Senator Lindsey Graham appears on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo and announces he will take all appropriate efforts to stop the truth about Ukraine from being exposed in the Senate.   This interview is a critical first step to understanding motives. CTH will expand in the next few posts that will highlight *WHY* Graham will bury information.
First, watch Senator Graham say unequivocally he will not call witnesses and will quickly move to dismiss the House impeachment effort.  Pay close attention to the part where Graham says calling congressmen to testify is dangerous, and he will not call Adam Schiff because he does not want to go down this path.

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These comments by Senator Lindsey Graham are very self serving. Why?… Because Senator Graham participated in the exploitation of Ukraine for his own benefit. In essence Graham is fearful that too much inquiry into what took place with Ukraine in 2014 through 2016 will expose his own participation and effort along with former Ambassador Marie Yovanovich.
Graham is attempting to end the impeachment effort because the underlying discoveries have the potential to expose the network of congressional influence agents, John McCain and Graham himself included, during any witness testimony.
[Full length interview below]
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Senator Ted Cruz appears on Meet The Press to discuss the fiasco of the impeachment effort…. and things immediately go south.  Chuck Todd flips though page of Share Blue and Media Matters talking points while attempting to interrupt and knock down arguments put forth by Senator Cruz.

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Planning for impeachment right after the 2018 mid-term election, HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff hired former SDNY U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman (link).  You probably saw Goldman doing the questioning for Schiff during the first public impeachment hearing.  Around the same time in 2018 Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler hired Obama Administration lawyer Norm Eisen and criminal defense attorney Barry Berke (link).

In addition to changing the House rules to align with the plan, the impeachment process we have been witnessing for two months was mapped-out in the congressional lame-duck session between November 2018 and January 2019.   Today Chairman Nadler announces who will present the impeachment file during the House hearing on Monday:

(Source Link – pdf)

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Tonight President Trump travels to Florida to deliver a speech at the Israeli American Council National Summit.  The President is scheduled to deliver remarks at 8:00pm ET.
White House Livestream Link – Fox News Livestream Link – NBC News Livestream

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HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes discusses his review of phone records, and how the mysteriously collected phone data that Chariman Schiff put into his impeachment report doesn’t match with his own review.

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Chopper pressers are the best pressers. Earlier today President Trump paused to deliver remarks on current events to the press pool as he departed the White House for a trip to Florida.  [Video and Transcript Below]

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[Transcript] – THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. That’s a very bright sun. Beautiful day in Washington.
I will say that we’ve had tremendous reports coming out of the economy — it’s been incredible — and numbers like we haven’t seen before. And we have the strongest economy in the world: 266,000 jobs; you can add another 40 [thousand] to that. It’s about 300,000 jobs. Very importantly, it’s 50- or 55,000 manufacturing jobs. We’re the envy of the world. Our economy is the envy of the world, and we’re going to keep it that way. So that’s very important.
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President Trump responds to today’s deadline set by House Democrats for the White House to say whether it would participate in the impeachment proceedings:

In summary:

“Nuts!”

Elections have consequences.  On the same day the U.S. economy reports astoundingly successful jobs growth of 266,000 jobs and a drop in the unemployment rate to 3.5 percent; the Canadian state economic minister reports surprisingly terrible jobs losses of 72,200 jobs and a jump in unemployment from 5.5 to 5.9 percent.
The Canadian economy is roughly one-tenth the size of the U.S. So in equivalent terms the results from Canada reflect a comparative loss of 720,000 jobs on the same day the U.S. revises all figures upward to over 300,000 gains.  A stunning economic contrast:

OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Canadian job market lost a surprise 71,200 net positions in November while the unemployment rate rose to 5.9%, the highest in more than a year, data showed on Friday, as analysts said a repeat of the weak numbers could force the Bank of Canada to rethink its monetary policy.
Analysts in a Reuters poll had forecast a gain of 10,000 jobs and had predicted the unemployment rate would hold steady at 5.5%. […] November’s numbers followed a weak report in October, when the labor market unexpectedly shed jobs despite a likely boost from hiring related to the federal election.

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HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes responds to the possibilities of how HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff gained private phone records for use in his impeachment effort.

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One of the possibilities is that Lev Parnas is a foreign national. SDNY gets a subpoena from the FISA court.  Rudy Giuliani is in contact with Parnas (1-hop). They then unmask and pull Giuliani’s records and get Nunes and Solomon (2-hops).
The question would then be how did the unmasked information in an active investigation that started in the FISC end up being sent to the House Intel Committee to be disclosed to the public?
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As the House impeachment of President Donald Trump becomes more of a forgone political conclusion it’s worth considering what terms and conditions Senate Leader Mitch McConnell will extract in order to preserve a Trump Presidency.
Most political pundits will not correctly outline the status of the possibilities, because most political pundits are willfully blind to the structure of the McConnell Senate.
First, McConnell doesn’t care about holding a majority position in the Senate.  Whether he is a majority leader or a minority leader doesn’t matter to McConnell. In fact McConnell’s political skill-set does better in the minority than the majority.
The preferred political position for Mitch McConnell is where he has between 45 and 49 republican Senators, and the Democrats hold the Majority with around 55.  Of course with Reid’s retirement, this would now be with Majority leader Chuck Schumer holding office.
Why does McConnell prefer the minority position?
The answer is where you have had to actually follow Mitch McConnell closely to see how he works.   When the Majority has around 52 to 55 seats, they need McConnell to give them 8 to 9 votes to overcome the three-fifths (60 vote) threshold for their legislative needs.  It is in the process of trade and payment for those 8 to 9 votes where McConnell makes more money, and holds more power, than as a sitting Majority Leader.
The 60 vote threshold, and McConnell’s incredible skillset in the minority, is where he shines.  Each of the needed votes to achieve sixty is worth buckets of indulgence to the minority leader.  This is why McConnell never changed the Senate rules for legislative passage.
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