Wednesday PM ~ thefrontpagecover

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TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
The DoJ FISA Report — Trump Was Right
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Mark Alexander  
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Joe diGenova: The Allegations 
Against Giuliani Are ‘Ludicrous’
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by WILLIAM DAVIS
{ dailycaller.com } ~ Former U.S. Attorney and Fox News commentator Joe diGenova defended former Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani... in an exclusive sit down with the Daily Caller. DiGenova called the allegations that have been leveled against President Donald Trump’s personal attorney “ludicrous,” as Democrats seek to impeach Trump over the Ukraine scandal.
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How Should the Senate Deal with 
an Unconstitutional Impeachment by the House?
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by Alan M. Dershowitz 
{ gatestoneinstitute.org } ~ If the House of Representatives were to impeach President Trump on the two grounds now before it, the senate would be presented with a constitutional dilemma... These two grounds— abuse of power and obstruction of Congress— are not among the criteria specified for impeachment. Neither one is a high crime and misdemeanor. Neither is mentioned in the constitution. Both are the sort of vague, open-ended criteria rejected by the framers. They were rejected precisely to avoid the situation in which our nation currently finds itself. Abuse of power can be charged against virtually every controversial president by the opposing party. And obstruction of Congress — whatever else it may mean — cannot extend to a president invoking privileges and then leave it to the courts to referee conflicts between the legislative and executive branches. Hamilton feared that vague criteria would allow a majority of the House to impeach a president from the opposing party just because they had more votes than the president's party. He called that "the greatest danger." Madison worried that open-ended criteria, such as "maladministration" would give Congress too much discretion and power, and turn our republic into a parliamentary democracy in which the chief executive serves at the will of the legislature. To prevent these dangers, the framers settled on criteria with well-established meanings: treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors. The House Democrats are simply ignoring these words and this history, because they have the votes to do so. They are following the absurd notion put forth by congresswoman scumbag/mad-Maxine Waters that when it comes to impeachment "there is no law," and the criteria are anything a majority of the House wants it be, regardless of what the constitution mandates. This lawless view confuses what a majority of congress can get away with absent judicial review with what the constitution requires. It places Congress above the supreme law of the land, namely the constitution. Were Congress to vote to impeach President Trump on the two proposed grounds, its action would be unconstitutional. According to Hamilton in Federalist 78, any act of Congress that does not comport with the Constitution is "void." This view was confirmed by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison and is now the law of the land. So, what options would the Senate have if the House voted to impeach on two unconstitutional grounds? Would it be required to conduct a trial based on "void" articles of impeachment? Could it simply refuse to consider unconstitutional articles? Could the president's lawyer make a motion to the Chief Justice — who presides over the trial of an impeached president — to dismiss the articles of impeachment on constitutional grounds? This is uncharted territory with little guidance from the Constitution or history. There are imperfect analogies that may be informative. If this were an ordinary criminal case, and a grand jury had indicted a defendant for a non-crime say, having gay sex or an unconstitutional crime, the trial judge would be obliged to dismiss the indictment and not subject the defendant to an unconstitutional trial. Impeachment, however, is not an ordinary criminal proceeding. So, the analogy is not directly on point. But impeachment by the House is similar in many ways to indictment by a grand jury, and a removal trial by the Senate is similar to a criminal trial, including being presided over by a judge. It is entirely possible that the president's lawyers may file a motion seeking dismissal of the impeachment as unconstitutional. It is impossible to predict whether such a motion would be entertained and if so, how it would be decided...   https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15269/senate-unconstitutional-impeachment 
Lindsey Graham Goes After the Media, Explains 
What the Real Headlines of the FISA 
IG Report Should Be
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by Katie Pavlich
