HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes responds to the possibilities of how HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff gained private phone records for use in his impeachment effort.

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One of the possibilities is that Lev Parnas is a foreign national. SDNY gets a subpoena from the FISA court.  Rudy Giuliani is in contact with Parnas (1-hop). They then unmask and pull Giuliani’s records and get Nunes and Solomon (2-hops).

The question would then be how did the unmasked information in an active investigation that started in the FISC end up being sent to the House Intel Committee to be disclosed to the public?

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has announced the date for the next impeachment hearing.   The date is Monday, December 9th – 2019 It appears from the announcement the HJC hearing will be set up to receive the impeachment recommendation(s) from Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee:

(HJC) The Impeachment Inquiry into President Donald J. Trump: Presentations from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Judiciary Committee  (link)

Monday December 9th, is also the same date that IG Horowitz is expected to release the results of the 21-month-long FISA investigation.

Two days later on Wednesday December 11th, Michael Horowitz will be testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his investigation…. Therefore we can expect Nadler, Pelosi and Lawfare to schedule another House event for Wednesday Dec. 11th.

Earlier today President Trump responded to the House Judiciary Committee farcical construct of a constitutional academic panel:

Moments later, Speaker Pelosi announced her instructions to the House Chair to assemble articles of impeachment for House floor vote consideration.  In response to the Pelosi announcement President Trump tweeted:

The CIA primarily leaks PR spin to the Washington Post.  The FBI primarily leaks PR spin to the New York Times; and the State Dept. primarily leaks PR spin to CNN.  This narrative distribution model is the one constant in an ever changing universe.

Cue the audio visual…  Obviously the prior Washington Post effort to conflate the Durham investigation with the Horowitz investigation didn’t get the desired result.  As a consequence it only took a few days before the Washington Post was back at it (Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett again) to try obfuscation 2.0; this time with Joseph Mifsud.

For three years the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN have sold the FBI claim that Professor Joseph Mifsud was a Russian operative passing information about Clinton’s emails to George Papadopoulos.

That essential point underpins their defense of the predicate for the CIA and FBI to open the July 31st investigation of the Trump campaign.   Again, for three years Joseph Mifsud was sold as a Russian operative; working on behalf of Russian interests.

That “Mifsud is a Russian asset” claim is the fulcrum of Crossfire Hurricane.   Mifsud has to be a Russian asset, or else…  George Papadopoulos talking to Australian Diplomat Alexander Downer about Mifsud is simply political gossip without merit, value or bearing.

The key point is Mifsud has to be a Russian operative in order for all of the downstream FBI activity to be justified.   If Mifsud ain’t Russian, the CIA and FBI have a problem.

It doesn’t matter if Mifsud is Maltese, Taiwanese, Sicilian, Italian, British, Canadian, Chinese, or a half-breed Congolese migrant from Morocco… for the CIA and FBI justification to stick Professor Joseph Mifsud has to be a Russian operative.

Yet for some reason the PR outlet for the CIA and FBI are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to say Mifsud isn’t an American intelligence asset.   A ridiculous amount of energy spent on a claim that no-one has ever made.  The question remains: Is Joseph Mifsud a Russian Operative?

If no, the CIA and FBI have a world of sh!t on their hands.  Period.

Perhaps that’s the reason why the Washington Post are again trying to create and conflate an issue that doesn’t exist.  Example:

Devin Nunes appeared on Tucker Carlson to discuss the impeachment events of the day.  However, thankfully they also discussed the revelation that HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff randomly started issuing subpoenas for telephone information.  That’s the part I find very troubling.  Notice how the media simply ignores it?  This is a pretty big damn deal.

Under what authority can congress arbitrarily send subpoenas for the private phone records of citizens, journalists, and fellow politicians?  Can Nunes now start sending subpoenas for the phone records of Michael Isikoff around the time of the Flynn phone call leak?… and can congress publish those call records as a part of some possibly inquiry into the leak… and we can cross reference to identify the FBI leaker?….

Representative Matt Gaetz confronted the jaw-dropping level of political bias and Trump Derangement Syndrome exhibited by Chairman Nadler’s panel of left-wing experts.

With a visible display of righteous indignation Mr. Gaetz dressed down the pompous liberal law professor, Pamela Karlan, and cut right to the heart of the matter with the entire panel.  WATCH:

Professor Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law School became the pompous face of the academic impeachment panel today when she ridiculed the son of President Trump in an effort to highlight her resistance bona-fides.   Imagine the hate that necessarily exists in the heart of a witness who would rehearse such a line to gain tribal cheer.

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Professor Karlan’s tone-deaf effort is a result of a life in an echo-chamber of far-left liberalism. However, the exhibited hatred did more to support the argument of the impeachment opposition than a thousand hours of granular testimony.  Karlan’s disposition during her diatribe is a case study in Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Trump Derangement Syndrome Personified

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and not a supporter of President Trump, warned House lawmakers today against impeaching a President without merit. Mr. Turley said that to impeach Trump based on the current evidence “would be to expose every future president to the same type of inchoate impeachment.”

[Opening Remarks Below]

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[Transcript] Chairman Nadler, ranking member Collins, members of the Judiciary Committee, my name is Jonathan Turley, and I am a law professor at George Washington University where I hold the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law.

It is an honor to appear before you today to discuss one of the most solemn and important constitutional functions bestowed on this House by the Framers of our Constitution: the impeachment of the President of the United States.

Twenty-one years ago, I sat here before you, Chairman Nadler, and other members of the Judiciary Committee to testify on the history and meaning of the constitutional impeachment standard as part of the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton. I never thought that I would have to appear a second time to address the same question with regard to another sitting president. Yet, here we are. Some elements are strikingly similar.

The intense rancor and rage of the public debate is the same. It was an atmosphere that the Framers anticipated. Alexander Hamilton warned that charges of impeachable conduct “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.” As with the Clinton impeachment, the Trump impeachment has again proven Hamilton’s words to be prophetic.

The stifling intolerance for opposing views is the same. As was the case two decades ago, it is a perilous environment for a legal scholar who wants to explore the technical and arcane issues normally involved in an academic examination of a legal standard ratified 234 years ago. In truth, the Clinton impeachment hearing proved to be an exception to the tenor of the overall public debate. The testimony from witnesses, ranging from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Laurence Tribe to Cass Sunstein, contained divergent views and disciplines. Yet the hearing remained respectful and substantive as we all grappled with this difficult matter.

I appear today in the hope that we can achieve that same objective of civil and meaningful discourse despite our goodfaith differences on the impeachment standard and its application to the conduct of President Donald J. Trump. I have spent decades writing about impeachment and presidential powers as an academic and as a legal commentator. My academic work reflects the bias of a Madisonian scholar. I tend to favor Congress in disputes with the Executive Branch and I have been critical of the sweeping claims of presidential power and privileges made by modern Administrations. My prior testimony mirrors my criticism of the expansion of executive powers and privileges.

In truth, I have not held much fondness for any president in my lifetime. Indeed, the last president whose executive philosophy I consistently admired was James Madison. In addition to my academic work, I am a practicing criminal defense lawyer.

Among my past cases, I represented the United States House of Representatives as lead counsel challenging payments made under the Affordable Care Act without congressional authorization. I also served as the last lead defense counsel in an impeachment trial in the Senate. With my co-lead counsel Daniel Schwartz, I argued the case on behalf of federal judge Thomas Porteous. (My opposing lead counsel for the House managers was Adam Schiff).

In addition to my testimony with other constitutional scholars at the Clinton impeachment hearings, I also represented former Attorneys General during the Clinton impeachment litigation over privilege disputes triggered by the investigation of Independent Counsel Ken Starr. I also served as lead counsel in a bill of attainder case, the sister of impeachment that will be discussed below.

I would like to start, perhaps incongruously, with a statement of three irrelevant facts. First, I am not a supporter of President Trump. I voted against him in 2016 and I have previously voted for Presidents Clinton and Obama.

Second, I have been highly critical of President Trump, his policies, and his rhetoric, in dozens of columns. Third, I have repeatedly criticized his raising of the investigation of the Hunter Biden matter with the Ukrainian president. These points are not meant to curry favor or approval. Rather they are meant to drive home a simple point: one can oppose President Trump’s policies or actions but still conclude that the current legal case for impeachment is not just woefully inadequate, but in some respects, dangerous, as the basis for the impeachment of an American president.

To put it simply, I hold no brief for President Trump. My personal and political views of President Trump, however, are irrelevant to my impeachment testimony, as they should be to your impeachment vote. Today, my only concern is the integrity and coherence of the constitutional standard and process of impeachment.

President Trump will not be our last president and what we leave in the wake of this scandal will shape our democracy for generations to come. I am concerned about lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger.

If the House proceeds solely on the Ukrainian allegations, this impeachment would stand out among modern impeachments as the shortest proceeding, with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president. That does not bode well for future presidents who are working in a country often sharply and, at times, bitterly divided.

Although I am citing a wide body of my relevant academic work on these questions, I will not repeat that work in this testimony. Instead, I will focus on the history and cases that bear most directly on the questions facing this Committee. My testimony will first address relevant elements of the history and meaning of the impeachment standard. Second, I will discuss the past presidential impeachments and inquiries in the context of this controversy. Finally, I will address some of the specific alleged impeachable offenses raised in this process. In the end, I believe that this process has raised serious and legitimate issues for investigation.

Indeed, I have previously stated that a quid pro quo to force the investigation of a political rival in exchange for military aid can be impeachable, if proven. Yet moving forward primarily or exclusively with the Ukraine controversy on this record would be as precarious as it would premature. It comes down to a type of constitutional architecture. Such a slender foundation is a red flag for architects who operate on the accepted 1:10 ratio between the width and height of a structure.

The physics are simple. The higher the building, the wider the foundation. There is no higher constitutional structure than the impeachment of a sitting president and, for that reason, an impeachment must have a wide foundation in order to be successful. The Ukraine controversy has not offered such a foundation and would easily collapse in a Senate trial.

Before I address these questions, I would like to make one last cautionary observation regarding the current political atmosphere. In his poem “The Happy Warrior,” William Wordsworth paid homage to Lord Horatio Nelson, a famous admiral and hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Wordsworth began by asking “Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he what every man in arms should wish to be?” The poem captured the deep public sentiment felt by Nelson’s passing and one reader sent Wordsworth a gushing letter proclaiming his love for the poem. Surprisingly, Wordsworth sent back an admonishing response. He told the reader “you are mistaken; your judgment is affected by your moral approval of the lines.” Wordsworth’s point was that it was not his poem that the reader loved, but its subject.

My point is only this: it is easy to fall in love with lines that appeal to one’s moral approval. In impeachments, one’s feeling about the subject can distort one’s judgment on the true meaning or quality of an argument. We have too many happy warriors in this impeachment on both sides. What we need are more objective noncombatants, members willing to set aside political passion in favor of constitutional circumspection.

Despite our differences of opinion, I believe that this esteemed panel can offer a foundation for such reasoned and civil discourse. If we are to impeach a president for only the third time in our history, we will need to rise above this age of rage and genuinely engage in a civil and substantive discussion. It is to that end that my testimony is offered today.

Divining the intent of the Framers often borders on necromancy, with about the same level of reliability. Fortunately, there are some questions that were answered directly by the Framers during the Constitutional and Ratification Conventions. Any proper constitutional interpretation begins with the text of the Constitution. Indeed, such interpretations ideally end with the text when there is clarity as to a constitutional standard or procedure. Five provisions are material to impeachment cases, and therefore structure our analysis:

Article I, Section 2: The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment. U.S. Const. art. I, cl. 8.

Article I, Section 3: The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present. U.S. Const. art. I, 3, cl. 6.

Article I, Section 3: Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust, or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to the Law. U.S. Const. art. I, 3, cl. 7.

Article II, Section 2: [The President] shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment. U.S. Const., art. II, 2, cl. 1.

Article II, Section 4: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. U.S. Const. art. II, 4.

For the purposes of this hearing, it is Article II, Section 4 that is the focus of our attention and, specifically, the meaning of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

It is telling that the actual constitutional standard is contained in Article II (defining executive powers and obligations) rather than Article I (defining legislative powers and obligations). The location of that standard in Article II serves as a critical check on service as a president, qualifying the considerable powers bestowed upon the Chief Executive with the express limitations of that office.

It is in this sense an executive, not legislative, standard set by the Framers. For presidents, it is essential that this condition be clear and consistent so that they are not subject to the whim of shifting majorities in Congress. That was a stated concern of the Framers and led to the adoption of the current standard and, equally probative, the express rejection of other standards. (continue reading via pdf)

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