Category Archives: ethics

Smart Move

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Although, had it been me, I would have ignored it, not dignifying the thing with a response.

“It” is House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s (D, NY) pro forma invitation to President Donald Trump to send along his lawyer to be present at the Nadler Impeachment Inquisition, so long as Trump responded by Nadler’s deadline with the lawyer’s name and impeachment areas of interest.

The smart move was Trump’s refusal to accede to Nadler’s demand.

Note, too, that Nadler is beginning his hearings even before the House Intelligence Committee has prepared its report on its just concluded hearings and sent it along to Nadler.  Nadler will be starting his inquisition before he and his committee even know (at least officially) what the Intel Committee’s findings are.

The refusal letter included this in part of its explanation of Trump’s decision:

As for the hearing scheduled for December 4, we cannot fairly be expected to participate in a hearing while the witnesses are yet to be named and while it remains unclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the president a fair process through additional hearings[.]

[U]nclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the president a fair process.  Pat Cipollone, White House Counsel and author of the letter, is being generous.  It’s actually crystalline that there is no fair process to be had in the Judiciary Committee proceeding.  This is what House Resolution 660, passed on strictly partisan lines by the House Progressive-Democrats, says:

SEC. 4. IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY PROCEDURES IN THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY.
(c)(1) The ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized, with the concurrence of the chair of the Committee on the Judiciary, to require, as deemed necessary to the investigation—
(A) by subpoena or otherwise—
(i) the attendance and testimony of any person (including at a taking of a deposition); and
(ii) the production of books, records, correspondence, memoranda, papers, and documents; and
(B) by interrogatory, the furnishing of information.

Only with the permission of the Committee chairman can any Republican member of the Committee do anything. Of course, the Rules go on to say that the Chairman’s decision can be appealed to the committee as a whole—to the Progressive-Democrat majority membership. There’s nothing in this Progressive-Democrat-passed set of rules that even pretend to be a fair process.

There’s nothing going on in the House that warrants White House participation. There is a great deal going on in the House that warrants strong voter participation in the upcoming elections. We are, indeed, in a battle for the soul—and the safety—of our nation. The Progressive-Democratic Party is just too desperate to undo our choice in 2016 and to prevent us from exercising our choice in 2020.

The Left and Judging

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President Donald Trump has nominated Sarah Pitlyk for the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, and the Senate is about to take up her nomination for the confirmation process.

The American Bar Association thinks highly of Pitlyk’s great intelligence, high character, and experience researching and writing briefs, but it says she’s not qualified to be a judge.  After all, this textualist judge nominee

worked for the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit organization, on cases involving contract, employment and tax disputes, as well as on religious liberty and pro-life matters.

The evil, conservative Thomas More Society. And Pitlyk worked those religious liberty and pro-life cases that the Left hates so much.

It’s telling when the ABA says it does not want great intelligence, high character, and experience on the bench.

Look for a strictly party line vote to pass her nomination out of committee with a favorable recommendation and an equally party line confirmation vote.  Because the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate also do not want great intelligence, high character, and experience on the bench. Smart judges, morally strong judges, experienced judges are in the way of their agenda.

Some Immigrants

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Mary Anne Marsh is a firm believer in the power of immigration into the US, and she’s right. However, the three examples she threw up to illustrate her position merely serve to deprecate it.

For background, she opened her op-ed with this:

[W]e are sorely tested by those who serve not the idea of America but an individual who acts like a tyrannical monarch and puts the wishes of Russian President Vladimir Putin before the best interests of this country.

Fortunately, though, that man no longer is in office. Ex-President Barack Obama (D) openly, nakedly promised “Vladimir” more flexibility once he—Obama—no longer had to worry about pesky, impertinent clingers-to-religion-and-gun American voters.

Then she named her three canonical immigrants: ex-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, NSC staffer LtCol Alexander Vindman, and ex-NSC staffer Fiona Hill.  Marsh, while lionizing these three, chose to elide certain other pertinent information about them.

Yovanovitch testified under oath, in response to Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) readout of a Trumpian tweet and question about it, that she found the tweet “intimidating.” The tweet? It was nothing more than a bluntly put performance review. Yovanovitch’s confession to being frightened by rude words sends a dangerous, emboldening signal to our enemies that we can be pushed around easily.

