SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Well everybody starts sending me this tweet by our friend Tom Fitton over at Judicial Watch, and then I'm looking at the piece that they put out, an investigation that they're involved in, to find out if this Ukraine ambassador ordered State Department officials to monitor journalists and friends of the president, or people that are outspoken in terms of the president. In other words, illegal surveillance perhaps took place, I can't say for sure that this did. Certain figures in the media and elsewhere, private conversations that are being held between private citizens were being monitored, in an effort to find out information that could hurt Donald Trump -- that would be a constitutional violation. That would be something that you would expect in a third-world banana republic.
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Judicial Watch has obtained some information indicating that this ambassador may have violated laws and government regulations by ordering subordinates to target certain U.S. persons, using State Department resources, and apparently, reportedly ordered the monitoring keyed to the following terms: “Biden," “Giuliani," “Soros," “Yovanovitch." And Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom Of Information Act request with the State Department, and continue to gather facts. All right, I want to stay very clear of anything that is not factual here, Tom Fitton.
TOM FITTON (PRESIDENT, JUDICIAL WATCH): That's right.
HANNITY: I've read the piece. Do we know this happened for a certainty? We don't know yet.
FITTON: Well, our sources say it did, and so the concern is, and this is the process, is that the government, and certainly the government abroad, our representatives abroad, can't use government resources to track even the public communications, like tweets or public comments by American citizens. And so, evidently that was going on in the Ukrainian embassy, using the search terms that you highlighted, "Biden," "Giuliani," "Soros" and "Yovanovitch.
WASHINGTON, DC: Pay to Play corruption in the Obama administration was widespread among top officials, especially Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Vice President Joe Biden. Sweetheart deals. Board positions on energy companies. Contributions to “foundations” and overt bribery were the currency of foreign governments and would-be policy influencers alike.
They found rich terrain in the Obama Administration. Usually funneling money through family members or lobbyists. The Hunter Biden scandal involving Burisma Holdings and the Rosemont Seneca equity fund is just the tip of an ever-growing and horribly corrupt iceberg.
Now we have an impeachment Star Chamber led by liars in chief Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. They are focusing on the President’s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. They accuse Trump of abuse of power for seeking cooperation with an official investigation by Attorney General William Barr and US Attorney John Durham.
As one wag noticed, this would be the first time a Republican President was impeached because of the crimes of a Democrat.
It would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic.
But Schiff has close ties to a notorious Ukrainian arms dealer. Schiff was also a frequent recipient of campaign cash from meth dealer and Hillary Clinton donor Ed Buck. Buck is the LA Democrat with a penchant for shooting up homeless black men with meth and having sex with them. He allegedly killed at least two of them and is currently being charged with two counts of murder.
Schiff has yet to disavow him and return his repeated donations.
• A $15,000 crystal horse for a premier, and $10,000 in golf outings and a trip to Las Vegas for his son;
• And a $4,254 bottle of French wine for a top state banking official.
It was part of Deutsche Bank’s effort to win favor in China, and it worked, Michael Forsythe, David Enrich and Alexandra Stevenson of the NYT report: “By 2011, the German company would be ranked by Bloomberg as the top bank for managing initial public offerings in China and elsewhere in Asia, outside Japan.”
The documents “show that the bank’s top leadership was warned about the activity but did not stop it,” the NYT reports. The bank paid $16 million in August to settle accusations by the S.E.C. of misconduct in China and Russia.
Josef Ackerman, who was the bank’s C.E.O. until 2012, denied having knowledge of many details in the documents, but defended the broader strategy. “This was part of doing business in this country,” he told the NYT.
OPINION — On the day that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on election interference came out, cable news anchors strained to race through its 448 pages and describe the findings, all in the same breath. Computer sleuths hacked the document’s setting to let users search for “Trump,” “president,” “collusion” and “Russia.” Talking-head lawyers feverishly opined that Volume I contained less incriminating information than Volume II.
But around the country, voters mostly gave an “Is that all there is?” shoulder shrug and went back to their corners. Many members of Congress admitted they didn’t even bother to read it.
Nearly six months later, and to almost no fanfare last week while Congress was in recess, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the second of two installments of its own bipartisan investigation into roughly the same topic. The slim, 85-page report reads like a Russian spy novel crossed with a sequel to Orwell’s most dystopian version of the future — right down to an interview with a paid Russian troll who said his experience in 2016, pitting American voters against each other with social media platforms of their own making, was like being “a character in the book ‘1984’ by George Orwell — a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white.”
Unlike Mueller, who seemed to take great pains not to point fingers and softened his recommendations, the Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Richard Burr and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, put its warnings in the starkest possible terms. First, the Russians deliberately attacked American voters with an active measures campaign in 2016 to benefit Donald Trump and destroy Hillary Clinton. On the morning after Election Day, a former troll told the committee, exhausted hackers in St. Petersburg, Russia, uncorked tiny of champagne. They looked into each other’s eyes.
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