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    Andrew McCarthy

    Biden probe needs to untangle any foreign financial entanglements

    What’s your passport number? Why are we asking? Because we need to know everything there is to know about your travel to and contacts with foreign countries and foreign nationals. 

    Have you lived abroad? Do you have relatives who have lived and worked abroad? Your father, mother, brother, sister, or child? Oh, really? In what countries? What kind of work? Who are their business associates?

    Pretty nosy questions, right? Well, no, not really. They are actually just the tip of the iceberg for any American who wants to work in a national security position in the United States government.

    PSAKI AGAIN DODGES QUESTION ABOUT WHETHER HUNTER BIDEN’S BUSINESS PARTNER HAD SPECIAL ACCESS TO WHITE HOUSE

    Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, speaks to guests during the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House, Monday, April 18, 2022, in Washington.  (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

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    It is worth bearing this in mind as we watch the spectacle of Attorney General Merrick Garland dodging Congress’s questions about an ongoing criminal investigation that implicates several members of the Biden family, including President Joe Biden himself.

    In deflecting Senate questions about why a special counsel has not been appointed under circumstances where there is a neon-flashing conflict of interest, the administration acts as if this is just a narrow problem, involving only the president’s troubled son Hunter and what he deceptively refers to as his “tax affairs.”

    But Hunter and his potential tax evasions are the least consequential part of the probe. What matters is that corrupt and authoritarian regimes poured millions of dollars into Biden family coffers, clearly expecting to gain access to Joe Biden in his various top government positions. They were not after the erratic Hunter’s business acumen; they were after political influence.

    The American people are entitled to a thoroughgoing and credible probe of the Biden family’s foreign ties and lucrative foreign financial arrangements. We need to know what the foreign actors – many tied to notoriously corrupt governments, and to authoritarian, anti-American regimes – believe they have bought.

    We are talking here about an extensive and suspicious foreign network around the president of the United States, the man with the most significant national-security duties in our country, and thus the official whose vulnerability to blackmail and compromise could be the most damaging to American interests. But while administration officials bristle when such commonsense observations are made, we would easily grasp the threat if we just consider what we put ordinary Americans through.  

    Don’t take my word for it. Have a look at Standard Form 86, which the United States government requires to be completed by anyone who seeks even a low-ranking national-security job, one with responsibilities that barely register compared to the president’s.

    As you skim through SF-86, bear in mind the Biden administration’s implausible claim that the Justice Department’s investigation is only about Hunter, and that the son’s foreign financial dealings have nothing to do with the president.

    Put aside that this is false – that we already know President Biden met with his son’s foreign partners, discussed his son’s business affairs, and (according to Tony Bobulinski, a participant in one of the China deals) may have profited personally, albeit indirectly. The rudimentary fact is: When it comes to the intersection of foreign contacts and national security, our government presumes that American interests can be damaged not only by direct foreign influence on a government official but by foreign influence on the official’s close family members.

    Are you or your spouse bound to any foreign nationals by “affection, influence, common interests, and/or obligation”? That’s just the beginning of what SF-86 compels applicants for national security jobs to disclose. Who are those foreign nationals, and how do you know them? How frequently do you have contact with them? What is the nature of your relationships with them? Are there business and/or financial ties between you and foreign nationals or foreign entities? Do they pay you? Do you pay them, or owe them some reciprocal obligation? What are the names of these foreign nationals? Would you list for us the companies they work for and whether they have other foreign business or financial relationships?

    Because of the patent stakes for national security, the government requires applicants to reveal wither they, their spouses, or any members of their immediate families have “been asked to provide advice or serve as a consultant, even informally, by any foreign government official or agency?” And not just foreign governments – the form probes services provided to any foreign national at all, particularly foreign nationals who have contacts of some kind with foreign governments – just as Hunter Biden’s business contacts had relationships with the regimes in China, Russia, Ukraine, Mexico, and so on. 

    Oh, and imagine the Bidens having to answer this one: Have you, your spouse or your children “EVER had any foreign financial interests (such as stocks, property, investments, bank accounts, ownership of corporate entities, corporate interests or exchange traded funds (ETFs) held in specific geographical or economic sectors) in which you or they have direct control or direct ownership?” (Emphasis in original.) 

