“Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and the personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a … concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know – it was always you, through your proxies and … powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
With Andrew Napolitano in a 2010 interview with on Fox Business Channel, former White House National Security Adviser John Bolton stated (paraphrased) that he would have no problem fibing to the public if he thought it was necessary to protect national security.
Bolton, leaked to the New York Times about a book he has written for Simon & Shuster concerning his time working on national security policy for President Donald Trump. The book was scheduled to be released in March of 2020, but steps have been taken to stop its publication as has NOT been cleared and has been deemed to reveal top secret information. Bolton also stated during the 2010 interview that government information secrecy and protection of classified material was altogether necessary to protect the public and the United States.
The Bongino Report has revealed through sources that media coverage is 100% negative and 95% positive for the Democrats. Small wonder that Bolton has decided to publish without governmental approval. Navy Seals have also been compliant as national security requires this approval. Nevertheless, the public is well aware of "Shorty" and how much he does not "favor" or look like who he is supposed to resemble.
Highlights of the Trump team’s closing arguments HERE:
1. Bolton (former Trump appointee) and ‘Unsourced Allegations’ by Bolton AND printed in his new BOOK...
BRIEFLY...the story...During their phone conversation in July, 2019...Trump and Zelenskyy briefly discussed Trump’s interest in Ukraine’s investigating the dealings there of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Many feel that Bolton is,"What the hell...I'll make money being for the media...Trump nixed my retirement as I planned so I'll sell books...get an advance,etc".
The younger Biden joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, while his father (Joe Biden, VP) was President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine policy. {Was this a "conflict of interest" or nepotism especially since younger Biden lacks experience/education in oil, gas or coal? This is MOOT since "they" got away with it despite proud and boastful bragging ON CAMERA that Joe Biden served Ukraine a notice ie 6 hour altimatum ORDERING Ukraine to FIRE prosecutor investigating Younger Biden or "NO MILLION$ in aid. Ukraine FIRED the prosecutor so Biden BOASTED about his POWER PLAY being successful - Therefore Joe Biden "showed UKRAINE just WHO was BOSS!" (paraphrased)}
Trump also told Zelenskyy that he would like Ukraine to investigate whether that nation interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (As evidenced by TRANSCRIPT, it is a US President's DUTY to oversee MILLION$ in foreign aid or have "point man/woman" do so AND Trump MADE NO DEMANDS )
At the time, Ukraine’s president didn’t know that Trump had put a hold on $391 million in military aid, which he would release in September. (And TRUMP DID NOT ORDER (ie FORCE) ZELENSKYY to do anything
Early on Tuesday, Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow took on revelations reported over the past day about a Ukraine-related passage in former Trump national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming book which is supposedly a lucrative $2 million dollar deal.
The book, The New York Times and others reported, that Trump told Bolton he put a hold on the military aid to Ukraine because he wanted the former Soviet republic to investigate the Bidens.
COMMENT: This appears to be Bolton's interpretation of Trump's action which Trump termed,"The perfect phone call." It has been argued that there is no such thing perhaps because just about any statement to authorities can be used against an innocent "stater of facts". The fact that Trump has many times been misquoted and "spin doctored" much like "misheard lyrics"...is evident. Contractions are a prime example, so many speakers AVOID them and say for instance, "they are" because "their" can be misinterpreted especially by people who WANT to imply something else entirely.
“You cannot impeach a president on unsourced allegations,” Sekulow stated.
He cited another of Trump’s lawyers, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said the night before that even if true, the incident did not rise to the level of impeachment.
“I want to be clear on this, because there is a lot of speculation out there,” Sekulow said. “With regard to what John Bolton has said … here’s what the president said, in response to that New York Times piece: ‘I never told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.’”
Sekulow was reading from Trump’s tweeted response to the Times’ story Sunday. He also invoked Alexander Hamilton’s sentiment on cautious impeachments.
“What we are involved in here as we conclude is the most solemn of duties under our constitutional framework: the trial of the leader of the free world and the duly elected president of the United States. It is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Sekulow said.
“Hamilton put impeachment in the hands of this body, the Senate, precisely and specifically to be above that fray,” he said. “This is the greatest deliberative body on Earth.”
2. Calling for an end to ‘Era of Impeachment’
White House counsel Pat Cipollone spoke the last argument, in which he made what is considered a very strong case against continuing the impeachment trial with witnesses.
Cipollone called on senators to end what another Trump lawyer had called the “era of impeachment” on Monday.
“The Senate cannot allow this to happen,” the White House counsel said, adding: “This should end now, as quickly as possible. Reject these articles of impeachment for our country and for the American people.”
3. ‘Danger, Danger, Danger’
Sekulow argued that impeaching and removing a president through two articles of impeachment that do not allege a crime is a dangerous path to establish for future presidents.
Sekulow stated, “danger, danger, danger” at numerous points in his closing argument.
“In our presentation so far, you have now heard from legal scholars from a variety of schools of thought, from a variety of political backgrounds. But they do have a common theme with a dire warning: danger, danger, danger,” Sekulow said.
Sekulow said future presidents could be “paralyzed from their first day in office” if the Senate allows the impeachment standard for Trump to stand.
“To lower the bar of impeachment based on these articles of impeachment would impact the functioning of our constitutional republic and the framework of that Constitution for generations,” he said.
Specifically, Sekulow said, this could intrude on a president’s foreign policy by giving the legislative branch veto power if lawmakers question a president’s intentions:
The claim that foreign policy decisions can be deemed abuses of power—based on subjective opinions about mixed or sole motives that the president was interested only in helping himself–demonstrates the dangers of employing the vague, subjective, and politically malleable phrase ‘abuse of power’ as a constitutionally permissible criteria for the removal of a president.
4. On Elections and the Executive Branch
Sekulow stressed that elections are supposed to determine the next president. (WORKS for USA...like "Due Process of Law is supposed to)
Sekulow stated, “You are being asked to remove a duly elected president of the United States, and you’re being asked to do it in an election year,”
Then he added,"There are some of you in this chamber right now that would rather be someplace else. That’s why we’ll be brief. Why would you rather be somewhere else? Because you’re running for the nomination of your party. I get it. But this is a serious deliberative situation.
Elections are the reason a president runs the executive branch and not executive branch employees who work for a president, White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin said in making the first arguments of the day.
Philbin addressed the senators,“For two centuries, the president has been regarded as the sole organ of the nation in foreign affairs. So the idea that we are going to find out when the president had the wrong subjective motives by comparing what he did to the recommendations of some interagency consensus among staffers is fundamentally anti-constitutional,”
To "toss in all little grievances" it seems, the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report to the House Judiciary Committee criticized Trump for acting in his own interest when he did not follow the recommendations of foreign policy advisers regarding his conversation with Zelenskyy.
“It inverts the constitutional structure. It’s also fundamentally anti-democratic because our system is rather unique in the amount of power that it gives to the president,” Philbin said, adding:
The executive here has much more power than in a parliamentary system. But part of the reason that a president can have that power is that he is directly, democratically accountable to the people. There is an election every four years to ensure that the president stays democratically accountable to the people. But those staffers in the supposed interagency who have their meetings and make recommendations to the president are not accountable to the people.
There is no democratic legitimacy or accountability to their decisions or recommendations. That is why the president is the head of the executive branch. That is why he has the authority to actually set policy and make determinations regardless of what the staffers may recommend.
Other coverage of the impeachment trial for The Daily Signal by White House correspondent Fred Lucas:
