October 2019

The Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

The number of ways in which Democrats have abused the rules of the House of Representatives, the jurisdiction of committees, the importance of precedent, and virtually every other aspect of their so-called “impeachment inquiry” is clear beyond any reasoned dispute.

However, if Republicans continue to focus their energies on process, no matter how accurate their complaints, they will never gain the offensive advantage critical to ensuring President Trump remains in office.

Ask the average voter if he or she cares whether Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff has abused his power as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee by investigating matters that have nothing to do with oversight of the Intelligence Community, and the response is likely to be a blank stare. Sure, individuals who serve in the CIA care; but the average American voter, not so much.

Debate whether a resolution has or has not been introduced in the House of Representatives officially directing the House Judiciary Committee to begin a formal “inquiry of impeachment” as had been the case in prior impeachments, and listeners’ eyes are as likely to glaze over as to express interest in what is a “House Resolution.” To those of us who are or have been involved in such matters, that is a valid and important question. But few others would understand or care about such a technicality.

As we witnessed during the impeachment of President Clinton 20 years ago, it was far easier for his cohorts to defend the charges against him by claiming “it was all about sex,” than it was to argue the merits or lack thereof of “perjury” or “obstruction of justice” — the actual charges on which he was impeached. It is far more important to frame the argument in terms easily understood by the average person, and to remain on the offensive, than it is to engage in lawyerly dissertations. In this regard, the process is not so different from trial lawyers making their case to juries.

The bottom line right here, right now as the Democrats in the House of Representatives are moving — however ham-handedly — to impeach President Trump, is not so much how they are doing it, but that they are doing it in the first place; and without a shred of substantive evidence of anything remotely “impeachable.” Fighting the Democrats over process and procedure plays on their field; and it is a field about which only Beltway insiders care deeply.

Upon taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, Donald Trump swore an oath of office written into our Constitution 230 years ago and repeated by only 44 other men. No member of Congress, no cabinet officer, and no member of our armed forces takes that same oath. Adam Schiff has not taken it, nor has House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In taking the oath, Trump committed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and as president it is his responsibility to do so in all aspects of the office he holds.

If Trump believed this past summer — as he apparently did — that before committing hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support a foreign government, he needed assurances from that government that it would work with our government in cleaning up corruption that affected our elections, then it would have been irresponsible for him not to seek those assurances. In demanding that Ukraine commit to working with our Department of Justice to get to the bottom of evidence of corruption involving former and possibly current officials in our government, Trump was acting in accord with the oath of office he swore in January two years ago, not against it.

For Schiff and Pelosi to use the powers of their offices to punish Trump and try to remove him from office for such acts is an outrage. For Schiff and Pelosi to march State Department careerists and anonymous “whistleblowers” up to Capitol Hill to testify against their president in secret is further affront to our president, to every American voter, and to our very constitutional Republic.

That is the narrative, and that is what the American electorate needs to hear as clearly and as often as possible; otherwise these conspirators may very well succeed in removing a duly elected president.

Bob Barr (http://www.twitter.com/BobBarr) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation.

The Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

Efforts by Democrats in the House of Representatives to wound, if not remove, President Trump from office illustrate what many of us realized long ago — the Democrats are street fighters who battle without regard for rules. Republicans (with few exceptions) prefer to play as gentlemen, according to “Marquess of Queensberry” rules. Thankfully, Trump is a master street fighter himself.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in early 1995, the first year of my service in the House, and the first year in which the GOP enjoyed a majority since the 1950s. The occasion was a series of hearings to explore the manner by which the Clinton administration had conducted the raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas two years before.

The raid was initially planned and carried out by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. However, the raid went horribly awry; a number of ATF agents and Branch Davidian members were shot. A lengthy standoff eventually involved the FBI and U.S. military equipment and advisers, as well as Texas Rangers and other agencies and personnel.

It ended weeks later in a fiery conflagration sparked by tanks inserting flammable gas into the compound’s main building, in which some six dozen men, women, children and babies perished.

The “Waco hearings” were the first major set of hearings conducted by the new Republican majority, and as a member of the Judiciary Committee subcommittee involved, I was a participant. Just prior to the start of the first day of the hearings, the subcommittee chairman convened a meeting of Republican members who would be participating in the questioning of witnesses. He concluded his remarks by stating (and I paraphrase here), that “at the conclusion of these hearings, I want the American people to see that we have conducted ourselves as gentlemen, as in the bipartisan manner by which the impeachment hearings against President Nixon were carried out.”

The folly of this approach became obvious in the very first day of the hearings. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, then a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, tore into our witnesses, introduced evidence having nothing to do with the actual facts of the raid, and presented witnesses that soared off into tangential issues for which our leadership was ill-prepared to deal, to say the least. Things went largely south from that point on.

There were other examples of such ill-advised and rather naïve approaches to important and controversial hearings that I witnessed in the following years, which drove home to me a fundamental difference by which Democrats and Republicans conduct business in the Congress. Unlike Republicans, who strive generally to play fairly and with due regard for established rules, Democrats, almost to a person, play to win at whatever the cost and regardless of existing rules and precedents; they are true street fighters.

The Kavanaugh hearings last fall put on full display the manner by which Democrats and their proxies operate — full-out warfare regardless of the cost to the processes of government or to established precedent, and with no regard whatsoever for the target of their anger. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and members of her majority in the House, are continuing that strategy this year in their so-called “impeachment” drive against Trump and his administration.

Rather than following regular rules and procedures by which previous presidential impeachments were conducted, Pelosi has opted for a process designed to ensnare as many real and potential victims as possible, and with as little transparency as possible. All part of a strategy to keep Republicans off balance.

Statements by some of the more radical members of Pelosi’s team, threatening to jail members of the Trump administration who fail to respond appropriately to subpoenas issued by Democrat committee chairs, is but the most recent example of the scorched earth policy they are pursuing. The legal foundation for what these Democrats are threatening is sound, and reflects a U.S. Supreme Court opinion from 1927 (McGrain v. Daugherty) holding that a committee of the Congress, acting within its proper jurisdiction, has the inherent power to enforce a subpoena to obtain evidence from a recalcitrant executive branch official, by actually taking him into custody.

While this may or may not be a serious threat, it is telling that Republicans, when they held the majority in the House and were being stonewalled in their efforts to hold accountable Hillary Clinton and other Obama administration officials, never seemed to find the backbone to even threaten such a bold move.

Bob Barr (http://www.twitter.com/BobBarr) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the https://laweef.org/.

The Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

The indictment and arrest of two U.S. businessmen of East European background is the newest development in the effort to weaken the president by attacking those close to him. In this case, it’s his personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

While there may be some arguable basis on which to charge the businessmen — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — with incompetent business transactions, the timing of the indictment — in the middle of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment effort against Trump — makes it seem more than just coincidental.

Neither Parnas nor Fruman appears to possess the business acumen such that Trump would bring them into his inner circle of confidence. Their links to the Trump family appear to be nothing more than as political hangers on; and their relationship to Giuliani seem to consist largely of legitimate business dealings. Still, the fact that there are such relationships, no matter how tenuous, has provided ammunition for the media and Democratic Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to draw direct connections that in less hyper-partisan times would have been considered out of bounds.

As with so much of the ongoing impeachment effort being pressed relentlessly by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Schiff, and others of their majority in the House, the Parnas-Fruman “connection” has to with Ukraine. In this case, the connection is not so much directly with the now-infamous July 25 phone call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, as with the American president’s effort to ensure that his Ambassador to that country is fully supportive of his policies and diplomatic goals.

It is hardly a secret that Giuliani, in his capacity as one of Trump’s personal lawyers, was working to determine if career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch was in fact subtly undermining Trump’s efforts to determine Ukraine’s responsibility for interfering in our 2016 election and the degree to which former Vice President Joe Biden interfered with that country’s investigation of his son Hunter’s involvement with Burisma, an energy company controlled by Ukraine. Giuliani also has made no secret that among his many international business clients with whom he has worked since leaving his job as New York City mayor in 2001, are companies in which both Parnas and Fruman were involved.

Throw into that mix that fact that this pair of foreign-born but naturalized U.S. citizens supported Trump’s 2016 election campaign and boastfully attended the election night celebration in Manhattan, as well as donating in 2018 to a pro-Trump super PAC, “America First Action,” and the scene was set for the legal eagles at the Department of Justice to conclude something was amiss.

The fact that the two businessmen were also photographed with Donald Trump, Jr. later in May 2018, and donated also to a former Republican Congressman seems to have been the final evidentiary proof that the two businessmen were up to no good; especially, perhaps, because Giuliani also attended the 2016 celebratory event. The implication, of course, especially for the Schiff effort to impeach Trump at any cost, is that a vast U.S.-Ukraine conspiracy is at work leading from Kiev to the White House by way of two inept U.S. businessmen born in that part of the world, and who also had a business-client relationship with Rudy Giuliani.

The conspiracy, which the government alleges has Parnas and Fruman making donations clandestinely in behalf of Ukraine to influence U.S. efforts in that country, is made even juicer based on reports that two other Trump-supporting attorneys used Parnas (who does speak fluent Ukrainian) as a translator in an unrelated case in which they represented a Ukrainian back in 2014.

Of course, if Parnas and Fruman were directing donations to political candidates, parties or political action committees in the United States on behalf of foreign interests, that would be a violation of federal campaign laws and should be prosecuted. But it will take far more that attending a couple of campaign events or blustering on social media that they are “Friends of Trump” to make such a case stick as against them, and far more so against Giuliani or Trump. Even far weaker are the tangential avenues down, which Schiff and the media (and perhaps even rogue prosecutors at the Justice Department) are traveling with hopeful heart in an effort to ensnare Giuliani in their impeachment scheme.

For example, there is the theory that, because Giuliani was working with Parnas, Fruman and others, to have Yovanovitch recalled because she was subtly undermining the policies of the very president she was sworn to faithfully represent, that Giuliani should have registered as an agent of a foreign power under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, is absurd in the extreme. Giuliani’s further efforts in Trump’s behalf to help pressure the new Ukrainian government to aggressively uncover and stop the corruption in that country likewise represent fully legitimate efforts to further distinctly American goals in that country, certainly not Ukrainian goals in the United States.

After all, it was Ukrainian corruption that manifested itself in the interference in our 2016 election, and in the meddling by Biden in that government’s choice of a prosecutor investigating his own son’s ties to that government. 

Yovanovitch last week complained to Schiff’s committee that neither she nor her careerist colleagues at Foggy Bottom believed they had done anything to deserve her being recalled. Unfortunately for her and her supporters, the president of the United States, who has every right to demand his Ambassadors fully carry out and support his policies and goals in the countries to which they are assigned, determined otherwise, and removed her. End of argument; nothing to see here folks, go home.

This episode brings to mind the Justice Department prosecution of Russian Maria Butina, who recently was forced to enter a plea that she improperly tried to influence U.S. policy toward Russia. She possessed no more ability to do that than did the old TV spy Maxwell Smart.

Still, the complexity and vagueness of federal financial campaign laws and the Foreign Agents Registration Act have made these preferred vehicles by which federal prosecutors can target persons associated with political enemies and pressure them to cave and flip.

Bob Barr (http://www.twitter.com/BobBarr) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the https://laweef.org/.

The Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

Speaking as a former federal prosecutor and impeachment manager in the Senate trial of former President Clinton, and after having reviewed carefully the content and context of the Ukraine call and what we have learned about it subsequently, it is clear that no federal laws were broken and nothing close to an impeachable offense took place.

In fact, in that call the president of the United States was doing precisely what a president should have been doing.  In the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump emphasized that his administration was serious about getting to the bottom of corruption in Ukraine that had affected and had been affected by the United States.  Our president made clear he was referring to evidence that Ukrainian interests had been involved corruptly in our 2016 election, and that a high government official in our country — former Vice President Joe Biden — had improperly interfered with that country’s effort to discover and prosecute corrupt acts.

In considering whether the president’s conduct rises to the level of an impeachable or criminal offense, it’s easy to dismiss the rantings of Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters. The fiery congresswoman has been calling for Trump’s impeachment since he became president, and she is itching for a piece of the impeachment action for the Financial Services Committee she chairs. In Waters’ opinion, Trump has engaged in actions that not only are impeachable in nature, but so highly and criminally offensive as to warrant a sentence in “solitary confinement.”

It is not, however, quite so easy to dismiss the analyses of such credible observers as New Jersey state court Judge Andrew Napolitano.  The former jurist and long-time Fox News analyst declared shortly after the release of a transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call that it proved Trump had not only committed an impeachable offense but violated federal criminal law as well. 

The fact that one focus of Trump’s demands that Ukraine clean up its act as a prerequisite to continued support from America might also involve an individual now seeking to challenge Trump for the presidency, does not in any way diminish or undercut the propriety of Trump’s insistence that the Ukrainian president take steps to get to the bottom of what corruption already had occurred involving the two countries; and also to ensure that going forward the same corrupt acts would not recur.

To claim, as many have done — including Napolitano — that it is a crime for Trump to insist that Ukraine investigate past corrupt acts involving the United States, and that the country stop doing so moving forward, simply because Joe Biden now has chosen to challenge Trump politically next year, undercuts the very power of a president to protect our country from foreign interference and to investigate corrupt acts by former U.S. officials. Biden is deserving of no such self-imposed immunity.

Moreover, such a warped view of presidential actions turns on its head our system of criminal justice, in which it is the executive branch (headed by the president) that investigates and prosecutes violations of federal law. It was clear in that July 25 call that President Trump was letting President Zelensky know that our attorney general — the head of our Department of Justice that is responsible for such investigations — would be doing just that. To now assert that for this President Trump should be removed from office and prosecuted criminally, is absurd. 