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    SF-86 doesn’t leave it at that – not hardly. It wants to know: What is the nature of these foreign financial interests? When did they start? Are they ongoing, and if not, when did they end and on what terms? What countries do they involve? What is the value of these foreign financial interests in American dollars? Are there foreign financial interests that you have held on behalf of others (such as family members), or that others hold on your behalf? Do you have any relationship with a foreign country, entity, or person that will provide financial benefits or entail obligations now or in the future?

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    What matters in the Biden probe is not whether Hunter failed to pay his taxes. It is what kind of foreign financial entanglements may compromise the sitting president of the United States, and what foreign actors have reason to believe they can exert influence on him. If President Biden were just an average American seeking a government job that had any national-security implications, we would understand this implicitly.

    CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ANDREW McCARTHY

    Questions the media need to start asking about Hunter Biden and his dad

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    At a 2020 debate, President Donald Trump tried to press his rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, on an intriguing financial transaction: $3.5 million invested in a fund controlled by Biden’s son. Though Hunter Biden is better known for drug addiction and overall instability than business acumen, Elena Baturina, the widow of Yuri Luzhkov, longtime mayor of Moscow and confidant of Vladimir Putin, for some reason saw wisdom in pouring Russian money into a Hunter venture. 

    If Biden had been the Republican in the race, Trump would not have had to raise the question. The media would already have been asking it incessantly. The animating question of the campaign would have been why, when President Barack Obama made his vice president the point-man on administration policy regarding such countries as Russia, Ukraine, and China, people connected to those notoriously corrupt regimes suddenly thought it expedient to pay Biden’s ne’er-do-well son millions upon millions of dollars.

    But Biden was the Democrat in the race. The media-Democrat complex, far from haranguing him until he answered such questions, was sure to help him deflect. In fact, an establishment-friendly assortment of former intelligence officials baselessly floated the notion that damning data on a computer that patently belonged to Hunter might be Russian disinformation. The press dutifully ran with it. 

    HUNTER BIDEN SCANDAL HEATS UP AS MAINSTREAM OUTLETS AWAKEN: RUSSIAN ‘DISINFORMATION’ NO MORE

    So, in response to Trump, Biden parroted the disinformation dodge, dismissed his opponent as a “clown,” and posed as if the Hunter questions were not worth dignifying with answers.

    The tables have turned.

    FILE – WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 12: World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden (L) and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden award designer Michael Kors (C) the World Food Program USA’s McGovern-Dole Leadership Award at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

    Too late, of course, to influence the 2020 race, the New York Times and Washington Post have suddenly decided that the Hunter laptop and the Biden family business it reveals are real news after all. 

    The Times and Post have very good sources in the Biden Justice Department. It’s a good bet that they’re finally covering a story they tried to bury because they’ve been alerted to its seriousness. They don’t want to be embarrassed if, after their stonewalling, Hunter gets indicted after all.

    Well, sure, the mainstream media is now reporting on the case. But will they ask President Biden the hard questions they would undoubtedly ask if a Republican were in the White House?

    For example, Biden claimed that he never discussed Hunter’s business dealings with his son. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence that this is false. Just one example: Anthony Bobulinksi, a former naval officer and businessman recruited to structure Hunter’s lucrative deal with CEFC, a shady conglomerate intimately tied to the Chinese government and Communist Party, says he personally discussed the deal with Joe Biden, two times face-to-face. 

    Bobulinski says he was told that the Chinese operatives were willing to pay extravagantly for a connection to the Biden family, and that he was instructed by Hunter and Joe’s brother Jim to keep Joe’s participation under wraps. Hunter and Jim got millions of dollars in the deal.  A document written by one of Hunter’s business partners and kept on Hunter’s computer, describing each participant’s stake, says “the big guy” – who Bobulinski knew to be Joe Biden – was to get ten percent of the haul.

    Bobulinski is prepared to testify under oath about his dealings with the Bidens. He has already given extensive interviews to the FBI – i.e., risking a false-statements prosecution if he is not telling the truth. 

    So here’s my question and I wish the Post and the Times would ask it: Would President Biden also agree to testify under oath and sit for interviews with the FBI regarding CEFC? 

    Sure, the mainstream media is now reporting on the Hunter Biden case. But will they ask President Biden the hard questions they would undoubtedly ask if a Republican were in the White House?

    Another thing. Despite ongoing Russian aggression, China remains America’s greatest geopolitical threat. 

    Beijing continues its military buildup (its navy is now larger than ours), tests hypersonic weapons, and menaces Taiwan (having already swallowed Hong Kong). 

    • Hunter Biden walks to Marine One on the Ellipse outside the White House May 22, 2021, in Washington, DC.  (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

    • The Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop in March, 2022. ((Randy Holmes via Getty Images))

    • FILE – Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden speaks during the fourth night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, August 20, 2020.  (Democratic National Convention/Sipa USA  |   Berges gallery)

    • FILE – WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 20:  U.S. President Joe Biden embraces First Lady Dr. Jill Biden as son Hunter Biden, daughter Ashley Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris look on after Biden was sworn in during his inauguration on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2021 in Washington, D.C.   ( )

    Yet, Biden insists China is not a threat. He won’t investigate, much less sanction, Beijing for causing and covering up the Covid-19 pandemic that has taken over 6 million lives globally. 

    His administration quietly dropped the Justice Department’s initiative against Chinese espionage. Biden has been mute in the face of China’s hacking, mass-thievery of intellectual property, fentanyl production, and enslavement of Uighur Muslims.

    Against that backdrop of Biden administration appeasement, we now know that people and entities closely connected to the Chinese regime paid the Biden family millions of dollars over the last decade. 

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    Isn’t it time for the media-Democrat complex to dig into this?

    Hunter Biden formed a partnership with a front for the Bank of China that enabled his Chinese partners to acquire American technology with military uses, as well as a coveted African cobalt mine, which is key to cornering the market for batteries that power the electric cars – you know, the cars the Biden administration hypes to Americans as gas prices skyrocket. 

    In the other aforementioned CEFC deal, President Xi’s protégé, Ye Jianming, first enticed Hunter with a 2.8 carat diamond, then paid him a million dollars to represent Patrick Ho, a man Hunter described as the “f*** spy chief of China.” Ho was then under investigation by the FBI. He was eventually convicted of international corruption and money-laundering, after which Xi’s regime summoned Ye back home. Hunter’s deep-pocketed partner has never been seen again, while CEFC faded away in bankruptcy.

    So, doesn’t the president think the American people are entitled to a thorough investigation of the suspicious Chinese enrichment of the Biden family? Does it explain Biden’s weakness in the face of Beijing’s aggression? 

    Will America’s left-leaning press start asking questions?

    Here’s one more question I’d like to see the media start asking: Given the president’s enthusiastic support for the House January 6 Committee, would he similarly support a Committee on the Biden family’s propensity to cash in on Joe Biden’s political influence? 

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    If, as is likely, the Republicans take control of the House next year, would Biden endorse a committee hand-picked by the new Speaker, dominated by Biden opponents, and fully empowered to subpoena Biden officials and family members, including their bank and telecommunications records? Would he waive any claims of executive privilege, right?

    Just asking.

    CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ANDREW McCARTHY

    Andrew McCarthy: On coronavirus restrictions, burden of proof is on government to show justification

    Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox.  Sign up here. 

    There is never a good time for a pandemic, but an election year in a deeply divided country is an especially bad time. Everything is politicized. I would add that even science is politicized, but that would suggest that this was something new.

    Sadly, we’re inured to the politicization of science, thanks to climate change and to the centrality of government funding to academic endeavors. Research resources are diverted toward our political conflicts, rather than being freely allocated where they could better advance the search for truth.

    The politicization of science has ingrained in our political life something about which we ought to be highly skeptical: The argument from authority. It is doing extraordinary damage to the republic, through governmental responses — federal, state and municipal — to the coronavirus.

    BRANDON JUDD: AS CORONAVIRUS SENDS UNEMPLOYMENT SKYROCKETING, TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS CLEARLY NEEDED

    And it will keep doing damage unless and until we restore the burden of proof.

    There is no doubt that governments have a compelling interest in public safety, which includes preventing the spread of a potentially deadly infectious disease.

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    It is nevertheless the foundational conceit of the American republic that governments are created to secure the fundamental rights of a nation’s citizens — our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, the legitimacy of government is dependent on the consent of the governed.

    In the United States, authority is subordinate to liberty. Government is the servant, not the master.

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    Andrew McCarthy: On projections of coronavirus deaths, government uses unreliable model

    Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox.  Sign up here.

    To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.

    In a space of just six days starting April 2, two revisions (on Sunday and Wednesday) have utterly discredited the model produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

    I wrote about the IHME’s modeling at National Review on Monday, the day after the first revision — which was dramatic, but pales in comparison to Wednesday’s reassessment. This was not immediately apparent because the latest revision (Wednesday) did not include a side-by-side comparison, as did the Sunday revision.

    MEET THE FORMER NYT REPORTER WHO IS CHALLENGING THE CORONAVIRUS NARRATIVE

    Perusal of the new data, however, is staggering, as is what it says about government predictions we were hearing just days ago about the likelihood of 100,000 deaths, with as many as 240,000 a real possibility.

    As I noted in my last post on this subject, by Sunday the projection of likely deaths had plunged 12 percent in just three days, 93,531 to 81,766. Understand, this projection is drawn from a range; on April 2, IHME was telling us cumulative COVID-19 deaths could reach as high as approximately 178,000. The upper range was also reduced on Sunday to about 136,000.

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    On Wednesday, the projected cumulative deaths were slashed to 60,145 (with the upper range again cut, to about 126,000). That is, in less than a week, the model proved to be off by more than 33 percent.

    My use of the term “off” is intentional. There is no shortage of government spin, regurgitated by media commentators, assuring us that the drastic reductions in the projections over just a few days powerfully illustrate how well social distancing and the substantial shuttering of the economy is working.

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    Nonsense. As Alex Berenson points out on Twitter, with an accompanying screenshot data updated by IHME on April 1, the original April 2 model was explicitly “assuming full social distancing through May 2020.”

    CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW

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    Andrew McCarthy: Mueller’s charges against Russian firms dismissed — other shoe drops in collusion farce

    More than an investigation, the Mueller probe was the wellspring of a political narrative. That becomes clearer as time goes by and more information ekes out … such as new confirmation that, months before Mueller was appointed in May 2017, it was already well understood in Justice Department circles that there was no case of criminal “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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    Never was that made more obvious than by the Justice Department’s quiet announcement late Monday, under the five-alarm noise of the coronavirus scare, that it has dropped the special counsel’s indictment of Russian companies — an outcome I predicted here at National Review nearly two years ago.

    A little refresher is in order.

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    As detailed here many times, one of the biggest problems confronting those weaving the collusion tale was the inability to prove that Russia hacked the Democratic email accounts. As “Ball of Collusion” outlines, that’s not the only fundamental problem. There is also the fact that the Democratic emails, in which Hillary Clinton was not an active correspondent, did not actually hurt her campaign at all — certainly not the way her own email scandal did (a scandal for which there was no way to blame Moscow).

    There is also the dearth of evidence that the Trump campaign was even aware of, much less complicit in, Kremlin intelligence operations. Still, very basically, it would be impossible to prove that Trump had conspired in Russia’s hacking unless prosecutors could first establish that Russia had done the hacking.

    CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING ANDREW McCARTHY’S COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW

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    Andrew McCarthy: No to ‘FISA reform’

    Is FISA reform believable?

    Fox News contributor and attorney Andrew McCarthy says the ‘Washington playbook’ prefers to do FISA court reforms instead of proper investigations.

