Liberty Guard Author

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.

The Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

The spectacle of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff reading a made-up script of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky would make it easy to dismiss the entire “Ukrainegate” matter as comic relief. But it appears to be the vehicle by which Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her House majority have decided to begin impeachment of a sitting president of the United States.

There is a stench emanating from this episode that reveals it to be something far more sinister than the well-intentioned and patriotic move described by the acting director of the Office of National Intelligence (DNI) in his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.

The person — more accurately, persons — behind the Aug. 12 “whistleblower” complaint sent to the chairmen of both the House and Senate Intelligence committees that has fueled this drive, is not in any reasoned manner a true “whistleblower” complaint.

The lead complainant reportedly is employed by the CIA, but clearly is working in cahoots with others embedded in the intelligence community who feed him or her information and corroborate his or her conclusions. Collectively, they are saboteurs; intent on bringing down a duly elected president of the United States of America.

While these conspirators hide behind the cloak of “whistleblowers,” theirs is not an effort to simply bring to light evidence of government “fraud, waste or abuse.” Theirs is a cleverly calculated plan, hatched over a period of at least several months, and with the assistance of outside forces, including a so-called “public interest” law firm.

The façade here is one of a well-intentioned public servant bringing to the attention of the Congress and the American public “urgent” evidence of wrongdoing “within the intelligence community.” Despite such lofty rhetoric, however, the facts and the actual language of the federal law establishing the legal guidelines by which a bona fide “whistleblower” must proceed, shows that at every step of the way the whistleblower procedures were not applicable.

The starting point for this inquiry must be the “Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998,” which established the procedures according to which an employee or contractor of one of the many agencies that comprise the intelligence community, would report abuses to the congressional intelligence committees and be protected from retaliation for so doing.

In considering at the outset whether the July 25th phone call between Trump and Zelensky which so troubled the so-called whistleblower, even falls within the parameters of the 1998 law, it does not. Neither of the two presidents were engaged in discussing or carrying out anything “relating to … intelligence activity involving classified information,” which is the cornerstone in the law for a true whistleblower’s protected reporting.

In next considering elements of the so-called whistleblower’s initial complaint to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, we learn that Atkinson forwarded what he decided was a “credible” complaint of “urgent concern” to his boss (Acting DNI Director Joseph Maguire), without ever having read the transcript of the president-to-president phone call or listened to the recording itself.

In other words, the inspector general for the entire intelligence community determined that an individual had uncovered a matter of “urgent concern … involving classified information” that exposed abuse “relating to the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity,” without ever reading or listening to the supposed evidence (which happened to be hearsay to begin with)!

Had Atkinson bothered to simply read the transcribed phone call between Trump and Zelensky, he would have seen it had nothing whatever to do with “an intelligence activity involving classified information” — the actual legal cornerstone for a bona fide whistleblower complaint.

It is unclear why Maguire forwarded this complaint up the line without conducting even a cursory review of its contents to determine if it fell within the legal parameters of the law under which the so-called whistleblower purported to be acting. It also remains unclear why Maguire in the same way blindly accepted his inspector general’s flawed conclusion about the so-called whistleblower under his jurisdiction. (Maguire’s only apparent concern was for possible “executive privilege” material.)

Regardless of why these two senior intelligence officials blundered so badly, their irresponsible actions have given unwarranted credibility to individuals within our Intelligence Community actively working to sabotage the administration of President Donald Trump.

Not surprising, their work has found a receptive audience in the impeachment-hungry Democratic majority in the Congress.

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

Consistency, whether in the preparation of restaurant fare or the implementation of military policy, is not only desirable but essential, if success is the goal. At this juncture in his presidency, Donald Trump appears to lack this important ingredient. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our policies in the Middle East.

Early in his first year as the commander in chief, Trump ordered a massive missile strike against Syria, not in response to action against American targets by Bashar Assad’s regime, but because the Syrian dictator reportedly used chemical weapons against civilian populations in his own country. One year later, in April 2018, the president ordered another missile strike against the Assad regime, for essentially the same reason.

While any link to vital American national security interests was at best very indirect as a prerequisite to either of the missile attacks against Syria, there was at least an element of consistency that underlaid Trump’s moves. There has been no firm evidence since the second U.S. strike that Assad has deployed chemical weapons; permitting Washington to at least make a colorable case that the two strikes achieved the professed goal.

The administration’s responses to more recent events not in Syria, but in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia, however, raise considerably more doubts about what precisely are our goals. As many students and observers of what Hans J. Morgenthau — one of the 20th century’s leading scholars of international politics — called “Politics Among Nations” know, the lack of clarity and consistency in international affairs is a major cause of conflict.

Four months ago, Iran shot down an American drone aircraft in international airspace. No lives were lost, but the act was deliberate and violent, and obviously targeted a U.S. military aircraft. Not only did the Trump administration not respond with force, but the president publicly acknowledged he decided against launching a planned strike at the very last moment. The perception by the Iranian regime to such a move had to have been that the administration did not have a clear or consistent strategy on which to base responding to military actions by Tehran.

According to a New York Times story, one reason for the president’s last-minute hesitancy to give the green light to a military response to the shooting down of our drone aircraft, was concern for the potential loss of life on the ground resulting from our taking out the facility or facilities from which the Iranians launched their missiles against our multi-million-dollar drone. Yet, loss of life resulting from the two strikes against Syrian targets appears not to have deterred Trump in 2018 or the year before. Again, consistency appears hard to discern.

During the summer months also, Iran boldly has moved against civilian oil tankers in waters near, but apparently not in or purposefully in Iranian waters; disrupting vital oil supplies to the West. American response has been clearly muted.

Now there is the Sept. 14 drone and missile attack against the major Saudi oil facility in Abqaiq, which at least temporarily destroyed a major component of the Kingdom’s refining capability. While intelligence directly and unequivocally linking that militarily impressive strike to the regime in Tehran remains largely classified, sufficient evidence has been revealed publicly to make such conclusion far more than a 50-50 bet. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly labeled the strike an “act of war.” Thus far, however, the caution by the president has been deafening.

It is in a sense commendable that President Trump sincerely believes that the United States should not take steps that would pull our military into yet another ground war in the Middle East. And he is fully cognizant — as are his military advisors — that Iran is no Iraq; being far larger militarily and much more disciplined and sophisticated than was Iraq in 1991 or 2003. He is wise to be cautious in this regard.

Nonetheless, pursuing series of policy maneuvers that offer our allies and adversaries alike no clear or consistent strategy or link to important American security interests — especially when a number of limited but pointed military actions are available both directly involving the United States as well as indirectly through our allies in the region — is a strategy likely, if not certain, to encourage further probes by Iran. Each such move will make measured response by the United States more, rather than less, difficult.

Bob Barr (@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

The 15-year history of “swatting” should be borne in mind as several states and the federal government accelerate the push for “red flag laws,” also known as “emergency risk protection orders.”

It was in 2004 that a new and potentially deadly phenomenon appeared on the American legal landscape. That was the year a 14-year old boy, upset over being spurned in his sexual advances toward a girl, called in a false crime report designed to dispatch a SWAT team to the girl’s family’s home. Since then, there has been a surge in the number of cases in which calls or internet communications to law enforcement units claim that serious — but false — circumstances are about to unfold or have just taken place, which therefore requires immediate and serious law enforcement response against the “swatter’s” targeted victim.

The majority of swatting incidents thankfully have not resulted in serious injury or death, but there have been tragic exceptions. In one extreme swatting case in 2017 in Wichita, Kansas, for example, an innocent man was shot dead by a SWAT team responding to a false call from an irate “Call of Duty” player. The case spawned criminal charges against the alleged swatter that have yet to be resolved, but not charges against the police. Other cases have resulted in civilians and police officers being shot as a result of such surprise raids on the homes of unsuspecting victims.

Accurate figures on the number of swatting cases occurring each year are difficult to come by, especially since many jurisdictions, including the federal government, do not have explicit “anti-swatting” laws (such measures have been introduced in the Congress, but none has thus far made it to a president’s desk for signature). However, the number of such cases is estimated to be at least in the many hundreds each year.

The number of these cases is not likely to decrease anytime soon. This is because of the availability of increasingly sophisticated apps with which pranksters and evildoers can scour databases to obtain identifying information on victims to target. Moreover, improved and sophisticated technology allowing swatters to disguise the locations from which they make their calls and to hide other potentially identifying evidence from the authorities, continues to be available on the open as well as the dark web.

Even as police departments grapple with the already serious problem of swatting, another and similar potential problem looms. There is the distinct possibility that red flag gun confiscation orders that have been adopted in a number of states since the February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, will be abused by disgruntled family members, paramours, or others by making false or exaggerated allegations against a firearms owner who then becomes the target of a surprise police raid to seize his firearms.

While red flag laws incorporate measures intended to guard against the type of malicious pranksters that have caused the surge in swatting incidents, the laws allow for gun confiscation orders to be issued without notice to the intended targets, leading to surprise raids; also, the evidence required for the orders to be granted is troublingly vague in virtually every instance, and can be as easily abused as lawfully employed.

When swatters call in false information to police, they allege imminent and serious incidents, such as bomb threats, murder or armed hostage-taking, clearly designed to result not in routine dispatch of blue-uniformed officers, but rather heavily armed SWAT squads of the type today maintained by virtually every police department in the country. This same scenario will likely occur also when executing many red flag orders, which by their express terms apply to circumstances involving firearms and persons alleged to pose a serious risk to themselves or others.

For legislators thinking about enacting red flag laws, the swatting phenomenon should serve as more of a “red flag” than it has thus far.

Bob Barr (@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.