News Summary From the Week That Was (2 – 8 February)

This is a weekly summary of news that the legacy media and Democrats have obfuscated for partisan political reasons.

1. Let’s start off with some Victor Davis Hanson commentary that postulates a “post-impeachment Schiff world”:

Advertisement

[W]hat will be the status of a post-impeachment Schiff, once the impeachment farce has lost its luster?

Thanks in part to Schiff, President Trump is polling more strongly now than when Schiff began the circus in September.

Thanks in part to Schiff, the erstwhile frontrunner and best Democratic presidential chance, Joe Biden, is left hemorrhaging from impeachment’s never-ending embarrassments about Hunter Biden.

Thanks in part to Schiff, Trump now enjoys more party solidarity than any recent Republican president.

Thanks in part to Schiff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been made irrelevant, and the formula that won the House in 2018 is ancient history.

Thanks in part to Schiff, Trump rallies have gone ballistic with about 40 percent of his audiences including Democrats and Independents.

In truth, Schiff’s ego was wetted by the rah-rah, but unhinged anchors of cable news, and he began to believe in his own anti-Trump godhead. But he has now lied so often and so blatantly, that almost anything he says is deemed automatically false.

Ironically, the best thing that could have happened to Schiff was this coming quick end to the farce, given that if had he testified before the Senate, he would have destroyed what little is left of his reputation.

Read the rest here. VDH lays out Schiff’s lies and his disastrous Senate impeachment trial presentations (from the Democrats’ point of view). A great read!

2. The legacy media dropped the shootdown of Ukraine 752 lot a hot rock because it can’t be leveraged on behalf of Democrats, but here is proof the Iranians knew immediately that the airplane was shot down.

A leaked recording of an exchange between an Iranian air-traffic controller and an Iranian pilot purports to show that authorities immediately knew a missile had downed a Ukrainian jetliner after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard, despite days of denials by the Islamic Republic.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy acknowledged the recording’s authenticity in a report aired by a Ukrainian television channel on Sunday night.

Iranian authorities, however, condemned the publication of the recording as “unprofessional,” saying it was part of a confidential report.

“This action by the Ukrainians makes us not want to give them any more evidence,” said Rezaifar, the head of the Iranian investigators, according to a report by the semiofficial Mehr news agency.

Read the rest here. The Iranian Republican of Iran operates like the typical totalitarian regime: in secrecy, with total media control, and suppressing any dissent. In this case, the truth will out.

Advertisement

3. This bombshell is being suppressed, too, because it does fit the left’s narrative that domestic abuse is only perpetrated by men.

A leaked audio conversation between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard is blowing up Hollywood. The audio reveals Heard confessing to committing physical violence against Depp. After BuzzFeed published photos of Heard with bruises and accusations of abuse against Depp, his life fell apart. Depp was implicated in the #MeToo movement and branded as a wife-abuser. He was dropped from “Pirates of the Caribbean” in 2018 and many speculate it was because of the allegations.

On Sunday, a taped conversation between Depp and Heard was posted online. In it, Heard admits to “slapping,” “hitting,” and throwing objects at him. Her biggest frustration with Depp appears to be that he tries to get away from her when she turns violent. Depp is heard saying, “There can be no physical violence,” and Heard replies, “I can’t promise I won’t get physical again.”

Read the rest here. Alyssa Milano and the #MeToo crowd are exposed as the liars they have always been.

4. Two Republican senators are getting down to brass tacks on investigating Obama White House and Ukraine interactions in 2016.

The National Archives is in the process of reviewing several thousand documents related to meetings held between senior Obama Administration and Ukrainian officials at the White House in 2016. The trove of documents was discovered after a request for documents was submitted by two top GOP Senators in November of last year, this website has learned.

The documents requested by Senator’s Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, are significant as they directly concern meetings that senior Obama Administration and Ukrainian officials had at the White House in 2016. The documents are expected to be reviewed for classification purposes, as well as Executive privilege by lawyers for both President Obama and President Donald Trump

Johnson, Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, and Grassley, Chairman of the Committee on Finance, sent the three-page detailed request letter in November to David S. Ferriero, the head of the National Archives. The request was for “records of multiple White House meetings that took place in 2016 between and among Obama Administration officials, Ukrainian government representatives, and Democratic National Committee officials.”

The November letter requested “records of multiple White House meetings that took place in 2016 between and among Obama Administration officials, Ukrainian government representatives, and Democratic National Committee officials.”

“The White House meeting records also show Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian American operative ‘who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee’ during the 2016 election, attended numerous meetings at the White House, including one event with President Obama,” it stated.

Chalupa allegedly “worked to get dirt on Trump from the Ukrainians,” the letter states, referring to stories originally posted by Politico reporter Ken Vogel, who is now with the New York Times.

According to the November letter sent by Johnson and Grassley, Hunter Biden was also discussed at those White House meetings. The Senate request specifically references Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas giant, that was believed to be under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors at the time. From 2014, until 2019, Hunter Biden served as a paid board member of Burisma, which was founded in 2002 by Mykola Zlochevsky, an ally of the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Advertisement

Read the rest here. So much for “Ukraine conspiracy theories” from the likes of Adam Schiff and Chuck Schumer. This should have been done long ago.

5. This is an excellent summary of why the Democrats’ impeachment gambit failed.

Despite all the fabricated praise directed at Schiff over the past couple of weeks, the man reeks of partisanship. Not only because he’s been caught lying about the presence of damning evidence against Trump on more than one occasion, but because he personally played a sketchy role in helping the whistleblower responsible for sparking the impeachment come forward.

Lots of Americans rightly believe that a large faction of Democrats has been looking to impeach the president from Day One. Nadler happened to be someone who was actually caught scheming to do it.

Nancy Pelosi … exposed the supposed need for urgency as a ruse, by withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate for weeks. She did so despite having zero standing to dictate the terms of the trial, no constitutional right to attempt to dictate them, and no political leverage. In the end, she got nothing from Mitch McConnell for her trouble.

Meanwhile, Democrats had spent most of the House hearings focusing on the specific criminal offenses of “bribery” and “extortion” — poll-tested words that were taken up after the House realized “quid pro quo” didn’t play as well with the public. If, as seems likely, it’s true that Americans are more familiar with the concepts of “bribery” and “extortion” than with the concept of a “quid pro quo,” that just means they have clearer expectations regarding the evidence needed to substantiate those accusations. And the Democrats didn’t have such evidence. They didn’t even bother including the former “crimes” — no, you don’t need a violation of criminal law to impeach, but the word was incessantly used by House Dems anyway — in their open-ended articles of impeachment, which were expressly written to compel Senate Republicans to conduct an investigation for them.

The House had no right to demand that, and the Senate had no reason to comply. So as soon as the upper chamber took up impeachment, Democrats began dropping one “bombshell” leak after the next — the same strategy they deployed during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — to try and drag out the spectacle and maximize the political damage. It didn’t work.

Read the rest here. The Democrats ran an impeachment campaign for 3 long years. They were looking for a pretext to get it done and were forced to manufacture the Ukraine phone call hoax by leveraging Deep State operatives. It did not work!

Advertisement

6. Damning information continues to come out about Strzok, Page, and the Crossfire Hurricane, thanks to Judicial Watch.

Judicial Watch announced today it received 144 pages of emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that show their direct involvement in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the bureau’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The records also show additional “confirmed classified emails” were found on Hillary Clinton’s unsecure non-state.gov email server “beyond the number presented” in then-FBI Director James Comey’s statements; Strzok and Page questioning the access the Department of Justice was granting Clinton’s lawyers; and Page revealing that the DOJ was making edits to FBI 302s (summaries of interviews) related to the Clinton investigation, also known as Midyear Exam (MYE). The emails detail a discussion about “squashing” an issue related to the Seth Rich controversy.

Read the rest here. Little by little, the truth is coming out about the Obama FBI’s criminality in 2016-7.

7. This take on the State of the Union address is far more accurate than what the legacy media produced.

The speech was such a success, in fact, that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lost her cool at the end and literally tore up her copy of the speech in a fit of sputtering rage.

  1. The Facts Are Strong

  2. The Blue-Collar Boom

  3. Emphasizing Bipartisan Successes

  4. A Speech It Was Difficult to Ostentatiously Oppose

  5. Opposition to Socialism

  6. Overt Outreach to Black Americans

  7. Boldness Unmatched by Any Other Republican President

  8. Putting an Incredibly Cute Face to Victims of Late-Term Abortion

  9. A Touching Supreme Court Moment

  10. Articulating a Restrained Foreign Policy

  11. What Conservatives Might Not Like

  12. A Hopeful National Identity

  13. Bad Timing for Democrats

Read the details about each of those 13 items here. It was one of the greatest SOTU addresses ever given, and the Democrats were outed as the anti-Americans that they truly are.