{ townhall.com } ~ Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham did not hold back during his opening remarks at Wednesday's hearing with Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz... "Crossfire Hurricane was probably the best name ever given to an investigation in the history of investigations 'cause I think that's what we wound up with - a crossfire and a hurricane," Graham said.
Straight out of the gate, Graham chided the media for headlines that do not reflect the contents of conclusion of IG report on FISA abuse issued earlier this week. "There's been a lot of media reports about your report before it was issued. And I remember reading all these headlines, 'Lawful investigation with a few irregularities.' 'Everything okay, low level people kind of got off track. If that's what you get out of this report, you clearly didn't read it. If that's your take that this thing was lawfully predicated and that's the main point, you missed the entire report. How do you get a headline like that? That's what you want it to be. You want it to be that and nothing more. And I can assure you if this had been a Democratic president, going through what President Trump had gone through that would not have been the headline. The headline would be 'FBI takes the law into its own hands,' 'Biased agents cut corners, lie to court, ignore exoneration," Graham said. "So the first thing I want you to know is how the cake is baked here. My goal is to make sure that people when this is over, whether you like Trump, hate Trump, don't care about Trump, you look at this as more than a few irregularities. Because if this becomes more than a few irregularities in America, then God help us all," he continued...
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Impeachment Charges DROPPED
 – Trump Is Smiling
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by Martin Walsh
{ explainlife.com } ~ House Democrats announced on Tuesday that they drafted two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. After months of sham hearings, partisan witnesses, and still no evidence the president did anything wrong... House Democrats are preparing two articles of impeachment that will focus on: obstruction of Congress and abuse of power. But many noticed that Democrats dropped two of the main charges they levied against the president since they kicked off the impeachment inquiry back in October: bribery and obstruction of justice. For several months, Democrats accused Trump of “bribing” the Ukrainian president during his July 25 phone call, where they allege the president engaged in a quid pro quo. Speaker liar-Nancy Pelosi, Rep. scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff, and others have endless claimed Trump is guilty of “bribery” when he “threatened” the Ukrainian president to open an investigation into loose lips liar-Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s shady business deals if they wanted military aid from the U.S. They also accused Trump of “obstructing justice,” but they dropped that allegation too and instead went with the vague version of “obstruction of Congress” because Trump didn’t participate in their sham hearings. Democrats are apparently going to drop accusations of “bribery” and “obstruction of justice” from their articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, which are expected to be delivered on Tuesday, according to reports. As Breitbart News’ Joshua Caplan noted Monday evening, the Washington Post broke the story that Democrats “will focus on abuse of power and obstructing Congress.” Former Federal Prosecutor Robert Ray revealed on Fox News that: (1) Democrats didn’t have evidence to prove Trump bribed anyone or obstructed justice and (2) neither charge is an impeachable offense. “My first reaction to that is despite what you just heard from Chairman scumbag liar-Nadler, neither one of those is a high crime or misdemeanor,” Ray said. He added: “So we have not passed through an investigation over the course of the last several months where it’s not treason, it’s not bribery, it’s not extortion, it’s not a foreign an illegal foreign campaign violation it’s now whatever a majority of the House of Representatives that is controlled by the Democrats say it is, which is abuse of power, abuse of conduct and an inter-branch dispute.”
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Insurance Companies Ask Supreme Court For 
$12 Billion In scumbag/liar-nObamacare Losses
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by KEVIN DALEY
{ dailycaller.com } ~ The Supreme Court seemed to agree Tuesday with arguments that Congress must pay out some $12 billion to health insurance companies... as part of a program meant to mitigate risks caused by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The companies hope to collect those funds pursuant to a provision of the ACA that says the government “shall pay” insurers who incurred losses on the scumbag/liar-nObamacare exchanges. Despite that promise, Congress has not appropriated funds to compensate insurers. “This case involves a massive government bait-and-switch and the fundamental question of whether the government has to keep its word after its money-mandating promises have induced reliance,” said Paul Clement, who represents the insurance companies before the high court. scumbag/liar-nObamacare established “risk corridors” to help health insurers