Russia and China support the plan?
  • What will happen if agreement is not reached in 4 years?

One of the keys to this plan is getting the details to the Palestinian people. It is imperative to bypass the PLO, HAMAS and the state run media to address the Palestinian people directly.

CLICK HERE TO READ: Peace to Prosperity — A Vision to Improve The Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People

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Trump Offers Middle East Peace Deal: ‘We Have an Obligation to Humanity to Get It Done’

Abbas refuses Trump’s call, says US President is “a dog, son of a b**ch, a violent man”

Trump peace plan offers “Palestinians” a state with increased territory and $50 billion

Former Israeli Ambassador to US: Every time “Palestinians” are offered peace, they say “No”

Trump Peace Plan Gives Israel Settlements, Jordan Valley and Jerusalem

RELATED VIDEO: “Palestinians,” enraged at Trump’s peace plan, burn photo of Trump and Netanyahu.

https://twitter.com/Farberyanki/status/1222223063179235329?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1222223063179235329&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jihadwatch.org%2F2020%2F01%2Fvideo-palestinians-enraged-at-trumps-peace-plan-burn-photo-of-trump-and-netanyahu

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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Trio of Dem senators considering vote to acquit Trump

Under Bolton Shadow, 6 Big Moments From Day 6 of Trump Impeachment Trial

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

7 Big Moments in Democrats’ Final Arguments to Remove Trump

7 Highlights From Day 3 of the Trump Impeachment Trial

5 Flash Points From Impeachment Trial’s Opening Arguments

What to Know About Democrats’ 7 Impeachment Managers

RELATED ARTICLE: Pam Bondi Blew Up the Democrats’ Narrative on Hunter Biden and Burisma

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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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

It’s Time for Crucial Decision-Making in the Impeachment Trial

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

Third World Waiting for Trump to Leave so Border Invasion Can Go into High Gear

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Editor:  Don’t miss this morning’s post at RRW about how much the President is saving taxpayers by cutting the US Conference of Catholic Bishops funding!

Reader Jonathan directed me to this important post by Todd Bensman at the Center for Immigration Studies on Friday.

U.S.-Bound Migrants Gambling on Trump Defeat in November

TAPACUHLA, Mexico — Honduran Katherine Cabrera is among thousands of migrants who didn’t expect to get bottled up in this southern Mexican city, unable to proceed to the American border as planned, because of President Donald Trump’s insistence that Mexico block them with troop deployments and whatever else the Mexicans could come up with.

New Mexican travel restriction rules required that Cabrera either go home with her newborn child or stay here in Tapachula to apply for Mexican asylum and await an outcome perhaps months in the future. Rather than return home as some have, though, Cabrera said she reached a carefully reasoned-out decision. She’ll stay in Mexico and pursue that asylum claim in a calculated gambit: that Donald Trump will lose the November 2020 election and once the Democrats control the White House, they’ll reverse everything Trump did and reopen the U.S. southern border so that she can finally breach it.

“I want Trump out!” Cabrera said. “I’ll wait for that because it would make things easier to get in.”

Read it all and then see that additional migrants from Central America can’t wait and were attempting to break into Mexico just over the weekend. Story from Reuters.

Meanwhile the President has announced a new effort to halt the explosion of so-called “birth tourism.”

And, his refugee reform has been temporarily halted by a court injunction sought by the federal refugee resettlement contractors that stand to lose millions of tax dollars if the President reins-in the dysfunctional Refugee Admissions Program.

Moral of the story—everyone needs to get busy to re-elect Donald Trump.

Demographics is destiny! We need an additional four more years to work on halting out-of-control migration.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Non-citizens Discovered Voting in Illinois; Public Interest Legal Foundation Getting Involved

Free Speech Dead in France; We Could Be Next if Dems Take the White House

EDITORS NOTE: This Frauds, Crooks and Criminals 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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

WATCH: Schiff Alienates Key Senators With Quote About GOP Heads ‘on a Pike’

I’m Sorry This Is Happening To You: Jerry Nadler Loses It and Calls Trump A Dictator

Report: NYT Killed Story on Obama WH Meeting About Burisma and Hunter Biden

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.

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 >>

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.

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.

5 Flash Points From Impeachment Trial’s Opening Arguments

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House prosecutors claimed Wednesday that President Donald Trump is trying to “cheat” to win the 2020 election, as opening arguments from each side commenced in the Senate impeachment trial of the president.

The seven House Democrats who are impeachment managers, acting as prosecutors, made their case against Trump. They include House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California and House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York.

Presenting the other side was 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.

Under rules approved late Tuesday, each side has a total of 24 hours of speaking time on the Senate floor to make their case, a time allotment that may be spread over three days.

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 >>

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.

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

For now, the seven House impeachment managers have up to 24 hours over three days to persuade senators to convict Trump and remove him from office.

Schiff opened the proceedings with a presentation lasting more than two hours. He used video and text messages to support his case, including 2016 campaign footage and clips from sworn witnesses at the House impeachment hearings in November.

Here are five dramatic scenes from the second full day of the Senate impeachment trial, which began shortly after 1 p.m. and continued into the night.

1. ‘Cannot Be Decided at the Ballot Box’

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 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 Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a time when his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, 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 who was investigating Burisma.

Schiff told the Senate, sitting as a jury, that impeachment and removal of Trump is not about a policy disagreement.

“We are here today to consider a much more grave matter, and that is the attempt to use the power of the presidency to cheat in an election,” Schiff said.

Ahead of a presidential election in November, when Trump seeks a second term, Schiff rejected the notion that the matter should be left to voters.

“The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box,” Schiff said, adding:

For we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won. In corruptly using his office to gain a political advantage and abusing that office in such a way to jeopardize that national security and the integrity of our elections, in obstructing the investigation into his own wrongdoing, the president has shown he believes that he is above the law and scornful of constraint.

2. Resurrecting the Russia Narrative

Although one impeachment article alleges Trump was soliciting Ukraine to meddle in the 2020 election, the House impeachment managers brought up Russia again.

This comes despite the conclusion by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that neither Trump nor his campaign conspired with Russian government operatives to influence the 2016 election.

Before Schiff became chairman when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 elections, the House Intelligence Committee reached a similar conclusion prior to release of the Mueller report.

Nevertheless, Schiff wasn’t ready to let the subject of Russia go.

“This is not the first time the president solicited foreign interference in our elections,” Schiff said. “In 2016, then-candidate Trump implored Russia to hack his opponent’s email account—something the Russian military did only hours later. Only hours later.

“When the president said, ‘Hey Russia, if you’re listening,’ they were listening. Only hours later, they hacked his opponent’s campaign.”

In 2016, Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was under FBI investigation for conducting State Department business over an unsecure private email server.

Weeks after then-FBI Director James Comey announced that he wouldn’t recommend prosecution of Clinton, despite thousands of “missing” emails, Trump talked about the issue on the campaign trail.

This also came after news that Russia was believed to have hacked the Democratic National Committee.

“If it is Russia, it’s really bad for a different reason,” Trump said at a rally on July 27, 2016. “Because it shows how little respect they have for our country when they would hack into a major party and get everything.”

“But it would be interesting to see—I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That will be next.”

Later in the House impeachment managers’ arguments in the Senate, a video clip showed a Trump interview with ABC News after the Mueller investigation concluded, in which Trump was asked if he would report to the FBI if Russia or China offered him negative information on his opponent, or would take the information.

“I think maybe you do both,” Trump told the network in June. “I think you might want to listen; there isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said,] ‘We have information on your opponent’—oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

Arguing on the Senate floor, Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, proclaimed of the clip: “Shocking video.”

3. Trump’s Real-Time Response

Trump apparently weighed in on Schiff’s arguments from the economic conference he was attending in Davos, Switzerland. He took the time for a short tweet, in all capital letters: “NO PRESSURE.”

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1220073313768099840?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1220073313768099840&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailysignal.com%2F2020%2F01%2F22%2F5-flash-points-from-impeachment-trials-opening-arguments%2F

The president was making the point that he did not pressure Zelenskyy to conduct investigations of the Bidens and possible Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election in order to get $391 million in congressional approved military aid.

Zelenskyy also has said repeatedly that there was no pressure from Trump.

4. Citing an Actual Statute

Trump defenders and independent legal analysts frequently note that after House Democrats failed in their effort to show Trump had engaged in bribery or extortion, they had to rely on vague charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress—neither of which are crimes in federal statutes.

However, Schiff pointed to a Government Accountability Office opinion last week that said Trump violated a law called the  Impoundment Control Act in delaying the congressionally approved assistance to Ukraine.

The California Democrat said the president’s lawyers “pooh-poohed” the GAO’s finding.

“They are a nonpartisan organization that both parties have come to rely upon, but I’m not surprised they don’t like the conclusion of the GAO because the Defense Department warned them that this was going to be the conclusion,” Schiff said. “And that conclusion was that a hold on aid was not only wrong, it was not only immoral, it was also illegal.”

The GAO provided a legal opinion, not a legally adjudicated decision, and the White House Office of Management and Budget disputed the finding.

The 1974 Impoundment Control Act provides the executive branch only narrow and limited discretion in spending money appropriated by Congress and signed into law by the president in the budget process.

“It violated the law, a law that we passed, so that presidents could not refuse to spend money that we allocated for the defense of others and for ourselves,” Schiff said.

The GAO and a federal court determined that President Barack Obama violated certain laws regarding congressionally approved expenditures, The Wall Street Journal noted.

5. Defending the Bidens

Senate Democrats spent most of Tuesday asserting that they were committed to having witnesses testify in the Senate trial. However, before the trial began Wednesday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., threw that desire into question.

During a press conference, Schumer was asked about a possible deal to have testimony from Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, in exchange for testimony from Hunter Biden about his lucrative board position with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company, while his father was vice president and Obama’s point man on Ukraine policy.

“That trade is not on the table,” Schumer told reporters. “This isn’t like some fantasy football trade. Trials aren’t trades for witnesses.”

Viktor Shokin, then Ukraine’s prosecutor general, was investigating Burisma in 2016, when Biden visited the country.

Biden boasted on camera at a 2018 event that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine unless the government fired Shokin. He was fired.

Biden defenders say his threat had nothing to do with the Burisma probe.

Nadler delivered a strong defense of the former vice president on the Senate floor.

“It is true that Vice President Biden helped remove Mr. Shokin, who was widely believed to be corrupt,” Nadler said, adding:

It was official policy of the United States, the European community, and others—in order to fight corruption in Ukraine—to ask that Shokin and [former Ukraine prosecutor Yuriy] Lutsenko be removed. So Vice President Biden, in fulfilling U.S. policy, pressured Ukraine to remove Shokin, not to secure some personal benefit, but to advance the official policy of the United States and its allies.

Nadler invoked the Watergate scandal that enveloped President Richard Nixon as he talked about Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, who pursued the president’s interest in investigations in Ukraine.

“Who benefited from this scheme? Who sent Mr. Giuliani to Ukraine in the first place?” Nadler said.

“Of course, we could rephrase that question, as the former Republican leader of the Senate, Howard Baker, asked it in 1973: What did the president know and when did he know it?”

Ken McIntyre contributed to this report.

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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Alleged Whistleblower Had Deep Anti-Trump Connections to Schiff Staffer

Rand Paul Formally Invites Trump To Attend Impeachment Trial As His Guest

Exclusive: North Dakota Republican Senator Debunks Adam Schiff’s Claim Of Unfair Impeachment Trial

Ted Cruz Says Adam Schiff Made Hunter Biden’s Testimony ‘Directly Relevant’

‘Obviously Pornographic’: Tucker Carlson Mocks Media’s ‘Surging Waves Of Ecstasy’ Over Adam Schiff

RELATED VIDEO: Mark Levin Delivers His Opening Statement on Impeachment to Senate!

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.

FLORIDA: Cop suspended for liking his wife’s social media posts criticizing Tlaib and Omar

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Lost in the fracas here is the fact that what Annabelle Lima-Taub wrote is largely true. Tlaib really is demonstrably an anti-Semite who is friendly with several open supporters of jihad terror. See, for example, all the evidence here and here. That she might “blow up Capitol Hill” is hyperbole, but of course J. C. Jimenez never for a moment considered the possibility that Anabelle Lima-Taub may actually have been on to something, or that Ilhan Omar really might be a hatemonger and that Rashida Tlaib may really be an anti-Semite who is sympathetic to jihad terror groups and jihadis themselves. And no establishment media journalist would dare ask Tlaib or Omar themselves for a statement on their obvious closeness to anti-Semites and supporters of the jihad against Israel. Establishment media journalists only ask tough questions to those who dissent from the Leftist agenda, not to those who support that agenda.

Pablo Lima should immediately be reinstated, and Jimenez should apologize to him. But that would require this to be a sane world.

“Bay Harbor Islands cop suspended for social media post on wife’s anti-Muslim comments,” by Aaron Leibowitz, Miami Herald, January 16, 2020:

The husband of a Hallandale Beach commissioner who was condemned for anti-Muslim comments was placed on administrative leave by the Bay Harbor Islands police department Thursday for social media posts appearing to show support for his wife’s views.

Pablo Lima, a corporal in Bay Harbor Islands and a former vice president of the Miami-Dade police union, submitted an application Tuesday to become the town’s next police chief.

On Thursday morning, after the Miami Herald asked town officials about comments and posts that Lima “liked” on Facebook and Instagram, the department placed him on paid leave and opened an internal affairs investigation.

“The content of the social media posts that were brought to our attention are not consistent with our Town’s values and policies,” Town Manager J.C. Jimenez said in a statement. “Corporal Pablo Lima is currently on administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal affairs investigation. State law prohibits us from discussing details of an open internal affairs investigation.”…

In January 2019, the Hallandale Beach City Commission voted 3-2 to condemn Commissioner Anabelle Lima-Taub for a Facebook post saying that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman elected to the U.S. Congress, might become “a martyr and blow up Capitol Hill.”

The post was denounced as hate speech by numerous Muslim and Jewish human rights organizations, but Lima-Taub remained unapologetic, saying Tlaib’s support for boycotting Israel equated her with terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

The day of the commission vote, dozens of supporters of Lima-Taub held Israeli flags and signs calling Tlaib a terrorist outside Hallandale Beach City Hall. The group included people with a wide range of politics, including those who support Israel and denounce the boycott movement against it, and far-right Internet personality and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

On Jan. 30, 2019, one week after the vote to condemn the Israeli-born Lima-Taub, Pablo Lima shared a story on his Facebook page from WLRN.org titled, “Why A Hallandale Beach Panel Condemned A Commissioner For Anti-Islamic Language.”

Lima proceeded to “like” five comments showing support for Lima-Taub, including multiple comments that appeared to espouse anti-Muslim sentiments. One comment that Lima “liked” included the line: “This [piece of s—] took her oath on the Koran.”

“Screw these liberal commisioners and mayor,” the comment said. “When will these politicians grow some cohones and start supporting America and it’s Americans. They talk about [Lima-Taub] being a racist and spewing hate. These [expletive] forget that this muslim [Tlaib] supports the people who flew planes into our NY twin towers and killed over 5000 people and more dying from exposure still 18 years later.”

The comment continued: “This [piece of s—] took her oath on the Koran. She openly hates Jews and talks about how they should all die or be killed. Remind me again why you would not support Lima-Talib [Lima-Taub]?”

Lima also “liked” comments on the post that said: “I applaud her”; “Complete BS….”; and “free speach fk them.”

Another comment that Lima “liked” said: “But Talib [Tlaib] gets to spew her hatred of Jews and others not of the Islamic faith and it’s ok not to defend yourself ? I’m with the commissioner, awaiting the next terrorist plot to open eyes again only when something happens.”

Lima did not post any comments below the Facebook post himself.

The Herald also made Bay Harbor Islands officials aware of an Instagram post by Lima-Taub that was “liked” by Lima’s personal account.

