Free Republic

(CNN)New documents released Friday evening by House Democrats show communications between indicted Rudy Guiliani associate Lev Parnas and an aide to the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee in which they arrange interviews with Ukrainian officials and apparent meetings at the Trump hotel in Washington, DC, including with Giuliani

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will “soon” transmit the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, signaling a potential thaw in the standoff with Senate Republicans as she warned against rushing to an acquittal without a fair trial. Pelosi, D-Calif., faces mounting pressure from Republicans and some Democrats to quit delaying the president’s trial in the Senate, three weeks after the House Democrats impeached Trump on charges of abuse and obstruction. Republicans say Democrats are embarrassed by their vote. But Pelosi countered that Democrats are “proud” of upholding the Constitution and said she doubted that Senate Republicans will do...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing rising pressure to transmit articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate, as members of her own party signal they are losing patience with her delay tactics. Pelosi, D-Calif., indicated to Democratic colleagues — first on Tuesday in a memo, and again on Thursday during a press conference — that she plans to continue to hold onto articles of impeachment, at least until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., releases a resolution outlining the terms for a Senate trial. “We need to see the arena in which we are sending our [impeachment] managers....

One of the most vocal pro-impeachment Democratic voices on Capitol Hill said the “genesis” of President Trump’s impeachment began long before the Ukraine scandal. Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, one of the first lawmakers to push for Trump’s impeachment, appeared on MSNBC on Monday and was confronted about the president, and how his allies have weaponized Green’s outspokenness against Democrats. […] “The argument goes like this of House Republicans and Trump and his allies: the Democrats wanted to impeach Donald Trump from day one, they cast about looking for a set of facts that they could plausibly use to do it,...

The recent impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives is an accusation that President Trump has committed high crimes — an accusation and nothing more. By law, President Trump is presumed to be innocent of the accusation until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the alleged crimes in a court of law. One of the world's oldest principles of jurisprudence, the presumption of innocence was first codified into Roman law under the sixth-century emperor Justinian: "Proof lies on him who asserts [in this case, the House] — not on him who denies [the president]." The principle was based on...

At 9:30am tomorrow morning, on the Senate floor, I will speak about House Democrats’ precedent-breaking impeachment of the President of the United States.— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) December 19, 2019

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck back Tuesday at his Democratic counterpart's calls for an in-depth impeachment trial featuring multiple new witnesses, dismissing the push as a "fishing expedition" that would set a "nightmarish precedent." "The Senate is meant to act as judge and jury, to hear a trial, not to re-run the entire fact-finding investigation because angry partisans rushed sloppily through it,” he said on the Senate floor. In a Sunday letter, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer had called for the chamber to subpoena new documents and call witnesses who had been blocked by the White House during the...

President Donald Trump committed criminal bribery and wire fraud, the House Judiciary Committee alleges in a report that will accompany articles of impeachment this week. The report, a 169-page assessment of the case for Trump’s removal from office, contends that Trump committed “multiple federal crimes” — ones that Democrats addressed under the broad umbrella of “abuse of power,” the first article of impeachment against the president. “Although President Trump’s actions need not rise to the level of a criminal violation to justify impeachment, his conduct here was criminal,” the panel’s Democrats argue, labeling Trump’s behavior “both constitutional and criminal in...

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...

House Republicans are calling for the committee chairpersons overseeing the impeachment inquiry to release the guidelines and regulations under which depositions and transcriptions of testimony are being conducted. “We write to demand the release of the rules that are governing the depositions and transcribed interviews being conducted by the joint action of your three committees,” nearly 80 GOP lawmakers said in their Friday letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Oversight and Reform Committee acting Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) "The secrecy in which these depositions and interviews are being conducted,...

President Trump won’t budge: He refuses to comply with demands for information because the House has not formally voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry. House Democrats won’t budge: Speaker Nancy Pelosi says nothing requires the House to vote for an impeachment inquiry before conducting one. So who is right? They both are. We are an over-lawyered society that likes to see itself as governed by the rule of law. In truth, our fundamental law, the Constitution, is about the division of political authority — particularly between the Congress and the executive, the federal government’s political branches. The ultimate check on...

Everyone who already thought the case for President Trump’s impeachment was a slam-dunk went berserk Thursday, claiming that acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had just admitted to a quid pro quo with Ukraine. Except that what Mulvaney “admitted” is that the administration was doing what it should — pushing a foreign government to cooperate in getting to the bottom of foreign interference in the 2016 campaign. Virtually every media outlet in America — certainly all those that jumped on Mulvaney’s remarks — has spent most of the last three years painting such foreign interference as the blackest...

Adam Schiff is at it again, tampering with witnesses. Yesterday, he got caught trying to shove words into a witness's mouth, to make him say things he didn't want to say. I wrote about that here.Today, he's doing something just as bad, getting together with other witnesses and working out a pre-coordinated story for the coming show trial. According to Breitbart News: Itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Atlantic Council think tank reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting during the trip with acting U.S....

Schiff says committees will make impeachment inquiry transcripts public when it would not 'jeopardize investigative equities' House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a letter Wednesday that interview transcripts from closed-door impeachment inquiry depositions will be made public when they do not "jeopardize investigative equities." The Dear Colleague letter is designed to counter arguments from Republicans in both the White House and Congress that Democrats are conducting an invalid investigation, since their witness interviews are being held behind closed doors, outside the eyes of the public and lawmakers who don't sit on the three committees leading the investigations....

On Thursday at her weekly press briefing, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said the American people were “not going to decide” if President Donald Trump should be impeached. When asked about the impeachment timeline, Pelosi said, “I keep saying to people, impeachment is about the truth and the Constitution of the United States. Any other issues that you have, disapproving of the way the president has dealt with Syria, whatever the subject is, reluctance, the cowardice to do something about gun violence, the cruelty of not wanting to help our Dreamers and transgender people, the denial about the climate crisis...

I am lately struck by the similarities between the machinations that removed Nixon and what is going on now. We are all so indoctrinated about "Watergate" that we rarely remark on the oddity of a man who won 60% of the popular vote and >500 electoral votes being successfully subverted and eventually forced out by an alliance of the Deep State (CIA, FBI), the media, and especially the Congress. But it IS very odd that it happened, whatever we all may think now, we may all be missing the main story, and since the very same players (CIA, FBI), media,...

For those of you that missed Monday’s fireworks, Project Veritas actually got CNN President Jeff Zucker on audio. Here is a rundown from our friends at Right Wing Tribune: Newly leaked video from inside CNN shows that the network’s top leadership is telling staff to push President Trump’s impeachment. “BREAKING: New leaked video from inside CNN: President Jeff Zucker tells employees to push “impeachment” and that all of CNN’s stories should be about “moves towards impeachment” One of CNN’s employees says Zucker has a “personal vendetta against Trump” Reaction has been swift: “Obama’s CNN is being unmasked. Everything has to...

The White House is launching a new effort to slow the speeding Democratic impeachment push, but its noncooperation strategy is being constantly thwarted by a daily stream of explosive secrets being spilled behind closed doors on Capitol Hill. Current and former officials are painting an ever more damning picture of a wider than originally perceived scheme by President Donald Trump and his crew to pressure Ukraine that they warned could amount to a trampling of US law. Vice President Mike Pence launched a new effort Tuesday to bolster White House hopes of stalling the House inquiry long enough for Trump...

Full title: Gregg Jarrett: Latest Pelosi-Schiff impeachment ‘witch hunt’ is venomous affront to constitutional principlesThe quixotic quest to impeach President Trump is not only anathema to the fundamental principles of due process, but constitutes a full-frontal assault on the procedural protections inherent in the “due process” clause of the Constitution. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her chosen marionette, Rep. Adam Schiff, are operating in the shadows of secrecy. Their authority does not derive from the House of Representatives itself upon a full majority vote. Instead, they have commandeered impeachment power by anointing themselves as the sole determinants. They alone have chosen...

A week ago, House Republicans complained that Democrats imposed excessive secrecy on interviews conducted as part of the drive to impeach President Trump. Now, the situation appears to have gotten worse. Friday's interview of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, marked a new point — a low point, as Republicans see it — in Democratic efforts to keep impeachment information out of public view. In this way: The two previous impeachment interviews, with former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, were conducted in the format of what is known as a...