Crosstalk: November 15, 2019

The process of impeachment against President Trump began yesterday…or did it?  While the formal process began yesterday, others believe it began on inauguration day when Donald Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th president.  In fact, Jim noted that the White House pointed out yesterday that 19 minutes after the president was sworn in, the Washington Post published a headline on its website stating that the campaign to impeach the president had begun.

Joining Jim to look at some of the testimony from yesterday’s impeachment proceedings was Robert Romano.  Robert is the Vice President of Public Policy with Americans for Limited Government.

Discussion began surrounding an audio clip from Republican Representative Devin Nunes who made an opening statement highlighting the failure of the Democrats to find Russian collusion, so now we have hearings that are attempting to find something that rises to the level of impeachment concerning Ukraine.

As Robert noted, we know the Russian collusion narrative that attempted to overturn the 2016 election was false because of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report that found insufficient evidence to charge that any member of the president’s campaign conspired or coordinated with Russian government representatives to interfere in the 2016 election.

Related points where the Democrats came up empty include: 

–Trump attorney Michael Cohen never traveled to Prague to meet with Russian agents as the Steele dossier (paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign) had alleged.

–Carter Page wasn’t charged with anything although Steele alleged he was responsible for the coordination with Russia on the DNC hacks and putting the e-mails onto Wikileaks.

–Paul Manafort wasn’t charged with conspiring with Russia.  Instead he was brought up on unrelated tax and financial crimes that actually pre-date the election.

So no American—not Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Popadopoulos, or Roger Stone…none of them were prosecuted by Robert Mueller for conspiring with Russia.

As Robert put it, ‘And now having failed, as Nunes points out, with this deception to convince the American people that they had elected a ‘Manchurian candidate’ in 2016, now they want to say that President Trump is leveraging U.S. military assistance to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into the Ukrainian origins of the Steele dossier and also Ukrainian corruption at this Burisma natural gas firm that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, happened to serve on the board of directors of and for which there is nothing but oodles of evidence that this is a corrupt company.’ 

In light of such failures on the part of the Democrats, was there any convincing evidence they were able to present as testimony opened yesterday?  What was presented turned out to be hearsay and not first-hand knowledge.