In a post on Sept. 11, 2019, Lima-Taub quoted a statement by U.S. Rep Ilhan Omar ⁠— one of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress, along with Tlaib ⁠— that “some people did something” in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Lima-Taub, using her Instagram account “@theroguecommissioner,” called Omar a “hate monger” and said the United States was “founded on Judeo-Christian values.”

“#NeverForget #911 ‘Some people did something,’ as per America’s vitriolic hate monger, @repilhan!” Lima-Taub wrote. “Those 19 Jihadi terrorists massacred over 3,000 innocent men and women, encroached on our constitutional rights and caused several billion in loss to dollars with the deliberate action to destabilize our economic stability.

“This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we must never let the deaths of those who perished on 9/11 be in vain.”…

The Bay Harbor Islands police department’s social media policy prohibits any speech that “ridicules, maligns, disparages, or otherwise expresses bias against any gender, race, religion, or any protected class of individuals.”…

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RELATED AUDIO: Robert Spencer on Iran in context

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

The Senate Impeachment Trial: 8 Things You Need to Know

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The House of Representatives has chosen members to participate in the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, and they have presented the articles of impeachment to the Senate.

This is only the third impeachment trial of a president in our nation’s history, with the others occurring in 1868 for Andrew Johnson and 1999 for Bill Clinton.

Here are eight things you need to know as the Senate prepares to begin Trump’s impeachment trial.

1. When Will the Trial Begin, and How Long Will It Last?

Senate President Pro Tempore Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, administered the oath Thursday to Chief Justice John Roberts, who will preside over the trial.

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 >>

Roberts, in turn, administered the oath to all senators. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced that the trial itself will begin at 1 p.m. Tuesday.

The Clinton impeachment took five weeks, and Johnson’s lasted 11 weeks. The Senate’s impeachment trial rules, adopted in 1986, mandate that the trial should begin at noon and last until the Senate decides to adjourn, Monday through Saturday, “until final judgment shall be rendered.”

2. What Happens at the Trial?

An impeachment trial is not like a run-of-the-mill trial, but it does have some similarities. House managers will act as the prosecution, presenting the case for impeachment to the senators, whose role is a combination of judge and jury.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced the seven members of the House who will serve as the managers, including Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.

A team of lawyers will put on the president’s defense, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone; Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow; and former independent counsel Ken Starr, whose investigation into the Whitewater controversy led to Clinton’s impeachment.

Roberts will preside over the trial, consistent with Article 3, Section 6 of the Constitution, although it is mostly a ceremonial role.

After presiding over Clinton’s impeachment trial, then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist said, “I took a leaf out of [Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera] ‘Iolanthe’ … ‘I did nothing in particular, and did it very well.’”

When the trial begins, the Senate will adopt a resolution establishing the specific timetable, including the time allotted for each side to present its case, senators to ask questions, and the Senate to consider motions.

At that point, if the Senate follows the general pattern of the Clinton trial, the Senate will vote on a motion to dismiss the impeachment and, if that motion fails, on whether additional witnesses or evidence should be considered.

During Johnson’s impeachment trial, the prosecution and defense called a total of 41 witnesses. During the Clinton trial, three witnesses provided videotaped testimony.

McConnell and several other Senate Republicans have indicated they think the Senate should rely on transcripts of the testimony of witnesses who appeared before the House, while Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and several other Democrats have demanded that witnesses be called to testify.

3. Does the President Have to Appear Before the Senate?

No. While the Senate does issue a summons to the individual being tried, its impeachment trial rules allow for an appearance by the defendant or by his attorney.

The Senate tried, unsuccessfully, to force Johnson to appear for his impeachment trial. The New York Times published an account of how Chief Justice Salmon Chase asked the Senate sergeant-at-arms to summon the president.

“In a loud voice, and amid the stillness of the whole chamber, he called three times, ‘Andrew Johnson, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Johnson!’” but instead the president’s legal team, including Attorney General Henry Stanbery (who resigned the day before) and former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis, arrived.

Clinton likewise did not appear before the Senate during his trial.

Trump previously indicated he would “strongly consider” testifying or providing a written statement to the House during its impeachment inquiry, but that didn’t happen. Odds are, Trump won’t be present at the Senate trial.

4. What Are the Rules the Senators Will Follow?

Senators are not required to employ a specific standard of proof. During the 1986 impeachment trial of U.S. District Judge Harry E. Claiborne, he made a motion to designate “beyond a reasonable doubt”—the standard in criminal trials—as the standard for his trial.

After the presiding officer ruled that “the question of standard of evidence is for each senator to decide individually,” the Senate voted 75 to 17 against establishing a mandatory standard.

Similarly, the rules of evidence used in criminal trials do not apply in an impeachment trial. The Senate’s impeachment trial rules state that the Senate’s presiding officer has the authority to rule on questions of evidence.

Any senator, however, may ask that the full Senate vote on such matters. That reflects the Constitution’s assignment to the Senate of “the sole Power to try all Impeachments.”

5. Can Senators Be Disqualified for Showing Bias?

Senators have taken an oath to “do impartial justice, according to the Constitution and laws” in all things pertaining to the impeachment trial.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the minority whip, argued that some senators have already failed to meet the “independent and dignified” standard the Constitution envisioned.

There have already been calls for the House managers to move to disqualify senators whose impartiality is in question. There is no basis in the Constitution, Senate rules, or history for such an attempt.

The only qualification for participating in a Senate impeachment trial is to be a senator.

6. What Happens After the Trial?

While the trial itself will be open to the public, the Senate’s deliberations after its conclusion will not be.

The Senate will then come back into public session to vote on each article of impeachment. Senate impeachment trial rules say that the Senate must vote on each article in its entirety, and the Constitution requires the vote of “two-thirds of the [senators] present” for conviction.

Removal from office is automatic upon conviction, and the Senate may vote separately whether to disqualify the defendant from serving in any other federal office.

The Constitution explicitly provides, however, that these consequences by the Senate do not, if the defendant’s conduct is also criminal, prevent “Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

7. If the Vote Fails in the Senate, Can the President Be Retried?

In theory, he likely could be retried in the future. Although neither the Constitution nor Senate rules address this issue, and no precedent exists for it, a few legal scholars, such as former Obama administration official Neal Katyal, have pointed out that the Fifth Amendment Double Jeopardy Clause does not apply to impeachment proceedings.

A retrial on the same charges, however, would seem highly unlikely, and such a retrial would certainly run counter to the general principle of double jeopardy that someone cannot be tried twice for the same offense.

What is more plausible and likely is that the House would introduce new articles of impeachment, which it could do.

8. Will the Senate Conduct Other Business During the Trial, and Will It Interfere With the Supreme Court’s Work?

Senate committees may hold hearings in the morning of each trial day, but doing any business such as sending bills, nominations, or other matters to the full Senate would require the consent of all senators.

The Senate impeachment rules provide that the chamber must suspend its legislative and executive business while the trial is under way.

The trial should not affect the Supreme Court’s oral argument schedule. The court has arguments scheduled Tuesday and Wednesday, but those will conclude by 11 a.m.

The court won’t meet again for arguments until Feb. 24. Aside from taking up some of Roberts’ time in the afternoon, the trial is unlikely to otherwise affect the court.

COLUMN BY

Thomas Jipping

Thomas Jipping is deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: @TomJipping,

Elizabeth Slattery

Elizabeth Slattery writes about the proper role of the courts, judicial nominations, and the Constitution as a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Read her research. She hosts SCOTUS101, a podcast about everything that’s happening at the Supreme Court. Twitter: @EHSlattery.

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Impeachment Diary Day 1: Battle Lines Drawn

Republicans Vote Down Chuck Schumer’s Amendment Requesting White House Documents

RELATED VIDEO: Marsha Blackburn: Senate can only review, not expand Impeachment

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.

PODCAST: ‘Pro-Life Is Pro-Woman’ — What to Expect From 2020 March for Life

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“Life Empowers: Pro-life Is Pro-Woman” is the theme of this year’s March for Life, set to take place Friday in the nation’s capital. Since 1974, the March for Life has gathered to remember the lives lost since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, and to remind America that each life has value.

Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss what to expect at this year’s march and where the pro-life movement as a whole is headed in 2020. Listen to the podcast or read the lightly edited transcript below.

Virginia Allen: I am joined by the president of March for Life, Jeanne Mancini. Jeanne, thank you so much for being with me today.

Jeanne Mancini: Thanks so much for having me, Virginia.

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 >>

Allen: Now, March for Life began in January of 1974, one year after the passage of Roe v. Wade. March for Life really started out just as a small, peaceful demonstration, but it quickly grew into the world’s largest pro-life event. The 2020 march is taking place on Jan. 24 in Washington, D.C. Can you share with us what the theme is that you all chose for this year’s march?

Mancini: I’d love to and if it’s OK, I’ll just give a little bit of backdrop that every year we do a lot of thinking and discerning about the appropriate theme because with the March for Life being the only place where all of the different pro-life groups come together annually, it’s an awesome springboard to message, essentially, about what we think are the most cutting edge, most pressing issues in building a culture of life.

Themes in past years have included adoption and nubile decision. Another year, in fact, last year, we had pro-life as pro-science and really delved into the science behind embryology and some of the wonderful neonatal surgeries available, etc.

This year our theme is “Life Empowers: Pro-Life Is Pro-Woman.” And, of course, this is the year where we celebrate the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which created a woman’s right to vote.

So it’s a great opportunity to go back and look at the suffragist, the early feminist, the early female leaders who recognize the inherent dignity of women and the inherent dignity of the unborn. We’re not at odds with each other and they had a really good understanding about that.

We’re having a lot of fun with this theme and we’re excited to be able to talk about that more next week.

Allen: Absolutely. Now, who is speaking at this year’s march?

Mancini: We’ve got a great, great, great lineup and stay tuned because there are more announcements to be made even tomorrow.

Legislatively, we will welcome to the stage Representative Chris Smith, as well as state Representative, state Senator, as of yesterday, Katrina Jackson.

Chris Smith is very well-known. He’s from New Jersey and just a stalwart on our issues.

Katrina Jackson as well is very interesting because she’s one of the few pro-life Democrats and, in particular, we’re so interested to have her this year because she was the author of the bill in Louisiana related to abortion clinic regulations that then became a law. And now will go before the Supreme Court in March. And so it’ll be very interesting to hear from Senator Jackson.

So those are some of our legislative speakers and there’s a few more to be there.

We have Claire Culwell and Melissa Ohden. They both have these incredibly inspiring stories. They both survived abortion, essentially. And their lives are such witnesses and so they’re going to share their stories. And, of course, we’ll link that very much to the born-alive discharge petition in the House.

Right now we’ve got Jim Daly from Focus on the Family, Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of Susan B. Anthony List—a good year for Marjorie to speak with the theme. Another wonderful woman, she’s a pro-life leader in New Mexico, Lisa Martinez.

We also have a local pastor, David Platt from McLean Bible Church, a very well-known church here in the D.C. area. He will be doing our closing prayer.

And, like I said, we’ve got a few more announcements. And I should say our favorite speaker, at least when we do our surveys after the March for Life, is almost always the young person that speaks because, of course, by and large the participants in the March for Life are young people.

Our one specific designated young person who’s speaking this year is Catalina Scheider Galiñanes. And she is from Oakcrest, a school in Vienna, Virginia. She’s going to speak about why she’s pro-life.

Allen: Wow. So many amazing speakers. I really look forward myself to hearing many of them at the event on the 24th.

People come to March for Life in Washington, D.C., from states all across America. What is that message or motivation that you are really hoping that marchers will take with them back to their home states and their communities?

Mancini: The March for Life is very interesting in that it’s a place to come and witness and testify to the beautiful inherent dignity of the unborn person. And yet, ironically, for those of us who participate in the march every year, it’s an opportunity for our own hearts and minds to be changed even more about this issue.

I’ll just give you a quick example of that … I know I’m kind of backing my way into the answer here, but I had a family member come and participate from out West last year and it was the first time he had come and he’s always been pro-life, but it was quite a sacrifice to come.

He and his wife and one of his children came and had a really beautiful time. I think … his eyes were opened to the significance of the issue and perhaps his heart was changed even more in the direction of life.

And while he had a very busy schedule last year with having kind of a … I guess you could say a break from work for a few months as he was changing to a new job. This year, he’s again coming because he realized how important it is and it’s like, again, his own experience was changed and he wants to do more in his local community.

So what I would say is that the March for Life, again, while it’s a moment to testify and to give witness in the public square about the unborn, it also changes our own hearts.

Our deepest hope as those of us who pull this event together is that marchers go back home and make a difference in their local community. Because if it’s just one day that we’re coming together and are really [having a] motivating and exciting day, then we’re not doing our job. The job is really recognizing that we each have a role to play in building a culture of life and to do that in the area where we are planted.

Allen: Speaking of working in that area where you’re planted, you all have also launched a number of marches across America in different cities. Why did you feel that it was important to not just have the national march but also to have marches in states across America?

Mancini: Well, a few years ago as a pro-life organization in D.C,. we found that we were being tapped to do all things and there was a bit of … mission creep even within the organization, not terribly so, but it allowed for some reflection.

After some time I think we were all a little bit burned out and it gave us an opportunity to really look interiorly as well as look up to God and really think about why was the March created and what do we bring to the pro-life movement and to building a culture of life that no other pro-life group brings.

So, what can we do better and more of to end abortion, to change hearts and minds so that abortion is unthinkable in our country? And simultaneously, if you were to ask us, “What is the single thing that you get the most calls about or the most questions about?” It was to help groups start marches in their states and in their local areas.

We didn’t really have the bandwidth to do that well. I mean, we had sort of a very informal toolkit and we take calls and try to give technical assistance, but for the most part, we weren’t really staffed up to be able to help groups do that in a powerful way. So all of that led to a lot of soul-searching and deep discernment with the board.

We decided to try as a beta test, a state march program. So our first state march was in Virginia last year and it was in April and we brought out over 7,000 people for it. And we’re the lead story on the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which is the local Richmond paper. And for so many reasons, it was a huge success and we didn’t quite anticipate that it would be as big of a success as it was.

So this year we’ll have a second march in Virginia on Feb. 13. We’ll also have a march in Pennsylvania. That’s on May 18. And a march in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 15. Stay tuned for more announcements.

Allen: That’s so exciting. I do want to take just a moment to ask you to share a little bit about your own pro-life journey and how you got connected with March for Life.

Mancini: Oh, well, thank you for asking that. Well, let’s see. I grew up in a Catholic family and social justice and just understanding human dignity was something that was ingrained in my understanding of life and the most important things of life. …

I was 1 of 5. So we loved life, my family, and definitely lived in a way that was very respectful of life. …

After college, I did a volunteer corps, I did something called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I worked with young people that were in a crisis setting. They were in a youth crisis shelter.

They were being moved either from a situation that wasn’t safe for them to be in or they’d been found on the streets. And there was a long-term search for more of a permanent home, whether that was going to be foster care or a residential treatment center or what have you.

So my time working with those young people was very informative and I grappled a lot with the deeper questions about would it be better if some of these lives hadn’t been born? Is it unfair to bring some lives into the world when there’s such a difficult scenario and such heavy crosses that these people carry that nobody’s ever really meant to carry?

Anyways, I did a lot of sort of introspection and I came out on the other side really recognizing that every life is a gift. And I guess realizing with humility, who am I to judge the value of someone’s life because they’ve had some hard things happen to them?

And then along the way I’ve had different experiences, obviously, in life. For certain one experience [that] weighs heavily on my heart is two people very close to me when I was in college decided to have an abortion and they didn’t tell me before, they told me after. And then in some cases it was a long time after.

Just hearing the pain that they underwent was so sad and even this terrible guilt that they were experiencing. Of course, there’s always hope and healing.

And I should say that to anyone listening to your podcast, anyone who’s been involved in abortion, there’s so many wonderful groups and people to speak with to find hope and healing after having been involved in abortion.

But I just realized personally through these people who were close to me that women deserve so much better than abortion.

It was just a lived experience of what I’d always believed but I thought in a very sad reality in these situations. So, along the way there have been many different I guess you could say epiphanies throughout my life.

And you asked how I ended up getting to the March for Life. So this is a very long-winded way of answering that. But I guess about 10 or 11 years ago, I was working with Family Research Council and I was their pro-life spokesperson and just loved that job. It was so fun and I got to do a lot of policy analysis, which is really what I love to do.

So, a few years into that job, I was asked to join the board of the March for Life. And I did expecting just to be a board member for a period of time. But I never really made it to my first board meeting without a major happening. And that was that the founder of the March for Life, Nellie Gray, passed away before I went to my first board meeting.

So my first board meeting was an emergency board meeting where we were coming up with a plan for how we were going to continue the march.

In a short-term capacity, I and another board member, Patrick Kelly, took on the leadership and we thought we’d we had our plans for how that was going to happen and here I am seven and a half years later, still working with the March for Life. And lots has changed over that time. But it’s just been a big blessing.

Allen: Certainly. That’s so neat just to hear that background and your story and kind of see how all those pieces came together. It’s really, really neat.

Mancini: Thank you.

Allen: Increasingly, unfortunately, we are seeing an attitude among the pro-choice movement. It is really not only pro-abortion but advocates flaunting abortion. And you know, we see this through the Shout Your Abortion movement, examples like actress Michelle Williams during her award acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. We could go on and on, but what should the response of pro-lifers be to this really blatantly pro-abortion rhetoric?

Mancini: I think a couple things. One is to just have great confidence in what we believe. So, to remember that reality is not arbitrary and that calling something a certain name or saying that something shouldn’t have stigma or shame or what have you doesn’t make it so.

Abortion—whatever you’re going to call it, if you’re going to shout it, if you’re going to tell your story about it, etc.—always takes the life of one and most frequently wounds the life of another. So calling it something different doesn’t change that reality.

So I think just to A, recognize that. And then B—this might sound a little counterintuitive based on what I just said—to take a very merciful approach.

I mean, look, we are in a culture of what I would describe as the walking wounded because so many women and men have been involved in abortion and that very much impacts their response to these kinds of things. There’s so much woundedness around it. And so I think approaching any conversations about this topic with a lot of mercy and love and tenderness is critical.

And … I feel that we don’t ever have to twist someone’s arm behind their back to agree with us because we should have so much confidence.

Life is inherently beautiful and the pro-life message is so positive and attractive. So we really just need to show it for what it is instead of twisting someone’s arm behind their back if they don’t agree with us.

Conversely, the more that we understand about the abortion industry and even abortion procedures, it’s dark. I mean, it’s really, really dark. So to the extent that we can show that reality for what it is as well, and certainly try to prevent people from any kind of pain and loss of life. I think that’s important too.

Allen: President [Donald] Trump is often referred to as the most pro-life president in history. Looking back at his first three years in office, what, to you, are some of the most notable pro-life victories of his administration?

Mancini: Oh, that’s a great question. In terms of really creating pro-life policy, I would agree he has done more for the pro-life movement than any president when it comes to enacting policy.

Because of my job, I have to just start by talking about the March for Life. Prior to the Trump administration, we never had a president or vice president of the United States come to the march. In fact, a speech writer once told me, and this was a former speech writer, that presidents were counseled to go to Camp David around the time of the March for Life because they didn’t want to be photoed with some graphic images or something like that.

So … there’s almost been a real fear at top levels to associate with something this important. And we’ve seen the opposite from this White House. And it’s been incredible.

I will never, ever, ever forget one week after being inaugurated, there was the vice president in person at the March for Life and Kellyanne Conway, who ran a successful campaign. And that was, again, the first time.

It was a historic moment because it was the first time ever in the history of a March [for Life] that a standing vice president had come and spoken in person.

Then the following year, President Trump addressed the marchers about a mile away from the rally. So he was in the Rose Garden and there were a couple hundred young people there in the Rose Garden with him on big jumbotrons at the rally’s site. We broadcast that live and that was very exciting.

Last year, again, we had Mrs. [Karen] Pence and the vice president. So it’s just been incredible to have that level of support from the administration.

But in terms of amazing policies that they’ve enacted—gosh, there’s been so much. One of my personal favorites is the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy that had been formerly called the Mexico City policy, but that’s been reinstated and broadened.

Another favorite, of course, would be Supreme Court appointments, nominations and confirmations of both Justice [Neil] Gorsuch and [Justice Brett] Kavanaugh.

And then all of the excellent judicial nominations that are going to be at the appeals court and the district court, I think there have been over 218 of those. I don’t have the number right in front of me, but it’s high.

Returning Title 10 funding decisions to the state, launching an investigation into Planned Parenthood. I mean, again and again, there have been so many really, really great things.

Allen: Yeah. And just earlier this month, over 200 members of Congress signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade.

Of course, like you mentioned, we’ve seen all of these great new policies and legislation come out of the Trump administration. Also … 2019 did see some really devastating pro-choice legislation pushed forward. So what do you think we can expect in 2020?

Mancini: That’s a great question. Well, I think that some of the things that we need to think about are, first of all, the election. And the March for Life doesn’t endorse candidates, but we do educate. And I think that elections matter.

I know having worked in the Office of the Secretary at HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] and seeing all of the policies change—I was there during the Bush administration and then in the beginning of the Obama administration—I just have to say the pro-life vote makes such a difference.

So, elections matter and to prepare well for the election ahead because it’s going to be a big year. That’s one thing.

I know that something that we are very much focusing on at the March for Life this year is the born-alive discharge petition and just the born-alive troops.

You mentioned that there have been so many extreme laws enacted at the state, though. Of course, Illinois now passed the Reproductive Act, which makes it sort of the most pro-abortion state in our country. New York, of course, did last year. Vermont passed another similar law.

Essentially, it’s just so critical that we’re aware of these kinds of things and that we do as much as we possibly can to message on the truth about things like the born-alive discharge petition or born-alive bills at the level of the state by the ERA, etc., etc. …

You asked the question and it’s a little hard to know [what to expect this year]. The elections are in front of us. We have a mixed Senate and House, so it’s hard to pass the federal legislation right now. And then in the states there’s all sorts of different things happening.

So to fight the extreme stuff, especially in places like Virginia, my own home state, and we’re seeing the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] is going to get voted on soon there, but to continue as much as we possibly can to pass good pro-life legislation, for example, the Born-Alive [Abortion Survivors Protection] Act, which any person with common sense would agree with.

Allen: And you recently co-authored a commentary for The Daily Signal titled “Early Feminists Were Right About Unborn Human Life.” Can you tell us a little bit more about these American suffragists?

Mancini: I would love to. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t think that there is even one suffragist who was pro-abortion.

So we’ve got some fantastic quotes from, for example, Alice Paul, who called abortion the ultimate exploitation of women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was very strong in her views on this. Of course, Susan B. Anthony, etc.

But these early female pioneers, again, knew that a woman’s capacity for fertility and motherhood wasn’t a liability, but that it was a beautiful thing. I think they saw men and women as being equal in dignity but different not having to do away with the part of them that can make them mothers.

So it’s wonderful to look back and to see sort of this first wave of feminists and where they were coming from and their understanding of these kinds of issues. And then to see sort of where things are today and how far we’ve gotten from that.

For any of your listeners who have an interest in that, I cannot highly recommend enough coming to our conference the day before the March for Life.

Our keynote is one of my favorite speakers, especially on this topic. Erika Bachiochi—she’s a pro-life feminist and a legal scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And she’s got so much to say about this and herself has a tremendous testimony and story of coming from a more pro-abortion feminist perspective to where she is today.

And then we have a stellar lineup of panelists, very much speaking to different nuances about this. Sue Ellen Browder will be speaking, she’s an author, she wrote a wonderful book called “Subverted.” Now she’s got a book coming out called “Sex and the Catholic Feminist.” She’s essentially going to go into this question that you just asked me, what the early suffragettes said and a history of that. She’ll read quotes and papers, etc.

We also have Christina Francis, OB-GYN, who’s the chairman of the board of AAPLOG, the American Association of Pro-life OB-GYNs, and she’s going to talk about the consequences of abortion and especially the physiological consequences.

We also have Mary McCluskey, who works with Project Rachel Ministry on helping women and men who regret having been involved in abortion. And then Brandi Swindell, who’s the founder and CEO of Stanton Healthcare—named after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of course, an early suffragist.

So I highly recommend coming in and hearing about our theme.

Allen: And how can our listeners find out more about the march that’s happening in D.C. and then the state marches that are going to be taking place throughout this year?

Mancini: Well, follow us on all of our different mediums on social media, and check us out particularly on our website at marchforlife.org, and you can count down the hours, like you mentioned, Virginia, right at the beginning.

Allen: Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeanne. We just really appreciate your time.

Mancini: Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

PODCAST BY

Virginia Allen

Virginia Allen is a contributor to The Daily Signal. Send an email to Virginia. Twitter: @Virginia_Allen5.

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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!

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

Trump in Farsi: “Instead of dragging Iran to ruin, Iran’s leaders must put aside the terrorists”

/in , , , , , , /by

Remove Trump from office! He is daring to challenge the Left’s favorite world leader!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1218309736594116608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1218309736594116608&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jihadwatch.org%2F2020%2F01%2Ftrump-in-farsi-instead-of-dragging-iran-to-ruin-irans-leaders-must-put-aside-the-terrorists

“‘Put aside the terrorists’: Trump responds to Khamenei in Farsi,” by Zachary Halaschak, Washington Examiner, January 17, 2020:

Trump responded to a tweet Khamenei sent out on Friday, the same day that he gave his first public sermon in eight years. The 80-year-old leader tweeted that America was “villainous” and accused the United States of wanting to stab the Iranian people “in the heart.”

Trump, writing in Farsi, responded, “The noble people of Iran, who love America, deserve a government that will help them achieve their dreams, rather than focusing on killing them for revenge. Instead of dragging Iran to ruin, Iran’s leaders must put aside the terrorists and magnify Iran again!”

Trump previously tweeted in Farsi, which became the most-liked tweet in that language. The tweet racked up more than 370,000 likes.

“To the brave and suffering Iranian people: I have stood with you since the beginning of my presidency, and my government will continue to stand with you. We are following your protests closely. Your courage is inspiring,” he said last week.

Friday’s tweet earned more than 15,000 likes less than 30 minutes after it was posted….

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RELATED VIDEO: Robert Spencer on Israel, the jihad against the West, and more

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

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