    Thanks to Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky.,  and Mike Lee, R-Utah, as well as an amen chorus of Trump loyalists in the House, the president seems poised to fulfill one of the fondest dreams of Clinton and Obama Democrats: Government policy that regards international terrorism as a mere crime, a law-enforcement issue to be managed by federal judges rather than a national-security threat from which the officials Americans elect must safeguard our country.

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    I doubt the president realizes these ramifications of declining to reauthorize three Patriot Act security measures that are set to expire. Successfully camouflaging themselves as “FISA reformers,” Sens. Paul and Lee have steered the president toward exploiting the imminent expiration as a way of holding the FBI accountable for FISA abuse.

    In truth, the senators’ agenda predates the Trump era, and it would do nothing to fix what’s actually wrong with FISA. Their aim is to dismantle the post-9/11 intelligence-based approach to counterterrorism, a strategy prudently adopted by President Bush, who recognized that when our most immediate threat is jihadist mass-murder attacks, prevention should take precedence over prosecution. “FISA reform” is a shrewd way for them to accomplish this objective because it appeals to the president’s vanity — his most destructive blind spot.

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    See, the libertarian senators have always opposed intelligence-based counterterrorism on philosophical grounds that they root in the Constitution. They are wrong, though their sincerity is not to be doubted. As I’ve related over the years (see, e.g., here and here), the distortion of the Fourth Amendment Paul has long championed (and to which Lee seems adherent) bears little resemblance to the Fourth Amendment as written and originally understood. If adopted, it would be a boon to both foreign terrorists and domestic criminals.

    Washington’s reluctance to court this potentially catastrophic outcome has long frustrated libertarians, as have the facts that jurisprudence and the terrorist threat have lined up against them. But in recent years, things have started swinging in their favor.

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    Andrew McCarthy: Schumer threats to justices in abortion case show Supreme Court is a political institution

    Should Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., be censured? Of course he should, in the sense that the rule of law, were it actually our cynosure, would cry out for it.

    On Wednesday morning, the Democrats’ Senate minority leader stirred up the mob outside the Supreme Court, unabashedly threatening Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” Schumer inveighed. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

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    Inside, the justices were then hearing argument on what ought to be a straightforward abortion case (i.e., one in which the “right” invented in Roe v. Wade is not up for consideration). When called on his menacing remarks, rather than apologize, Schumer brazenly lied about what he had done. Thursday morning he was still lying — a tepid apology, offered under pressure while insisting that “in no way was I making a threat.”

    TRUMP REBUKES SCHUMER OVER THREAT TO GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH: ‘A DISGRACE HE WAS ABLE TO SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT’

    In a rule-of-law society, that should rate censure. Case closed.

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    Except it’s not closed, because we are not a rule-of-law society. We just pretend to be. In a rule-of-law society, a mob would not gather on the steps of the courthouse in the first place.

    Why is the mob out there?

    CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING ANDREW MCCARTHY’S COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW

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    Andrew McCarthy: Trump’s curious New York Times libel lawsuit

    President Trump is getting bad legal advice and bad political advice. Or, if he’s going on his own instincts, maybe that most mystifying trait of his has yet again reared its head: He just can’t stand prosperity or coast on good news. Whatever the case, this is not the right time — not that there would ever be a right time — to file a frivolous libel lawsuit against the New York Times, a suit that will put him on the defensive when he should be playing election-year offense.

    This may have been the best week of the Trump presidency. Apparently poised to nominate an unabashed socialist as their 2020 standard-bearer, Democrats are panicking over the potential ramifications, including the down-ballot fallout. Meanwhile, Trump’s poll numbers are up, and he just had a successful visit to India, a country of great importance.

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    Even amid a stock-market plunge, Trump held the best press conference of his presidency on Wednesday evening. Yes, it’s early and a lot could go wrong. His administration, though, appears to be managing the coronavirus outbreak well. With Democrats shamefully trying to stoke panic, the president made like the adult in the room, urging calm and bipartisanship. Of course, we’re talking about Washington, so “calm and bipartisanship” have to be graded on a curve: Trump did call House speaker Nancy Pelosi “incompetent” and took the obligatory shot at Senate minority leader “Cryin’” Chuck Schumer. But these fleeting jabs were fair response to their targets’ demagogic sniping. Plus, Trump’s point needed making: They are undermining the cooperation the country needs from its elected leaders in a potential health crisis.

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    So things are going Trump’s way. It is hard to imagine a worse moment for the president (through his 2020 campaign) to file his libel suit, the gravamen of which is a March 2019 op-ed by the Times’s former executive editor, Max Frankel.

    The defamation claim is patently meritless. As a matter of law, opinion cannot be defamation, period. And Frankel’s essay was an opinion piece: It was expressly written as the author’s opinion and published in the opinion section of the paper. Drawing on reported news and mostly undisputed facts, Frankel argued that there must have been “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime during the 2016 election. The piece focused on the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, in which the top tier of the Trump campaign knowingly welcomed Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer connected to the Russian regime, who had promised information that would harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

    CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING ANDREW McCARTHY’S COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW

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    Andrew McCarthy: In Trump impeachment trial, Senate right to block new witness testimony

    The Senate was right to vote Friday against hearing new witness testimony at President Trump’s impeachment trial. The Democrats’ demand for new witnesses at the trial was a red herring – a talking point that had some surface appeal but, upon scrutiny, was nonsense.

    House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and the other impeachment managers claim that there have been no witnesses in the trial. They said before the Senate voted 51-49 Friday to block more witnesses that if Republicans did note vote to approve subpoenas for former National Security Adviser John Bolton, among other top current and former administration officials, that the trial will be a “sham” – an exercise in “cover-up.” You can’t have a real trial, was their refrain, unless witnesses are called.

    It is nonsense. There have been plenty of witnesses. Schiff’s problem is that the additional witnesses he wanted to call would not change what has already been proved in any meaningful way.

    GOP BLOCKS WITNESSES IN SENATE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL, AS FINAL VOTE COULD DRAG TO NEXT WEEK

    Obviously, what’s happening in the Senate is not a trial in any familiar sense. We are used to judicial trials. Impeachment presents something completely different, a Senate trial. The Senate is a political body, not a law court.

    More from Opinion

    In the Senate, there are no trial procedures like those that govern judicial trials. The federal rules of evidence do not apply. Neither do the rules of criminal or civil procedure. You could not have a judicial trial without these rules.

    In stark contrast, the Senate trial has featured a mountain of hearsay, press reports read into the record, witnesses testifying about their opinions on subjects they are utterly unqualified to opine on, and so on. None of that would be permitted in a judicial trial.

    Even Chief Justice John Roberts – though he is a federal judge, is wearing his robe, and occupies a desk raised above the well – is not sitting as a judge in the usual sense. Under the Constitution, the Senate has the sole power over impeachment trials. The chief justice does not have power over the proceedings as he would in a court.

    The Democrats’ problem is not that they’ve been stopped from proving their case. They did prove their case … but their case is, at best, a petty crime, while impeachment is akin to capital punishment

    In the impeachment trial, Roberts is the presiding officer, not the judge. The Senate is the judge. For the sake of moving things along, the chief justice is ostensibly permitted to make rulings (for example, his refusal to allow a question from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., relating to the so-called “whistleblower”). But any ruling Roberts makes can be overruled by the Senate.

    Remember, ordinarily the vice president is the presiding officer in Senate proceedings. But the framers realized that it would be inappropriate for the vice president to preside over an impeachment trial of the president. To avoid the obvious conflicts of interest, the chief justice was substituted for that purpose. But the task is ministerial, not judicial.

    Just as the role of the judge and the governing rules in a Senate impeachment trial are night-and-day different from what takes places in a judicial trial, so too is the manner of presenting witness testimony.

    In point of fact, there have been over a dozen witnesses at the impeachment trial. They have not physically come into the Senate and testified. Rather, they testified in the House investigation. Their testimony is all in the record of the Senate trial, and both the House managers and the president’s counsel relied on it in making their arguments.

    That is actually not much of a departure from judicial trials. Routinely, in an effort to complete a trial expeditiously, opposing parties enter witness stipulations. These are agreements that, “if X were to be called as a witness, X would testify as follows” – with the two sides then summarizing what they mutually agree with witness would say.

    The lawyers do not have to agree on why the testimony is relevant or whether it is true; just that their summary accurately reflects what the witness’ testimony would be if he or she came to court.

    In effect, that is what has happened in the impeachment trial. Both sides are assuming that the many witnesses who testified before the House would give exactly the same testimony in the Senate that they gave in the House.

    Another salient difference between judicial trials and the Senate impeachment trial is motion practice. In a normal criminal case, for example, there is no guarantee that any witnesses will testify. Instead, the defendant is permitted to make pretrial motions seeking dismissal of the charges – including on the ground that the indictment fails to state a cognizable offense.

    When such a motion is made, the judge assumes for argument’s sake that all of the factual claims the prosecutors have made are true.

    If the judge grants the motion, it means that even if all the testimony and documentary evidence came out precisely the way the prosecutors have alleged they would come out, the case still has to be dismissed because the charges are legally insufficient. There is thus no need to call witnesses – end of story.

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    If that procedure had been available in the Senate trial, the case would have been thrown out without any witnesses.

    The consensus position of Republican senators is what Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., announced as his conclusion on Thursday night: The Democratic House managers proved their case that the president pressured Ukraine to conduct investigations that might help him politically; but the allegation does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense – because there ultimately were no investigations, because Ukraine got its U.S. aid and was not harmed, because it was lawful (even if unwise) for Trump to ask Ukraine to look into the activities of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son for purposes of rooting out corruption, and so on.

    Republicans have drawn that conclusion based on hundreds of hours of witness testimony set forth in thousands of pages of transcripts and available for viewing on video recordings. There has been plenty of witness testimony.

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    The important consideration when it came to Bolton is not whether he would physically show up in the Senate chamber, take the oath, and give testimony. It was whether his testimony would change anything. It wouldn’t. If he testified in a manner that is consistent with press reporting about his soon-to-be-published memoir, it would prove that the president pressured Ukraine for investigations.

    The House managers have already proved that.

    There is no need to belabor the point. The Democrats’ problem is not that they’ve been stopped from proving their case. They did prove their case … but their case is, at best, a petty crime, while impeachment is akin to capital punishment. It’s not that we approve of petty crime; it’s that petty crime is not a capital case. And even if Bolton testified, it wouldn’t become one.

    CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY ANDREW MCCARTHY

    Andrew McCarthy: Trump Senate impeachment trial – The questions that need to be answered now

    We have at last reached the impeachment trial phase in which senators are given the opportunity to address questions to each side. Questions by the Republicans and Democrats are to be submitted and vetted by their respective leadership to avoid duplication and irrelevancy. They will then be submitted to Chief Justice John Roberts, who will pose them alternately to the House impeachment managers and President Trump’s defense team.

    Each side presumptively has five minutes to answer, with the caveat that, on rare occasions when a question truly demands it, the party’s time to respond may be expanded slightly. This process will go on for no more than 16 hours – eight hours over the next two days.

    Everyone who has been observing the Ukraine kerfuffle through the House impeachment inquiry and the Senate trial probably has some questions. I doubt close watchers will have very many, though.

    JENNA ELLIS: TRUMP SENATE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL – HERE’S WHERE THINGS STAND NOW, WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN NEXT

    More from Opinion

    The case against the president is very thin, in the sense that a finite set of events that took place over a relatively short time to an inconclusive end has been lavished with months of investigative attention, with the result that the Democratic-controlled House, on a strictly party-line vote, voted two articles of impeachment. The charges are so vague that Democrats repeatedly shifted their theory about what to call the president’s alleged misconduct – campaign-finance violation, attempted extortion, quid pro quo, bribery, and more recently, a budget-law transgression – before ultimately settling on a nebulous “abuse of power” claim, coupled with obstruction of the House’s inquiry.

    CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

    We all have a good idea where things stand, and thus most of us are probably skeptical that this phase of questions by the Senate could change any minds.

    CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING ANDREW McCARTHY’S COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW

    CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ANDREW McCARTHY

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