participating in ACA exchanges. Those companies took on previously uninsured clients and people with preexisting conditions, but could not charge higher premiums. The risk corridors set up a system for sharing profits and losses: If costs exceed premiums received, the insurers can collect payments from the government to offset losses. Similarly, if premiums received exceed costs, the insurer must pay a portion of its profits to the government. For example, in 2016 health insurers paid $25 million into the risk corridors. By contrast, the government owed insurers $3.98 billion. Yet the Trump administration argues Congress is not obligated to make those payments, despite the law’s “shall pay” language. “HHS was required and empowered to make payments only to the extent Congress appropriated funds to do so — and Congress was free to decide whether and to what extent to fund those subsidies,” the Trump administration told the justices in legal filings. Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed to disagree. He said when Congress avoids taking on financial obligations, it uses language like “subject to appropriations,” instead of or alongside “shall pay” clauses. “Congress knows how to prevent the obligation from taking effect before the future appropriation and, in fact, does so often and did so in the Affordable Care Act,” Kavanaugh told Edwin Kneedler, a government lawyer who argued Tuesday for the administration. Clement put a finer point on Kavanaugh’s observation later in the argument. “The ‘subject to appropriations’ language is…not just a feature of many other provisions of the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “I asked one of my associates to look at how many times that appears in the U.S. Code. When he gave me 200, I told him he could stop.”...   https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/10/supreme-court-risk-corridors-case/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11232   
Jonathan S. Tobin: Iran's Regime 
Will Fall if U.S. "Keeps Pressure On"
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by Gary C. Gambill and Marilyn Stern
{ meforum.org } ~ Middle East Forum Radio host Gregg Roman spoke on December 4 with Jonathan S. Tobin, editor in chief of the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) and a contributing writer for National Review... who called in a recent op-ed for the Trump administration to exploit a "historic moment of Iranian weakness" by ramping up pressure on its Islamist regime. Tobin emphasized that recent waves of protests in Iran "are a greater threat to the regime than it has faced in the last forty years of its existence," judging from the amount of violence needed to suppress them. This puts Iran at an inflection point similar to that during the scumbag/liar-nObama administration when "international sanctions ... put it in a very difficult place." Unfortunately, at that time Iran's ruling mullahs were "rescued by the weakness of the scumbag/liar-nObama administration and its willingness to make a ... nuclear deal with them at any price." For starters, the Trump administration should further ramp up economic pressure on the regime. "As draconian as the sanctions have been for Iran up until now, they can get worse. The United States can seek to embargo all oil sales from Iran," says Tobin. "Trump hasn't gone quite all the way to really strangle the Iranian economy." Secondly, the Trump administration must take European countries to task for their continuing, if largely ineffective, attempts to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Iran via INSTEX, a bartering mechanism established at the beginning of the year to enable trade outside the U.S. financial system. Iran "is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and the Europeans are looking to keep a lifeline and the money flow to the terrorists." Thirdly, the Trump administration must respond more forcefully to Iranian provocations, such as attacks on oil tankers. However, he acknowledges that finding a way to "slap the Iranians down without escalating ... into a conflagration that the United States can't control" is no easy task. According to Tobin, Iran's extraordinary provocations over the past nine months are not a reflection of regime confidence, but rather are efforts to "distract everyone from the fact that it cannot withstand the pressures" of tightening sanctions. The Trump administration understands this – that "the more extreme the Iranians get, it shows that this policy is working," but "has erred too much on the idea of 'these are just bluffs, let's not play into their hands.'" "This is an administration whose foreign policy has always  been a mixed bag. It's always been engulfed in deeply contradictory impulses, which are embodied by the president's own beliefs," said Tobin. He continued...
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The DoJ FISA Report — Trump Was Right
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Mark Alexander:  The best indication that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s review of FISA applications is a serious problem for Democrats is the fact that The Washington Post listed it as third down in its political headlines this morning.

If the report had dispensed with the Trump administration’s claim that a handful of top government bureaucrats who supported scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton, most notably Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s former FBI Director scumbag-James Comey and former CIA Director scumbag/commie-John Brennan, used the FISA court search warrants as a layup for Robert Mueller’s investigation — in effect a bureaucratic coup d'etat to take Trump down — the report would have been the top headline this morning, teeing up fodder for the House impeachment inquisition.

scumbag/commie-Brennan and scumbag-Comey, and their corrupt scumbag/liar-Clinton cronies, used their “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation to set Trump up for a takedown. And the best evidence supporting that fact provided by Horowitz: Of the 17 most egregious “errors” a handful of corrupt FBI managers committed in order to justify the FISA warrants and launch the Mueller investigation, every one favored the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign.

As you recall, the Russia-collusion investigation  originated with the FBI’s “evidence” for unaccredited FISA warrants linked to the fake Trump dossier they knew was funded by the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign.

And that has been the fundamental basis for our objection to these “investigations” from their inception.

According to Horowitz’s report: “We identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications, and many additional errors in the Woods Procedures. While we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the case agents … we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems we identified. In most instances, the agents and supervisors told us that they either did not know or recall why the information was not shared with the OI (Office of Investigations), that the failure to do so may have been an oversight, that they did not recognize at the time the relevance of the information to the FISA application, or that they did not believe the missing information to be significant. On this last point, we believe that case agents may have improperly substituted their own judgments in place of the judgment of the OI, or in place of the court, to weigh the probative value of the information.”

In other words, members of the deep-state cabal who set Trump up proceeded on the basis of their opinion, which was obviously a reflection of their bias.

To that end, the Horowitz report concludes: “We also found that the FBI did not aggressively seek to obtain certain potentially important information from Steele [author of the fake Trump/Russia dossier]. For example, the FBI did not press Steele for information about the actual funding force source for his election reporting work.”

So, we are to believe that nobody involved in this setup thought to ask the critical question, “Who funded the dossier?” — even though it had been suggested the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign was behind it. How convenient! Again, we now know, as scumbag/liar-Clinton’s FBI backers knew then — that the funding was from the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee.

And a note regarding the report’s assertion that, based on the mandate of what Horowitz was tasked to investigate, there was no evidence of “bias.” scumbag/liar-Clinton’s backers were high-ranking FBI bureaucrats — of course they did not leave an official trail of evidence pointing to their political bias in kicking off this investigation. However, there is no question that each of the individuals involved in the chain of command demonstrated significant personal bias against Trump. Horowitz was not tasked with evaluating their personal bias, only the evidence directly related to the FISA warrants.

The FBI’s predication for those FISA warrants is what prompted Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham to declare the Horowitz report woefully incomplete.

According to AG Barr: “The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory. Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory.”

Durham, who is investigating the origins of scumbag-Comey’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation in a criminal probe, took the unusual step prior to the release of his own report to note: “I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff, however, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

The Wall Street Journal notes, “The FBI corrupted the secret court process for obtaining warrants to spy on former Trump aide Carter Page. And it did so by supplying the court with false information produced by Christopher Steele, an agent of the scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton campaign.” The editors noted further, regarding the report’s finding that “the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order,” that “This confirms what Rep. Devin Nunes and House Republicans first disclosed in February 2018, which was denied by Rep. scumbag/liar-Adam Schiff and sneered at by the press at the time.”

As seasoned political analyst Brit Hume concludes, “The 17 instances of misconduct cited in the report — they are damning… The FISA court was clearly taken for a ride by the FBI … up and down the chain of command. … The FBI has had some dark days in its past, but nothing like this recently. … This was very serious misconduct on the part of the FBI.”

Of course, the now-demented scumbag-James Comey is out taking a victory lap, laughably insisting, “The FBI fulfilled its mission — protecting the American people and upholding the U.S. Constitution.” While most rank-and-file agents are devoted to that mission, scumbag-Comey was not among them. The report indicates that, among other things, scumbag-Comey lied to Congress when he asserted he did not open a counterintelligence investigation into Trump prior to the 2016 election, leading to the FISA warrants. But in fact, he did just that.

Finally, responding to the FISA report, Trump said: “They got caught, they got caught red-handed. … Never ever should this happen again in our country.” And he is right.

Stay tuned for the Durham report…   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/67271?mailing_id=4723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4723&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

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