Editor’s note: Each Sunday, the chattering class fills American airwaves with the thoughts and opinions of Washington’s most powerful Swamp-dwellers. Often these interviews make headlines and inform the public about what to expect in the coming week. If you want to stay informed but don’t have the time to devote to all the political punditry, there is hope. Liberty Nation author Kelli Ballard sifts through the shows for you and presents the high and lowlights in this weekly column.
This weekend featured nothing more than impeachment issues, of course. You’ve got Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) claiming the president will not do anything right for the country but only what’s right for Donald Trump. You’ve got the GOP saying the entire impeachment process is a crock of bull. Who do you believe?
This Week With George Stephanopoulos – ABC
First up we have House Impeachment Manager Val Demings (D-FL), who, of course, made the same demand we’ve been hearing for weeks: We need witnesses. She had the audacity to say: “Let’s look at the facts, George, because I know that sometimes the other side seems to struggle with that.” And then she followed it up by saying the trial is based on the president’s intentions rather than on nefarious – and provable – actions. “I understand what the president’s attorneys are saying,” Demings explained, “but we have to go back to what President Trump’s intentions were on the call that day and what President Zelensky heard.”
So, Democrats are basing their case on intentions and hearsay, rather than on proof? Is that what we’re supposed to get out of this? She continued: “But I’m reminded, too, of Michael Cohen. Remember the president’s former personal attorney who’s sitting in prison. One of the things that he said was that the president talks in codes but everybody around him understands what he means.”
Again, the question must be asked: Should the Senate convict a president based on what they think his intentions were? Senator James Lankford (R-OK) was asked why the Republicans did not want to hear from the witnesses. He had a pretty good response: “Well, it’s for the same reason they didn’t want to hear from the witnesses apparently,” he answered, adding:
“[House Democrats are] saying the president not only can be impeached in 78 days, through the House, the fastest ever in history, but they’re now saying the president should not have access to the courts at all at any point through the trial. So the closing argument from Adam Schiff was: ‘Do not allow the president to be able to go to the courts and be able to argue these things.’ Quite frankly it looks like they’re asking the Senate to go be special counsel, go search, go seek out. That’s not really the task of the Senate. The task of the Senate is to hear the trial.”
But that’s not all. Despite Stephanopoulos interrupting and trying to put words into the senator’s mouth, Lankford pointed out that the impeachment managers avoided presenting the full context of certain statements:
“Over, and over, and over again, for 21 hours over three days, the House managers would read one sentence but not read the next sentence… in the phone call itself, the sentence they didn’t read was President Zelensky said ‘hey if we can’t do a White House meeting, let’s meet in Poland on September the first.’ The White House agreed to that and set up the meeting.”
George tried to trip up the senator with questions about the now-infamous phone call between Donald Trump and Ukraine President Zelensky. That didn’t work out so well either, as Lankford rebuked: “The whole issue about Hunter Biden and Rudy Giuliani doesn’t originate with the president. President Zelensky actually brings that up… ”
Meet the Press – NBC
Jerry Nadler . (Photo by Patrick Semansky-Pool/Getty Images)
As the Meet the Press show opens up we see Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) talking about how the right lies, saying “and they lie, and they lie, and they lie,” and also calling the president a dictator. Adam Schiff talks about how a fair trial requires witnesses, yet, the House did not allow the White House to provide any witnesses on their end. Both sides of the aisle are fighting against each other making it difficult for the American people to have faith in the system.
Face the Nation – CBS
This week on Face the Nation, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) was a guest and, in true left-wing media fashion, hostess Margaret Brennan kept interrupting his answers. He was asked whether he would vote to allow witnesses during the impeachment trial and responded with:
“I’m not going to vote to approve witnesses because the House Democrats have had lots of witnesses. We heard from them, over, and over, and over again this week. We don’t need to prolong what’s already taken five months’ of the American people’s time. The House Democrats have not proven their case against Donald Trump.”
Both sides think they have the upper hand, but as Cotton said, “We listened to Adam Schiff drone on for three days, and then the president’s lawyers, in just two hours, demolished the case that he had made.”
Then the hostess tried to turn the tables and talk about how the president was trying to get rid of former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. The program played a video in which you can clearly hear President Trump saying they needed to get rid of her. She’d been going around talking about how he would be impeached. Cotton had an answer for that too:
“That video was more than a year before he asked Marie Yovanovitch to be removed … The president has the right to remove any ambassador for any reason or no reason whatsoever. An ambassador badmouthing a president is a pretty sound reason to remove an ambassador.”
Stay tuned next week to see what innovative ways the left conjures to misdirect and mislead the public.
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Read more from Kelli Ballard.
