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Friday, October 4, 2019
Thursday, October 3, 2019
I'm in a state of shock
Only 11 percent of network news coverage of Ukraine controversy referenced Bidens, right-leaning watchdog claims
Major broadcast network news shows only spent 11 percent of its Ukraine coverage referencing the controversy surrounding former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter's business dealings, right-leaning media watchdog Newsbusters reported on Tuesday.
According to the study, ABC, NBC, and CBS took seven hours and five minutes out of their morning and evening news shows to focus on the controversy surrounding President Trump and Ukraine. The study, conducted from Sept. 20 to Sept. 30, showed that only 46 minutes of that time was devoted to Hunter Biden and his father. That included 12 minutes from ABC, 16 minutes from CBS, and 18 minutes from NBC.
The study's Sept. 20 start date was around the time when news reports surfaced that the administration allegedly suppressed a whistleblower report on Trump asking the Ukrainian president to investigate former Vice President Biden. The former vice president has come under fire for pressuring the Eastern European nation to fire its top prosecutor, who had been investigating Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden sat on the board.
While Democrats have seized on the issue as a springboard for impeachment, Republicans have tried to refocus the conversation on the Bidens.
"Even when networks mentioned Trump’s concern about Hunter benefiting from his father’s status as vice president, they were quick to dismiss the allegations with the refrain: 'no evidence of any wrongdoing,'" Newsbusters' Geoffrey Dickens wrote.
Dickens quoted reporters on each of the three networks downplaying the idea that Hunter Biden engaged in any misconduct.
"Over on the Sept. 20 NBC Nightly News," Dickens wrote, "correspondent Hallie Jackson also downplayed any conflict of interest involving Hunter Biden: 'The President’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has suggested then-Vice President Biden tried to stop an investigation into a Ukrainian company that named his son to its board, despite no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden.'"
"But if the networks dared to look just a little bit into Hunter Biden’s history with the Ukranian energy company Burisma, they’d find plenty of evidence of questionable behavior involving the Bidens – that would be worth more than 46 minutes of coverage," Dickens added.
He pointed to a book authored by Peter Schweizer, who has defended the idea that Ukraine should investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings.
“There’s no conspiracy theory here,” Schweizer, the author of “Secret Empires,” told “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “It’s the oldest game in politics, which is: follow the money and self-enrichment. Joe Biden just wants these issues to go away.”
He added that Hunter Biden's activities were documented and that his father shouldn't dismiss the issue as a conspiracy theory. Schweizer pointed to "his son joining this corrupt board where he had no background and expertise in the country and his son doing the same thing in China."
Trump says Schiff 'helped write' whistleblower complaint, after House panel admits advance knowledge
Video 527
This article alludes to what Mark Levin said the other day...
Trump holds joint news conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto as House Democrats ramp up impeachment push.
A spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that the whistleblower alleging misconduct in the White House had reached out to Schiff's panel before filing a complaint -- prompting President Trump, in an extraordinary afternoon news conference at the White House, to accuse Schiff directly of helping write the document.
Schiff had previously claimed in a televised interview that "we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower." A Schiff spokesperson seemingly narrowed that claim late Wednesday, telling Fox News that Schiff himself "does not know the identity of the whistleblower, and has not met with or spoken with the whistleblower or their counsel" for any reason.
An aide to Schiff insisted that when Schiff mentioned "we" had not spoken to the whistleblower, he was referring to members of the full House intelligence committee, rather than staff. NBC National Security reporter Ken Dilanian flagged Schiff's explanation as "deceptive" late Wednesday.
"It shows that Schiff is a fraud. ... I think it's a scandal that he knew before," Trump said, as the president of Finland stood at an adjacent podium. "I'd go a step further. I'd say he probably helped write it. ... That's a big story. He knew long before, and he helped write it too. It's a scam."
Referring to Schiff -- a Trump antagonist who has long claimed to have surefire evidence that Trump illegally conspired with Russians -- as "Shifty Schiff," Trump characterized Democrats' impeachment inquiry as a "fraudulent crime on the American people." (Earlier in the day, Trump described the inquiry as "BULLS---," and mocked Schiff as a partisan "lowlife.")
At the press conference, Trump suggested Schiff had a "mental breakdown" and may have committed a crime by reciting an inaccurate, exaggerated version of a transcript of Trump's fateful July call with Ukraine's leader -- a move that Schiff himself later apologetically acknowledged was a "parody."
Trump also called Joe and Hunter Biden "stone-cold crooked," citing Hunter Biden's lucrative business dealings in Ukraine while his father was vice president.
Trump went on to threaten litigation concerning what he called false accusations by "the fake news media" and "in many cases, the corrupt media."
"He knew long before, and he helped write it too. It's a scam."— President Trump
Responding to Trump's comments, whistleblower attorney Mark Zaid said in a statement to Fox News: "I can unequivocally state that neither any member of the legal team nor the whistleblower has ever met or spoken with Congressman Schiff about this matter.”
The whirlwind day in Washington kicked into gear when The New York Times reported earlier Wednesday that Schiff "learned about the outlines" of the whistleblower's complaint "days before" it was filed.
Speaking to Fox News, Schiff's office denied that the intelligence committee had reviewed or received the complaint in advance, but largely confirmed the Times' reporting.
“Like other whistleblowers have done before and since under Republican and Democratic-controlled Committees, the whistleblower contacted the Committee for guidance on how to report possible wrongdoing within the jurisdiction of the Intelligence Community," Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News. "This is a regular occurrence, given the Committee’s unique oversight role and responsibilities. Consistent with the Committee’s longstanding procedures, Committee staff appropriately advised the whistleblower to contact an Inspector General and to seek legal counsel."
Boland added: “At no point did the Committee review or receive the complaint in advance. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, at the behest of the White House, refused to disclose the subject matter or the substance of the complaint to the Committee, despite its lawful obligation to do so, and despite the fact it was deemed ‘credible’ and of ‘urgent concern’ by the Intelligence Community Inspector General. The Committee did not receive the complaint until the night before the Acting Director of National Intelligence’s open hearing before the Committee – more than three weeks after the legal deadline by which the Committee should have received the complaint."
Boland went on to assert that the whistleblower should be "commended."
Other GOP sources told Fox News that the development was unsettling and undermined the integrity of the Democrats' ongoing impeachment inquiry.
"This is totally unsurprising," a Republican official close to the matter told Fox News on Wednesday. "Schiff was clearly involved in orchestrating this from the very beginning."
Republicans have suggested other Democrats besides Schiff may have had advance notice. House Republican Conference Chairman Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., on Monday pushed for answers on how much top Democrats knew about the explosive White House whistleblower's complaint before it was officially made, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's head-turning comments during a televised interview on Sunday.
"He told me it was perfect, that there was nothing on the call," Pelosi, D-Calif., said on CBS News' "60 Minutes," referring to a conversation she had with President Trump before the Trump administration released either a transcript of his July phone call with Ukraine's leader or the whistleblower's complaint.
"But, I know what was in the call," Pelosi continued, before quickly adding, "I mean, uh, it was in the public domain."
Pelosi's remark drew scrutiny from Republicans because no verbatim account of Trump's call had yet been made publicly available.
"@SpeakerPelosi said on 60 Minutes last night she knew the details of the classified Ukraine call before White House released transcript," Cheney tweeted. "This is starting to seem like a political set up. So, Madame Speaker, 'what did you know and when did you know it?'”
Speaking to Fox News, Pelosi communications director Ashley Etienne said the House speaker was referring only to publicly available information, and that Cheney had misinterpreted the question Pelosi had been asked. Etienne insisted that to her knowledge, Pelosi was not made aware of the whistleblower complaint or the contents of the transcript before they were publicly released.
The inspector general for the intelligence community said earlier this week that the whistleblower claimed to have firsthand knowledge of misconduct -- a claim that appeared to conflict with documents sent to Congress and the director of national intelligence.
The lengthy statement Monday was posted in response to questions, raised in the media and by congressional Republicans, about the disclosure form filed by the whistleblower, who first flagged concerns about President Trump's July phone call in which he asked the leader of Ukraine to "look into" actions by the Bidens. The IG said the whistleblower stated on an initial form Aug. 12 "that he or she possessed both first-hand and other information."
According to the watchdog, the whistleblower "checked two relevant boxes" on the form: One stating, "I have personal and/or direct knowledge of events or records involved”; and the other box stating, “Other employees have told me about events or records involved.”
However, the declassified whistleblower complaint sent to Congress last week stated: "I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another."
Democrats have focused on the whistleblower's complaint, released last week, which cited information from White House officials who alleged there'd been efforts to secure Trump's July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among other conversations. The Trump administration reportedly began placing transcripts of Trump's calls with several foreign leaders in a highly classified repository only after anonymous leakers publicly divulged the contents of Trump's private calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia in 2017.
We’re finally discovering the ugly truth about China and the harm it has caused
Victor Davis Hanson:
Asia analyst Michael Pillsbury says no one ever thought China would develop the weapon system that it has today.
In these times of near civil war, Americans agree on almost nothing. Yet sometime in 2019, almost all of America finally got “woke” on China.
For years, our leaders had yawned about Silk Road neo-imperialism in Africa and Asia, and gross abuses of human rights against Chinese religious minorities and political dissidents.
Almost every assumption Washington made, both by Democratic and Republican administrations, was logically flawed at best. And at worst, these calculations were a weird mix of conservative commercial greed, liberal political correctness and shared screwball naiveté.
American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but always as weakness to be exploited. It was always ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize and begin to resemble America or a European Union nation.
Even sillier was the old shibboleth that China’s embrace of capitalist reforms — as if by some unwritten, determinist economic law — would lead to constitutional government. But the ability to buy a new cellphone never ensures the right to vote for a candidate of one’s choice.
Instead, all China did was auction off large sections of its new and more efficient economy to crony communist pseudo-capitalists and corrupt provincial officials in order to modernize the country, beef up the military, warp the international trading system — and make itself very rich.
Why did America act in such a suicidal way on China?
Cheap Chinese labor and lax American laws motivated hundreds of U.S. corporations to shut down their domestic assembly plants and relocate to China. At least at first, they were free to pay substandard wages and were mostly unregulated.
Once American businesses got hooked on mega-profits, the Chinese government slowly started stealing their technology, infringing on copyrights and patents, dumping their own merchandise on the world market at prices below production costs, running up huge trade surpluses and manipulating their currency.
But by then, American corporations were so addicted to laissez-faire profitmaking that they turned a blind eye and paid their hush money.
Universities cashed in too, both by setting up lucrative satellite campuses
in China and admitting tens of thousands of Chinese citizens. These Chinese students paid full tuition (and sometimes premiums and surcharges), turning once cash-strapped campuses into profitable degree mills.
Most college deans and presidents simply ignored the dreadful human rights record of China, not to mention occasional expatriate espionage rings designed to steal engineering and high-tech research.
If profits had blinded corporations to exploitive Chinese partnerships, political correctness conveniently offered academia and the media-political cover — as if a mostly monoracial China was a 1.3 billion-person diverse “other” with historical grievances against a supposedly racist America.
The result was that everyone profited and all remained willfully blind to the ascendant cutthroat and dictatorial colossus.
The domestic winners in the appeasement of Communist China were the two American coasts — the New York financial industry, the Washington political lobbying nexus, Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies, and the coastal mega-research universities such Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
Suddenly, the intellectual and informational classes could sell their wares in a new global market, and they profited enormously.
Few cared about the “losers” in the now-hollowed-out Midwest and in rural America. For corporate America, domestic muscular labor could be easily and cheaply replaced by millions of Chinese workers. Outsourcing and offshoring pulled investment capital out of America and put it overseas, as Chinese-assembled products brought far greater profits.
Academics could not have cared less that the Deplorables and the working classes were being wiped out, given their politically incorrect social and cultural views.
What finally woke America up were two unforeseen developments.
First, the Chinese overreached and systematically began militarizing neutral islands in the South China Sea. They derided international commercial treaties.
In racist fashion, they treated Asian and African countries as if they were 19th-century colonies. And they unapologetically lifted technology from America’s biggest and most powerful corporations to turn China into something akin to George Orwell’s “1984.”
Meanwhile, Beijing began rounding up dissidents, cracking down in Hong Kong and “re-educating” millions of Muslims in detention camps. All that brazenness finally drove the left to drop its multicultural blinders and accept the truth of renegade Chinese oppression.
Second, Donald Trump got elected president, all the while screaming that the Chinese emperor had no clothes. The cheerleaders finally listened and admitted that China had been buck naked after all.
Now we will learn whether America woke up just in time or too late. Either way, no one will credit the loud Trump for warning that China was threatening not just the U.S. but the world as we have known it.
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Gregg Jarrett: Trump did NOT commit an impeachable offense on call with Ukraine’s president – Here’s why
In their delusive demands for the impeachment of President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats are substituting partisan politics for the commands and intent of the U.S. Constitution. This became self-evident when Pelosi announced her impeachment folly the day before she even set eyes on the alleged evidence, which turned out to be no evidence at all.
The usual gaggle of misanthropes like Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff of California and Jerrold Nadler of New York have been searching for a reason – any reason – to impeach Trump ever since his improbable election in November 2016.
Anybody remember when they went ape shit because Trump had two scoops of ice cream?
With a shove from the chronically vapid Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Pelosi and her confederates have now settled on the most implausible of all their impeachment schemes peddled during Trump’s presidency – that his conversation with Ukraine’s president somehow constitutes an impeachable offense. It does not. Not even close.
Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution defines the basis for impeachment as an act of “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Anything less than that is not an impeachable offense. Were it otherwise, those who authored that esteemed document would have so stated.
Sadly, then-Republican Rep. Gerald Ford, as House minority leader in 1970, forever mangled the impeachment provision when he mistakenly observed: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
This was precisely what our framers did not intend. This is what they feared. They did not want a sitting president to be removed because a capricious Congress controlled by an opposing party disliked a chief executive or disagreed with his policies.
Yet, Ford’s misguided thesis has now been warmly embraced by legions of Democrats who despise Trump. They have dishonestly conjured up a pretext to undo the 2016 election result and drive him from office.
The charade may eventually succeed in the House, where Democrats holds a comfortable advantage and a simple majority is all that is needed to impeach. But conviction in a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate will fail miserably because a two-thirds majority is constitutionally required.
This was the wisdom of the framers. They knew that unscrupulous politicians would inevitably try to subvert the democratic process for purely political reasons. The framers made it exceedingly difficult for such politicians to achieve that end.
As I argued in an earlier column, Trump’s request that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky assist in an official and ongoing Justice Department investigation launched by Attorney General William Barr is neither criminal nor unusual.
Indeed, Trump’s appeal for help from Kiev conforms with a treaty two decades old that obligates Ukraine to cooperate with U.S. investigations or prosecutions in any criminal matters by furnishing relevant evidence upon request. This is what Trump did.
Moreover, asking for Ukraine’s help was no clandestine maneuver. On May 24 the president reminded assembled reporters on the White House lawn that Barr was investigating the origins of the Russia “collusion” hoax
“And I hope he looks at the U.K., and I hope he looks at Australia, and I hope he looks at Ukraine,” Trump said of Barr. “I hope he looks at everything, because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”
The president made it clear that Ukraine was suspected of having been involved in election meddling, along with other foreign actors. Much of this is described in my book, “Witch Hunt.”
In several hearings in April and May, Barr candidly informed Congress that he was conducting this investigation. He appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to lead the probe.
We now know that Barr asked Trump to initiate introductions between him and foreign leaders in furtherance of his probe. The president did so by approaching Ukraine’s president, while Australia initiated contact with the U.S. on its own accord.
Barr personally contacted officials in Great Britain, and he twice traveled to Italy to solicit assistance. His most recent trip occurred last Friday in the company of Durham.
There was nothing inappropriate about any of this. It was logical, sensible, and not at all uncommon. Other presidents have done the same thing. Our Justice Department has enlisted foreign help in numerous investigations over the years. It is pure sophistry for Democrats to declare such an endeavor is an impeachable offense.
Biden isn’t entitled to a “get out of jail” free card simply because he is now running for president.
Did Trump mention former Vice President Joe Biden and his son toward the end of the conversation? Of course, he did. He was right to do so.
If, in addition to meddling, Ukraine possesses evidence that the former vice president’s bragging about a “quid pro quo” was a corrupt act intended to benefit his son by extorting $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds. It is incumbent on Trump to ask Zelensky to investigate.
Biden isn’t entitled to a “get out of jail” free card simply because he is now running for president. Hillary Clinton coveted such a card, and it should never happen again.
Lost amid the cacophony of condemnation of Trump is the fact that the Criminal Division of the Justice Department examined the official record of the Trump-Zelensky telephone call and concluded there was no crime, not even a violation of campaign finance laws. “All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion,” said the Justice Department.
Some constitutional scholars have ventured that a president’s abuse of his official powers might rise to the level of an impeachable offense, even though it may not fall under the conventional statutory definitions and strict language of crimes and misdemeanors.
This is not an entirely misbegotten argument. Yet, it has no application to what President Trump is accused of doing. He had every right to ask for foreign assistance in his attorney general’s official investigation. This was not an abuse of power, but a proper exercise of power.
Conversely, it is Democrats who are abusing their power of impeachment by deliberately contorting its constitutional meaning to serve their own political purpose.
Barr is determined to get to the bottom of how the “witch hunt” against Trump began. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the conclusion of the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Barr posed an imperative question:
How did we get to the point where the evidence is now that the president was falsely accused of colluding with the Russians and accused of being treasonous and accused of being a Russian agent?” Barr asked. “And the evidence now is that it was without a basis.”
Americans deserve to learn the truth of what happened. A handful of foreign governments may help provide the answers.
It is not an impeachable offense to ask.
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