"The impeachment inquiry, investigation, votes, and ultimate refusal to transmit articles are not about removing Trump from office. Rather, it is a tacit acknowledgment he will be re-elected in November of 2020. The plan now is to use impeachment to neuter that second term with a Democrat-controlled Senate.

"This impeachment exercise is most assuredly about removing someone from office. It's just not about removing Trump from office. It's about removing Cory Gardner, Martha McSally, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins and Joni Ernst from their senate offices.

"A Democratic Senate would make the assemblage of a Cabinet next to impossible, end the filling of judicial vacancies, paralyze the country should there be a U.S. Supreme Court opening and ensure that both the House and Senate spend their time investigating the executive branch.

"If you think the country made little to no legislative progress with a Democrat-controlled House and a Republican president, just wait until there is a Democrat-controlled House and Senate and a Republican president. ...

"Whatever Senate Republicans ultimately do, they should be ever mindful this 'trial' is not about removing Trump from the presidency. It is about removing at least 5 incumbent Republican senators from the U.S. Senate."

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"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's brazen attempt at extortion appears to have failed.

"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has announced he now has the necessary votes to begin the impeachment trial of President Trump in the Senate without capitulating to Pelosi's shakedown that witnesses must be called in a trial of her choosing.

"It is now up to Pelosi, D-Calif., to transmit the two articles of impeachment adopted by the House of Representatives. The longer she delays, the more her waning credibility devolves into utter irrelevancy. ...

"The framers of the Constitution never envisioned that a future House would vote to impeach a president but then maneuver to halt an impeachment trial in the Senate. Who could have foreseen a House speaker like Pelosi whose disdain for the Constitution is exceeded only by her thirst for absolute, unfettered power?

"Pelosi has made a mockery of impeachment and debased her high office. The Senate must act to disabuse Pelosi of her pretensions and restore some semblance of constitutional order."

"Should the missile attack on Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops turn out to be the extent of Iran's response, then the operation to kill Iranian terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani will turn out to be a major victory for President Trump.

"Though the Pentagon has yet to release a full damage assessment, preliminary reports suggest that Iran's action resulted in no U.S. casualties. After days of tough talk and chants of, 'Death to America,' Iranian officials are now claiming that they have no interest in further escalation if the United States does not retaliate. This could be it.

"If this is indeed the case, there is no doubt that the U.S. dealt a far more devastating blow to Iran than it absorbed in return. Soleimani was one of the most important figures in Iran and the architect of its regional strategy to extend the regime's influence from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. He directed global terrorist attacks, targeted U.S. troops in Iraq, aided Bashar Assad in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his own people, supported the terrorist group Hezbollah, and fueled the civil war in Yemen by supporting the radical Houthi movement. ...

"The early indications are that Iran blinked. The regime dramatically launched ballistic missiles toward U.S. troops and made a big show of it to the world, but it also chose targets where it knew Americans were expecting an attack and would be able to take preparations to reduce or avoid casualties. It was telling that even the threats Iran issued tonight, that if the U.S. retaliates, Iran will attack Israel and Dubai, suggest an unwillingness to engage the U.S. were it to risk actual casualties."

"During his Friday presentation, Schiff tried to shame Republicans by playing a clip of the late Sen. John McCain talking about the threat that a democratic Ukraine posed to Putin's vision for the region. Yet he neglected to show the speech in which McCain described the Russian takeover of Crimea as 'the ultimate result' of Obama's 'feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America's strength anymore.'

When Russia first invaded Ukraine in March 2014, Schiff tried to deflect blame away from the Obama administration and onto the intelligence community. That same month, the California congressman cautioned against a tough response to Russia's aggression, warning that 'the challenge is, we do need to have some kind of working relationship with Russia. And while we can impose these costs and take these steps, we've got to be mindful of the fact that they can impose their own costs on us.'

The impeachment case does not hinge on substantive arguments about U.S. policy toward Ukraine. The question is whether Trump abused power by delaying aid to Ukraine appropriated by Congress in an effort to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Trump's domestic political rival.

But Democrats pushing the idea that Trump's delay in sending aid endangered U.S. national security doesn't pass the laugh test. Given the Obama legacy, Democrats presenting themselves as enduring agents of support for Ukraine and defenders of global security is plainly ridiculous."

"The United States has long had a policy of using targeted strikes to kill enemy leaders. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched a program of drone strikes and Special Forces attacks to kill leaders of al-Qaeda and insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only did Barack Obama continue these policies, he also launched an air war against Libya that sought as one of its goals to kill its leader, Moammar Qaddafi, in order to trigger regime change. Few, if any, Democratic officials criticized Obama for engaging in illegal assassination or for launching strikes in Libya or, later, in Syria, without congressional approval. ...