Vindman testified to concern about a telecon between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a telecon about which both Zelenskiy and his Foreign Minister have averred not only no concerns but positively that the telecon was a good and friendly one. Marsh chose to omit from her paean to Vindman that he had been reprimanded for—during a joint exercise with Putin’s Russia, yet—yocking it up with his Russian exercise counterparts about how foolish the US was and is.

Marsh quoted from Hill’s testimony:

Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did.  This is a fictional narrative….

The only fiction here, as was exposed during Republican questioning, was the bit about some on the committee believing Russia “did not conduct a campaign against our country.”  Examples were produced, and under oath Hill acknowledged their accuracy, of the Republicans on the committee having repeatedly sounded the alarm over Russian interference in our 2016 elections—especially with the complicity of the Democratic National Committee—and of their continued attempts to interfere with our 2018 and 2020 elections.

Hill also was exposed for her false dichotomy in her implication that because Russia had and was interfering, Ukraine must not be. A woman as intelligent and accomplished as Hill surely knew her dichotomy was false when she presented it, and her…error…was exposed, also, during Republican questioning.

The value of immigration to our great nation is vast, and it includes those who’ve fought in our defense from our beginnings down through today, serve in our Congress, and less glamorously “merely” work in our business enterprises, charity organizations, and governments at all levels.  Marsh’s three examples do not match these. At all.

Marsh’s keyboard is clacking. She might want to see to that.

The People Have Spoken

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The tally is nearly completely in for Hong Kong’s Sunday vote for local offices.

Local broadcaster RTHK reported that pro-democracy parties took 390 out of 452 seats in the district council, or nearly 90%.
The polls closed with 71.2% of eligible voters casting a ballot, the election commission said, easily surpassing the figure of 47% in the last such vote in 2015.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam suggests

The government will certainly listen humbly to citizens’ opinions and reflect on them seriously[.]

Yeah. She’ll think about it.  But will it act accordingly? Keep in mind, as you cogitate on that question, that the Lam government is nothing but a Beijing satrap.

Gordon Chang, who often writes for The Wall Street Journal and contributes to Fox News, is optimistic:

This is political annihilation for Beijing and it’s going to have consequences that are going to reverberate not just in Hong Kong itself, but perhaps in China as well….

He has a warning, though:

Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong chief executive, she reports directly to Xi Jinping. She no longer has any freedom of action. If he tells her not to give ground, which is what he’s been doing for the last several months, then you’re going to see Hong Kong erupt because, you know, people have expressed their will.
If the political establishment doesn’t make concessions, then we don’t know where this will go, but we know that will become probably much more violent and the protests will become even larger[.]

Are Xi and his Communist Party of China government listening?  Yes, most carefully.  But they’ll likely draw the wrong lessons.  I think we do know where this will go, and it won’t be pleasant, although it will be brief. Tanks rolling against a fundamentally unarmed civilian population will see to that, as was demonstrated in Tiananmen Square a little bit ago.

The US and our putative allies need to become more overt in supporting the good people of Hong Kong.  The PRC has already welched on its handover commitment and its pretense of a one country, two systems policy.

The Republic of China is watching the degree of our resolve, too.

Lying to a Court

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Press rumor has it that the DOJ’s IG report will call out an FBI lawyer for falsifying an email used by the FISA court to authorize the FBI to spy on monitor a Trump 2016 campaign advisor. Press rumor further has it that the IG report also will say the court would have authorized the…monitoring…regardless.

Let’s assume that first rumor is true. This is no minor matter; this is no loaf of bread stolen to feed the man’s family, in which some compassion might be felt for the felon.  This was a loaf of bread stolen because the man could.  This was a loaf of bread stolen explicitly to hurt someone else.  And in the end, this was a far more serious crime than merely stealing a loaf.

The FBI lawyer will have lied on a government form.  This FBI lawyer will have lied under oath when he swore to the authenticity of his document submittal.  This FBI lawyer will have lied to a court, altering the data on which the court relied—of necessity—as it reached its ruling.

The second rumor may well be plausible, but it remains speculation—there’s no way to evaluate the fact of the matter of such counterfactual surmise.  Even if accurate, though, even if the court would have reached the same decision had the FBI lawyer not lied, or even not submitted the document (altered or not) at all, the fact remains the FBI lawyer will have lied.  Under oath.

If the first rumor is true, the sanction must begin with the permanent loss of his law license, in all jurisdictions, include jail time, and then proceed from there.