8. More great poll news for President Trump.

Americans’ views on their personal financial situation have been climbing since 2018 and are now at or near record highs in Gallup’s trends. Nearly six in 10 Americans (59%) now say they are better off financially than they were a year ago, up from 50% last year.

The current 59% of Americans who say they are better off financially than they were a year ago is essentially tied for the all-time high of 58% in January 1999.

In addition to U.S. adults’ highly positive report on their current financial situation, Americans are also expressing peak optimism about their future personal financial situation. About three in four U.S. adults (74%) predict they will be better off financially a year from now, the highest in Gallup’s trend since 1977.

Advertisement

Read the rest here. These poll results are great for America and disastrous for Democrats. Excellent!

9. This is a nice, quick summary of the political scene and the disaster facing Democrats after President Trump’s acquittal.

Now that the impeachment farce is finished, and the president is acquitted, the Democratic Party has nothing left but futile gestures to mask its fatal political miscalculation.

All that’s left is a broken Nancy Pelosi shredding her remaining dignity by ripping up the president’s State of the Union speech.

All that’s left is poor Joe Biden limping from a catastrophic fourth-place finish in Iowa to another looming rout in New Hampshire, as the ascendant socialist wing of the party goes rogue.

Biden has collapsed as the moderate hope of the Democrats and all that’s left is the unelectability of ­78-year-old Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders and 38-year-old gay left-wing Indiana ex-mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Only a mutual loathing of Donald Trump preserved a façade of unity and purpose for Democrats during impeachment.

But all that did was deliver the president record high approval ratings and unite Republicans around him, reborn as street brawlers.

Even Republicans skeptical of Trump’s tweets and combative tone now see clearly what he’s been up against.

Read the rest here. All that Democrats have is Trump Derangement Syndrome at this point. They are a hot mess.

10. Time for some comic relief from Sheila Jackson Lee, who apparently thinks the Russians screwed up the Iowa caucuses.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, suggested during an FBI oversight hearing on Wednesday that Russia is responsible for the vote-reporting issues from Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses.

“I hope that the Iowa Democrats will ask for an FBI investigation on the app,” the Texas Democrat told FBI Director Christopher Wray. “I believe that Russia has been engaged in and interfering with a number of our elections dealing with the 2016 election.”

Read the rest here. The Democrat Party is a dumpster fire. She needs some new staffers.

11. This should be a universal demand, but of course Democrats loved what Nancy Pelosi did immediately after the SOTU address.

Her drop the mic moment will have a lasting impact on the House. While many will celebrate her trolling of the president, she tore up something far more important than a speech. Pelosi has shredded decades of tradition, decorum and civility that the nation could use now more than ever. The House speaker is more than a political partisan, particularly when carrying out functions such as the State of the Union address. A president appears in the House as a guest of both chambers of Congress. The House speaker represents not her party or herself but the entirety of the chamber. At that moment, she must transcend her own political ambitions and loyalties.

Pelosi, like her predecessors, is supposed to remain stone faced during the address even if the president leaves her personally enraged. Indeed, House speakers have been the authority who kept other members in silent deference and respect, if not to the president, then to the office. However, Pelosi appeared to goad the mob, like a high schooler making mad little faces behind the school principal at an assembly. It worked as members protested and interrupted Trump. Pelosi became another Democratic leader, little more than a twitching embodiment of this age of rage.

She shredded the pretense of governing with civility and dignity in the House. Notably, she did not wait to rip up her copy of the speech until after she left the House floor. Pelosi wanted to do it at the end of the speech, in front of the camera, with the president still in the chamber.

That act was more important to Pelosi than preserving the tradition of her office. In doing so, she forfeited the right to occupy that office.

Advertisement

Read the rest here. Yes, indeed. Censure is not enough. She should resign immediately.

Here are this week’s “honorable mention” articles:

An amazing week with great news for President Trump, Republicans, and Americans in general! Acquittal on the articles of impeachment, the best SOTU address in memory, emoluments clause lawsuit toss out by a circuit court, a great jobs report that exceeded expectations, Americans happy with their personal financial situation, the Vindmans gone from the National Security Council, five more federal judges approved by the Senate, and Democrat primary chaos. And there is the Durham investigation waiting in the wings along with the Senate’s investigation of Ukraine and the Bidens. Stay tuned!

The end.

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos