Free Republic

A top national security aide to Vice President Mike Pence told House impeachment investigators that President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political opponents were “unusual and inappropriate,” and “shed some light on possible other motivations” for the president’s order to freeze military aid to the U.S. ally.

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC). The focus on AntAC(Anti-Corruption Action Center) — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted. The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration took the rare...

Newly-entered 2020 candidate Deval Patrick boasted that the Democrats are the "party of the woke." Appearing on MSNBC on Thursday after officially launching his presidential campaign, the former Massachusetts governor was asked about the "vulnerability" of his involvement in Bain Capital, the investment firm that previously dogged Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. "You’re not running in a Republican primary, you are running in a Democratic primary," MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace told Patrick. "Your party has moved to the left." "First of all, I love that the party has moved to the left. I love that we are the party of the...

This is a Live Blog. Happening now on the YT website. Reliability of the info? Listen and judge for yourself. The two women are saying that actual incriminating Docs showing fraud was leaked by an insider with the company that conducts electronic voting for the state of Kentucky.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is spearheading the resolution, which is backed by 44 GOP senators including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Graham, during a press conference with reporters, lashed out the House impeachment inquiry calling it a "secret proceeding" and a "rogue action" that "denies due process." "The process in the House today I think is a danger to the future of the presidency," Graham told reporters. He argued that under the current procedure Trump was "pretty much shut out," adding "God help future presidents." The GOP senators not cosponsoring the resolution as of Thursday afternoon,...

Things are more fluid than they seem. That’s my impression of Washington right now. There’s something quiet going on, a mood shift. Impeachment of course will happen. The House will support whatever charges are ultimately introduced because most Democrats think the president is not fully sane and at least somewhat criminal. Also they’re Democrats and he’s a Republican. The charges will involve some level of foreign-policy malfeasance. The ultimate outcome depends on the Senate. It takes 67 votes to convict. Republicans control the Senate 53-47, and it is unlikely 20 of them will agree to remove a president of their...

The Senate never pushed back on Obama’s declared emergencies. But TEN RINOs today voted to prevent funds be diverted to the Trump Border Wall. Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey and Roger Wicker. The Senate again voted on Wednesday to end President Trump’s emergency declaration on the U.S.-Mexico border wall, paving the way for a veto showdown with the White House. Senators voted 54–41 on a resolution to end the declaration, which Trump used to shift billions of dollars from the military toward wall construction. Under the National Emergencies Act, a resolution ending the...

nthony Scaramucci says President Donald Trump’s “meltdown” is going to get a whole lot worse. On Wednesday night, the former White House communications director who was fired after just 10 days on the job said on CNN that Trump was looking at his future “and the future does not look good for him.” “As more facts unfold about Syria, as more facts unfold about the people that have been arrested recently, and the conjoinment of all those issues over there, it’s going to be devastating for the president,” he said. Scaramucci also predicted that Republicans in the Senate will soon...

RINO Paul Ryan was a disgrace as a “Republican” House Speaker, and one of his biggest failings was taking advantage of complete GOP control of Congress and the White House during President Trump’s first two years in office. Some conservatives (us included) have blamed him for losing the House, as he and more than 50 other establishment Republicans bailed on their constituents, on Trump, and on our republic ahead of the 2018 elections. None of Ryan’s anti-Trump treachery has been lost on the president.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) confirmed Thursday that he will not mount a primary challenge to President Donald Trump, stating that the president will be the Republican presidential nominee and likely win re-election in 2020. Romney, a frequent critic of President Trump, made the remarks while hosting a roundtable discussion on anti-vaping policy at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. Three Republican challengers have launched longshot primary bids against President Donald Trump — former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, former Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC), and former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) — However, several GOP state parties have already canceled...

Just over half of voters want President Trump impeached and removed from office, according to a Fox News Poll released Wednesday. A new high of 51 percent wants Trump impeached and removed from office, another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed, and 40 percent oppose impeachment altogether. In July, 42 percent favored impeachment and removal, while 5 percent said impeach but don’t remove him, and 45 percent opposed impeachment.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General said on Friday that his office is reviewing all the cases that were closed by his predecessors, including several related to the owner of a gas company where former Vice President Joe Biden’s son sat on the board. Ruslan Ryaboshapka’s comments came amid an impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump that relates to a call he made to the Ukrainian president asking him to investigate the Democratic presidential candidate and his son’s work in Ukraine. Ryaboshapka told reporters in Kyiv that prosecutors are auditing all the cases that were closed or dismissed by former prosecutors, including...

Thankfully word is getting out; people are starting to recognize the construct behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s highly political impeachment plan. [CTH will have more on the plan details soon because key democrats are leaving distinct fingerprints.] In the first four minutes of this interview Mark Levin outlines how Speaker Pelosi is throwing out customs, traditions, processes and protocols within the House impeachment scheme. This is not a flaw of their plan, this is a key feature. As CTH has outlined, a concerted group of like-minded ideologues – that also consists of Lawfare allies, are following a plan developed soon...

The rest of the title: It's 'time to risk your careers in favor of your principles.' Former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake on Monday urged Republicans in Congress not to support President Donald Trump's 2020 reelection bid, saying they have a moral obligation to put their principles first -- even if it means risking their careers. Flake, a longtime Trump critic who has before argued that the Republican Party should not support the President in 2020, made his case in an op-ed published in The Washington Post titled "Fellow Republicans, there's still time to save your souls," writing that Senate Republicans...

"Media Buzz" host Howard Kurtz criticized rival network MSNBC for its coverage of President Trump Sunday and singled out host Nicolle Wallace for talking over the president's speech and calling him a liar while it streamed live on air last week. "MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace did exactly what she and colleagues did during [Attorney General] William Barr’s [Capitol] Hill testimony -- broke in, in the middle, to accuse people of lying -- in this case, while the president was still speaking," Kurtz said. Wallace broke in mid-sentence during Trump's Wednesday news conference about the House opening a formal impeachment inquiry...

A Republican congressman supports an “oversight process" to determine whether President Trump broke the law when he asked a foreign leader to look into a political opponent’s activities. Just don’t call it an impeachment inquiry. Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada used language during a phone call with reporters on Friday night that suggested he supported the Democrats’ investigation into Trump. “Let’s put it through the process and see what happens,” Amodei said, according to the Nevada Independent. "I’m a big fan of oversight, so let’s let the committees get to work and see where it goes.” “Using government agencies to,...

On her MSNBC show, Friday, Nicolle Wallace, after boasting, "I've spent my career studying public opinion," said that independent/swing voters will be "a whole lot more likely" to believe what Nancy Pelosi says about impeachment when they hear Mitt Romney saying the same thing.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who currently sits on the board of Fox Corp., is reportedly urging Fox News to “decisively break” with President Donald Trump, according to a Thursday Vanity Fair report documenting the network’s “management bedlam.” Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman, citing four sources, reported that Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, who has long tried to move Fox News to the center, “is already thinking about how to position the network for a post-Trump future.” Ryan, the longtime Trump antagonist, has reportedly been suggesting to Murdoch that “Fox should decisively break with the president” as Murdoch holds “strategy conversations...

As House Democrats push forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, Republicans have largely rushed to Mr. Trump’s defense, or at least tempered their criticism to avoid his furious reprisals. Among the handful of exceptions, though, there has been none louder or more prominent than Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a figure who once embodied the essence of the Republican Party before Mr. Trump commandeered it, and is now in a lonely category of his own. Since the first reports a week ago that Mr. Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R....

Prominent GOP consultant Mike Murphy claimed on Wednesday that he was told by a Republican senator that the majority of Republican senators "would vote to impeach" President Donald Trump if they could do so anonymously. "These Senate Republicans, should the Democrats vote impeachment, which is far more likely than not, are going to be pinned down to a yes/no answer," Murphy, who previously advised Republican politicians including Mitt Romney, John McCain and Jeb Bush, said in an interview with MSNBC. "The politics of it will get worse and worse for Trump," the Republican political consultant, who has long been critical...