"Whether killing Soleimani amounted to valid self-defense would raise difficult factual questions if the United States were acting in a purely anticipatory manner. The United States and other countries have recognized that a nation can use force to preempt an imminent attack by an enemy. President Kennedy, for example, stretched the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense perhaps to its limits when he imposed a naval blockade during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to prevent Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles on an island just 100 miles from Florida. Whether the United States could attack Soleimani in anticipatory self-defense would depend on the facts: whether Iranian forces under his control were planning or in the middle of an attack on U.S. forces or installations.

"But in this case, the events of the last few weeks make Trump's legal case all the easier. Iran had already begun attacking U.S. personnel. It supported militias that had already shelled a U.S. base in Iraq, an assault that killed one defense contractor and injured several U.S. soldiers. It had ordered its militias to storm the U.S. Embassy. With access to extensive electronic and human intelligence, the Trump administration could conclude that Soleimani and his associates were planning yet further attacks on American forces. Soleimani had, after all, planned the devastating campaign against U.S. forces during the Iraq occupation, provided support for Hezbollah and other terrorist groups that have lethally attacked American troops in the Middle East, and devised the Iranian drone strike on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities.

"President Trump could choose to make public the intelligence to prove that Soleimani and his associates were continuing further attacks on Americans. But he need not, as the immediate historical record already reveals the Iranian general's intentions to harm American personnel and installations. Instead of worrying about his constitutional authority, Trump would do better to explain to the American people the broader strategy toward Iran and how the killing of an old, implacable enemy in Soleimani will succeed in deterring, rather than triggering, a broader war with Iran."

Read entire article here.

"The calendar turns and a decade begins, but there is nothing new under the sun in Washington. Even the killing of an Iranian mass murderer is cause for more partisan strife.

"In a sane country, which America used to be, there would be shared sober satisfaction over the elimination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Yet Democrats apparently outsourced their reactions to robots, whose script called for conceding that the departed was a very bad man, but prohibited approval of President Trump's decision to take him out.

"Instead, the quibblers' chorus raised questions of timing and expressed fear of escalation and retaliation. In the context of Iran's military aggression and Soleimani's bloody hands, there is another word for that fear: appeasement.

"Or, as defense specialist Michael Doran wrote in The New York Times, the fear of war 'ignores the fact that Mr. Soleimani has been waging war on America and its allies for years.'

"The latest example was the attack on our embassy in Baghdad, carried out by groups allied with Iran. That is the sort of dirty work Soleimani specialized in -- getting Arab Muslim proxies to fight and die for Iran's goal of regional dominance."

Read entire article here.

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"It looks like Pelosi is going to delay sending over the articles of impeachment, which is a really bad idea. One, this is not a way to exercise leverage over McConnell, because he doesn't care to have the articles sent over in the first place. Two, it's bizarre to try to force the Senate to fight to get witnesses that the House didn't make much of an effort to get itself. Three, this contradicts the argument that impeachment was such an urgent necessity that it had to be rushed. Four, it will make impeachment look even more partisan and political. Five, it is exactly the wrong tack to win over those Republicans who might be persuadable on witness like Romney and Collins. Besides all that, it's a brilliant idea."

"Watching the so-called debate Wednesday, I was struck by how the impeachers, desperate to inflate their base partisan passions into something noble, have cheapened our nation's history and language.

"They resembled Grade B actors performing for the cameras, their rehearsed references to oaths, prayers, the Founding Fathers, the rule of law, checks and balances and the Constitution itself all sounding contrived. Rather than reflecting actual gravitas, the words were trotted out to create the appearance of it.

"That was consistent with Pelosi's latest demand that her members stay 'solemn' in public, so as not to give the impression that they were gloating and joyful. In other words, hide how you really feel so we can fool more people into joining us.

"Only the damage to America is real."

"Washington, D.C. -- The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court harshly rebuked the FBI in a Tuesday afternoon order, saying FBI misconduct in applying for warrants against Trump campaign official Carter Page calls all past warrant applications into question, and setting a fast-approaching deadline to fix the system.

"The order was issued in response to an inspector general report that found the FBI failed to include exculpatory evidence in its four succesful applications for surveillance warrants on U.S. citizen, former Naval officer, and then-Trump campaign official Carter Page. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is a secret court set up in 1978 to grant U.S. intelligence agencies warrants to spy on suspected spies from other countries, or, literally, to surveil foreign intelligence.

"'This order,' FISC Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote at the top of the four-page document, 'responds to reports that personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provided false information to the National Security Division (NSD) of the Department of Justice, and withheld material information from NSD which was detrimental to the FBI's case, in connection with four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for authority to conduct electronic surveillance of a U.S. citizen named Carter W. Page.'

'The frequency with which representations FBI personnel made to the court turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case,' Judge Collyer continued, 'calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.'

"The document orders the government to, by Jan. 10, 'inform the Court in a sworn written submission of what it has done, and plans to do, to ensure that the statement of facts in each FBI application accurately and completely reflects information possessed by the FBI that is material to any issue presented by the application.'"

Read entire article here.