Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik was finally able to get her questioning in of former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch on Friday afternoon, after being repeatedly shut down from speaking by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
The effective questioning from Ms. Stefanik acted to underscore the fact that ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president, to emphasize the Biden family’s shady business dealings within Ukraine, and finally, to highlight President Donald Trump’s support of Ukraine, particularly in relation to the lack of support provided under the Obama administration.
“Stefanik asked Yovanovitch to confirm that she believes she ‘serves at the pleasure of the president’ and that she is still an employee of the State Department on leave as a fellow at Georgetown. Yovanovitch did,” The Washington Post outlined.
….They call it “serving at the pleasure of the President.” The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.
Democrats are clowns. The above is what they are claiming is “witness intimidation.” Apparently, he can be smeared, but he’s not allowed to say why he fired her or be critical.
The White House responded Friday to suggestions that President Donald Trump’s mid-hearing tweet constituted “witness intimidation.”
The statement, initially given in answer to a question from MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson, characterized the president’s tweet as simply his opinion and attacked the ongoing hearing as a “totally illegitimate charade stacked against the President.”
The tweet was not witness intimidation, it was simply the President’s opinion, which he is entitled to. This is not a trial, it is a partisan political process—or to put it more accurately, a totally illegitimate, charade stacked against the President. There is less due process in this hearing than any such event in the history of our country. It’s a true disgrace
Trump’s tweet attacked former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch while she was still testifying before the committee.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) faced intense criticism on Friday for repeatedly interrupting and refusing to let Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik speak during the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry hearing of former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
During the hearing, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) yielded his time to Stefanik who started to question Yovanovitch before being cut off by Schiff.
Here is the following exchange between Schiff, Nunes, and Stefanik:
Nunes: I know Ms. Stefanik you had a few quick questions for the ambassador. I yield to you Ms. Stefanik.
Stefanik: Thank you, Mr. Nunes. Ambassador Yovanovitch–
Schiff: The gentlewoman will suspend. The gentlewoman will suspend.
Stefanik: What is the interruption for this time?
Schiff: The gentlewoman will suspend, you’re not recognized. Mr. Nunes–
Nunes: I just recognized Ms. Stefanik.
Schiff: Under the House Res. 660 you are not allowed to yield time except to counsel.
Stefanik: The ranking member to another member of Congress.
Schiff: Nope, nope. That is not accurate.
Nunes: You’re gagging the gentlewoman from New York?
Stefank: That is accurate. Ambassador Yovanovitch I want to thank you for being here today–
Journalists, pundits and politicians accused President Donald Trump of witness tampering after he tweeted at former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch during her testimony Friday.
Yovanovitch, who said she felt threatened by Trump while working under him, was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee during the second day of public impeachment hearings when the president tweeted about her.
“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors,” Trump tweeted during the testimony.
“They call it ‘serving at the pleasure of the President.’ The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.,” he continued.
NBC recently got sued for plagiarizing its 2018 “Sunday Night Football” intro. So it created a new song this year and swept the scandal and publicity under the rug. It just happened to sweep America under the rug as well.
For years, “Sunday Night Football” has been NBC’s top-rated show, helping the network this past year earn the highest viewership in the nation. Since 2013, Carrie Underwood has been kicking off the show singing the intro. To celebrate the 100-year anniversary of professional football, and with incentive from songwriter Heidi Merrill’s plagiarism lawsuit, NBC rewrote the intro, bringing in rockstar Joanne Jet to play with Underwood.
Although with this new version NBC pulled out all the stops to get fans hyped for this historic season, there is still a small problem: the video doesn’t once make any patriotic references in its visuals or audio. That might not seem to be too big of a deal, except for the fact that for the past 10 years, NBC has consistently called attention to things like “America’s Game” and “the Red White and Blue.”
Sitting down to watch the intro at the beginning of the season, you might have expected to see at least one American flag, but you didn’t. The flag is gone. This comes in sharp contrast to the 2010 and 2011 intros, in which Faith Hill sang ringed by American flags and Executive Producer Dick Ebersol’s name was displayed on an American flag billboard. In seven of the past ten years the intro has shown American flags and even at times the U.S. capitol and other patriotic sights. In this season’s intro, the producers showed the Seattle skyline.
In every one of the past 10 years, there has been an explicit patriotic reference in the lyrics; the previous two years (which featured new theme songs) talked about “America’s game” while before that Underwood and Hill sang about the “star-spangled fight” that bled “red, white, and blue.” Now returning to the original theme song, NBC edited out those lyrics to talk about “a prime-time fight” that’s “kicking into high gear.”
On Thursday, President Trump flipped another U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals into a conservative majority, as the Senate confirmed the nomination of White House attorney Steven Menashi to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals now has seven judges appointed by Republican presidents and six by Democrats. Democrats flailed about in hysteria over the Menashi nomination, in which he was confirmed 51-41 in a party line vote only excepted by Susan Collins of Main, who voted against Menashi.
Menashi, 40, was viciously attacked by Democrats; Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer raged, “Mr. Menashi is one of the most contemptible nominees to come before the Senate in all my time in this body. He would be a disgrace, a disgrace to the seat once held by the great Thurgood Marshall.”
Blows up another Democratic lie. Trump invited Zelensky to the White House despite Democrats claiming that such an invitation was contingent on an investigation of Biden.
President Trump and Republicans have been repeatedly slamming the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry as a “partisan sham” that’s about politics rather than a patriotic duty to defend the interests of the country, as Democrats have insisted. A new detail about a sudden, unified shift in the Democrats’ talking points, however, shows just how political the impeachment game really is.
As The Daily Wire and other outlets on the right have noted, after weeks of accusing Trump of imposing a “quid pro quo” on Ukraine — allegedly requiring the administration to follow through on investigations into alleged corruption involving Joe and Hunter Biden and Ukraine-based energy company Burisma and alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election in order to receive $391 million in U.S. military aid — the Democrats have dropped the Latin term altogether.
Now, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who is heading up the impeachment effort, and his colleagues are uniformly hammering a new allegation against Trump: “bribery.”
In an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Tuesday, Schiff notably avoided mentioning the term “quid pro quo,” and instead said he believes he can prove that Trump committed several impeachable crimes, particularly “bribery” and “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which NPR pointed out are “both explicitly outlined in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.”
“Bribery, first of all, as the founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader,” said Schiff, allowing himself as much room as possible in the allegation. “It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest.”
So what prompted the switch? Many conservatives and Trump defenders pointed out one obvious possible rationale: the Democrats’ “quid pro quo” argument has largely fallen apart. The transcript of the famous July 25 call that started it all released by the Trump administration shows no explicit quid pro quo. Ukrainian officials, including the president himself on multiple occasions, have made clear that they did not believe there was any form of quid pro quo attached to the investigations. And the U.S. released the aid without Ukraine beginning to conduct or publicly committing to conduct the investigations.
The Office of Congressional Ethics recommended subpoenaing Rep. Rashida Tlaib and several of her campaign staffers as part of an investigation into whether the Michigan Democrat improperly diverted campaign funds for personal use.
All five members of the board of OCE voted to recommend that the House Ethics Committee continue an investigation into Tlaib over $17,500 in payments she received from the campaign after her election win Nov. 6, 2018.
House rules allow candidates to receive salaries during their campaigns that are not greater than what they earned in the year before starting their campaign. Candidates are also allowed to receive funds only up until the general election.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “And one more thing. One more thing. Let’s not pretend — that’s right, Bernie speaking on it. (laughter) But let’s not act or pretend that Donald Trump is not a climate crisis unto himself, because he has put foxes in the hen house in the charge of EPA, in charge of public housing, in charge of virtually every federal agency that we have. And so, if we want to protect our planet, we also, you know, we also need to make sure that holding the President accountable in this White House is a part of that.”
Health care is about saving lives, abortion is about taking lives.
PRESSLEY: “Even in states like the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which I represent, individuals, particularly low income and young people, LGBTQ, and black and brown folks, continue to face barriers in accessing comprehensive reproductive health care, and let me be clear, health care is abortion care. But in these times, we’ve seen many states emboldened by this Administration pass additional restrictions that further hinder individuals’ access to abortion, endangering lives, and criminalizing individuals for decisions that should be kept between themselves and their doctor. It’s important to discuss these draconian state restrictions.”
The “Jeopardy!” contestant behind the moment that almost brought Alex Trebek to tears has revealed a plan to raise money for cancer research in the host’s honor.
Contestant Dhruv Gaur went viral this week after using his final answer to write a message of love to Trebek, who is battling stage four pancreatic cancer, according to a report published by Entertainment Tonight.
Now, Gaur has shared his plan to keep honoring Trebek during Thursday’s episode of the “The Ellen Show.”
“Something that a lot of contestants on the tournament and I are going to be doing tonight and tomorrow night is during the finals of the Tournament of Champions that will be airing,” he told Ellen DeGeneres. “We’re going to be playing along at home and for every question that we get right, we’re going to be donating a dollar to the Lustgarten Foundation to support Pancreatic Cancer research.”
The House Ethics Committee on Thursday released a trove of striking internal campaign communications sent in 2018 by Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, in which Tlaib urgently requested money from her congressional campaign to defray personal expenses — and, a government watchdog said, possibly violated federal law in the process.
The document dump was related to the committee’s ongoing ethics probe into Tlaib, which the panel said on Thursday would be “expanded” based on a referral from the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). Additionally, the Ethics Committee acknowledged for the first time on Thursday an investigation into Florida Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings concerning a “personal relationship with an individual employed in his congressional office.”
Texts and emails released by the Ethics Committee show Tlaib frantically contacting members of her staff for financial help.
In one April 2018 email offered as an exhibit by OCE, Tlaib wrote that she was “struggling financially right now” and was “sinking.” She continued: “So I was thinking the campaign could loan me money, but Ryan said that the committee could actually pay me. I was thinking a one time payment of $5k.”
In the first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) cleared up misconceptions about why president Donald Trump held up the military assistance funds that Congress had approved for Ukraine. Democrats insist that this delay was part of a corrupt quid pro quo — “bribery,” “extortion,” and whatever the next term may be — to force Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president and 2020 Democrat Joe Biden, as a political attack on his potential rival.
The Democrat narrative seems disturbingly plausible, but Jordan gave a far better explanation for why Trump held up the money.
“There was a delay on sending hard-earned tax dollars of the American people to Ukraine,” Jordan admitted. “We’re not talking any country, we’re talking Ukraine. Ernst & Young said one of the three most corrupt countries on the planet. … So our president said, ‘Time out. Time out, let’s check out this new guy. Let’s see if Zelensky’s the real deal. This new guy who got elected in April, whose party took power in July. Let’s see if he’s legitimate.'”
Jordan continued, “Now, keep in mind, in 2018 President Trump had already done more for Ukraine than Obama did. That’s right, President Trump — who doesn’t like foreign aid, who wanted European countries to do more, who knew how corrupt Ukraine was — did more than Obama because he gave them Javelins, tank-busting Javelins to fight the Russians. Our witnesses have said this, others have said this: ‘Obama gave them blankets, Trump gave them missiles.’ But when it came time to check out this new guy, President Trump said, ‘Let’s just see, let’s just see if he’s legit.'”