Other attempts to characterize Trump’s actions during, surrounding, or following that call as violations of federal campaign laws, the bribery statute, or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, are equally inapplicable and unsupported by the facts or any reasonable interpretation of the statutes themselves.

Another avenue down which Trump’s critics travel is just as barren. Claiming that the administration’s moves to protect the July 25 call, and probably others between Trump and foreign leaders, by placing them in a more secure database, is hardly nefarious or evidence of a criminal state of mind. The administration already had been plagued by leaks and mischaracterizations of Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders. Taking steps to protect such critical and sensitive communications is not only understandable but absolutely responsible.

Trump was acting responsibly and presidential. He deserves our appreciation, not our opprobrium.

Bob Barr (http://www.twitter.com/BobBarr) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the https://laweef.org/.

Morning Consult

by BOB BARR & JASON PYE

Well, after months of back-and-forth, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has finally caved to the radical base of the Democrat Party and authorized a formal Inquiry of Impeachment. Or, maybe not.

It was less than one month ago that the House Judiciary Committee actually did approve a resolution, strictly along party lines, that began what some Democrats claim is an “impeachment investigation” and others call an “impeachment inquiry.” Pelosi recently seemed to agree with both assessments in launching what might best be viewed as a “faux impeachment” process – verbally labeling it an “inquiry” but without a House resolution formally doing so on the record.

During an interview last month, Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said that the investigation his committee is conducting “is not necessarily called an impeachment inquiry. That’s a made-up term without legal significance. It is, however, what we are doing.” Clear as mud.

Although there is nothing in the rules of the House that requires a formal vote by that chamber in order to authorize the initiation of a presidential impeachment inquiry, in modern practice the House of Representatives votes as a body to instruct the Judiciary Committee to begin such an important process. This also establishes the parameters for such an investigation. The committee then would review information relevant to the inquiry and, if necessary, produce articles of impeachment, which then would be considered by the House as a whole.

That was precisely what occurred in the most recent impeachment – that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. That procedure that yielded four very focused and well-documented articles of impeachment (two of which passed the full House, roll call votes 543 and 545, on Dec. 19 of that year).

In contrast, the resolution passed last month by the Judiciary Committee is nothing but an extraordinary display of partisan politics, one that undermines the impeachment process as a constitutional remedy for holding a president accountable.

Furthermore, based on what we know about the so-called “Ukraine-gate” incident — including the transcript of the president’s July 25 phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, which has now been made public — that seems to have spurred Pelosi to action, there still is no tangible evidence of criminal acts or serious abuse of power by President Donald Trump.

There are other factors illustrating the bald partisan political nature of Nadler’s effort. The chairman is facing a well-funded primary challenge in his district by Lindsey Boylan, who previously criticized Nadler for his hesitancy to move forward on impeachment. When Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) noted this fact during the committee’s deliberations, Democrats expressed outrage that anyone would dare question Nadler’s motives.

The resolution approved by the committee is seriously flawed. It departs not only from the norms of an impeachment inquiry, but also from the rules of the House. The resolution prohibits noncommittee members from reviewing materials, such as documents from a grand jury, received behind closed doors. This is in direct conflict with House Rule XI, Clause 2(e)(2), which requires that all noncommittee members be allowed to review such materials. Only the House as a whole can waive this rule. To date, the House has not done so.

Another problem with the committee’s resolution is that it limits the ability of the president’s lawyers to respond to information received behind closed doors. In contrast, in 1998 the Judiciary Committee adopted explicit procedural rights for President Clinton, similar to those adopted in the impeachment inquiry into President Richard Nixon a generation earlier. Clinton’s counsel could, among other things, review and respond to evidence received by the committee and cross-examine witnesses. “The provisions will ensure that the impeachment inquiry is fair to the President,” the committee report explained at the time.

The current Judiciary Committee resolution only allows Trump’s counsel to respond to information or testimony received during open session. This is hardly a great favor being granted the president; anyone, whether they are a noncommittee member of the House or the average viewer watching a hearing on C-SPAN, may respond to information or testimony received during open session.

The process Democrats are employing for this impeachment “investigation,” “inquiry,” or whatever term they want to use, is a stain on the Judiciary Committee and on the institution of the House of Representatives — lacking, as it does, any pretense of fairness, due process or regard for institutional precedence.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th Congressional District from 1995 to 2003 and served as an impeachment manager during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Jason Pye is the vice president of legislative affairs at FreedomWorks.