Matt Gaetz grills impeachment witnesses over Democratic donations, slams professor's dig at Barron Trump

House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., grilled three of the four impeachment panel witnesses for their past support for Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, and admonished one for making a joke at the expense of the teenage son of President Trump.
Gaetz began his allotted five minutes of question time by responding to the previous questioner, House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem S. Jeffries, D-N.Y., who noted that Americans had elected a Democrat majority in the House to serve as a check on Trump.
"The will of the American people also elected Donald Trump to be president of the United States in the 2016 election, and there's one party that can't seem to get over it," Gaetz said, adding that unlike Jeffries' caucus, Republicans haven't focused all of their resources on attempting to remove the top official in the opposing party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
"Frankly, we'd love to govern with you," he added.
Turning to the professors, he asked UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Michael Gerhardt to confirm that he donated to President Barack Obama.
"My family did, yes," Gerhardt responded.
Shifting his attention to Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, Gaetz noted the educator has written several articles that portray Trump in a negative light.
"Mar-a-Lago ad belongs in impeachment file," Gaetz said, repeating the title of an April 2017 piece Feldman wrote for Bloomberg Opinion.
Gaetz further pressed Feldman, asking him: "Do you believe you're outside of the political mainstream on the question of impeachment?"
Responding to Gaetz, Feldman said impeachment is warranted whenever a president abuses their power for personal gain or when they "corrupt the democratic process." The professor added he was an "impeachment skeptic" until the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
After the exchange, Gaetz turned to Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan and challenged her on reported four-figure donations to Clinton, Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
"Why so much more for Hillary than the other two?" he added, smiling.
The Florida lawmaker went on to criticize Karlan for a remark she made while answering an earlier question by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.
Karlan had told Jackson Lee that there is a difference between what Trump can do as president and the powers of a medieval king.
"The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son 'Barron', he can't make him a baron."
Gaetz fumed at the remark, saying it does not lend "credibility" to her argument.
"When you invoke the president's son's name here, when you try to make a little joke out of referencing Barron Trump... it makes you look mean, it makes you look like you are attacking someone's family: the minor child of the president of the United States."
Later, First Lady Melania Trump ripped Karlan for bringing up her son, claiming she should be ashamed for using a child in the pursuit of public "pandering."
"A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics," Mrs. Trump wrote. "Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it."

Pamela Karlan says she once crossed the street to avoid a Trump hotel in DC

The Stanford Law School professor who sparked backlash from the White House Wednesday after evoking the president’s minor son during the first day of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry had previously stated that she once crossed the street just to avoid passing one of President Trump's hotels.
Pamela Karlan, who was one of three witnesses who testified before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, previously told a 2017 American Constitution Society panel that she couldn’t stomach walking past the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Video of the panel from two years ago resurfaced online after Karlan's public testimony.
“I came in from the airport yesterday and I got off the bus from Dulles down at L’Enfant Plaza and I walked up to the hotel and as I was walking past what used to be the old post office building and is now Trump hotel," Karlan told an audience in 2017. “I had to cross the street, of course.”
Fellow panelist, Neil Siegel, asked: “Are you staying there?”
“God, no! Never!” Karlan responded.
On Wednesday, Karlan drew ire from the White House, the Trump campaign and even First Lady Melania Trump after using 13-year-old Barron Trump’s name to illustrate her point that President Trump can’t rule like a king.
"The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron," Karlan told the committee, prompting chuckles across the room.
One of the lawmakers Karlan delivered testimony before included Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who himself made headlines in February after tweeting he wouldn't enter Trump Tower in New York City during a snowstorm – even if he were to come inside just to buy a cup of coffee.
“It’s snowing in #NewYork. I need coffee. The closest cafe is inside Trump Tower. This is me walking to an alternative,” Swalwell said, sharing a selfie in front of the Fifth Avenue building covered in a light dusting of snow. Twitter users later mocked the four-term congressman from California, pointing out that there are many cafes in that area of New York City within short walking distance.
Swalwell announced his bid for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in April before leaving the race in July.  The former prosecutor who’s a member of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees had been a vocal critic of President Trump over the relationship between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia during Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham alluded on Twitter that Karlan’s remark during the impeachment hearing demonstrated her clear bias against the president.
“Classless move by a Democratic ‘witness’. Prof Karlan uses a teenage boy who has nothing to do with this joke of a hearing (and deserves privacy) as a punchline,” Grisham tweeted. “And what’s worse, it’s met by laughter in the hearing room. What is being done to this country is no laughing matter.”
"A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics," first lady Melania Trump also tweeted. "Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it."
Karlan later apologized during the same committee hearing, taking a dig at President Trump.
"I want to apologize for what I said earlier about the president's son,” Karlan said. "It was wrong of me to do that. I wish the president would apologize, obviously, for the things that he's done that's wrong, but I do regret having said that."
While speaking on the panel in 2017, Karlan took swipes at President Trump on a number of issues and, at one point, accused him of sexually assaulting "more women than 99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally.”
“Every day Trump says something outrageous and people go, ‘ah, at least it’s not as outrageous as the day-before thing,’ Karlan began. “I remember this during the campaign, where he would say things, and you would think, ‘okay, that’s the end.’”
“When he mocked John McCain for having been shot down, when he made fun of the reporter with the disability, when the infamous tapes about grabbing women came out, and you kept thinking,” she continued. “Donald Trump has sexually assaulted more women than 99.99% of all of the people who have entered this country illegally. By himself, he’s done more."
The professor said she worries that people are getting so used to the way Trump speaks that the public will never reach a "red-light moment." She also took aim at the president over what she described as nepotism in his choice to hire his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner as White House advisers.

Massachusetts EBT Cartoons

Bloomberg, in single digits, needs to start making news, and fast

Mike Bloomberg is having an impact.
After spending more than $35 million, he has pulled ahead of…Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar, both at 2 percent. And Harris dropped out Tuesday.
I don’t see a cause and effect, though Harris ran out of money and took a parting shot at billionaires. Her campaign, overseen by her sister, had been flailing for a long time, as advance obits in the New York Times and Washington Post made clear. Harris kept changing positions, attacking rivals and retreating, playing up and playing down her prosecutor past, unable to carve out space in a crowded field. And that had nothing to do with Bloomberg, though he could benefit by picking up some of her staff.
The former New York mayor is at 6 percent in the latest Hill poll, trailing Joe Biden with 31 percent, Bernie at 15, the fading Elizabeth at 10, and the rising Mayor Pete at 9. Not exactly an earthquake.
I don’t understand the campaign that Bloomberg is running. (And that’s putting aside the dumb decision by his news service to not investigate the boss. That enabled the president, whose campaign has yanked Bloomberg News credentials, to tweet: “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization not to investigate him or any Democrat, but to go after President Trump, only. The Failing New York Times thinks that is O.K., because their hatred & bias is so great they can’t even see straight. It’s not O.K.!”)
Bloomberg has his strengths, including his 12-year tenure as mayor, although that contains ample ammunition to alienate Democratic liberals. But he remains a remote figure for many American voters. And yet he isn’t doing the things you’d expect an eleventh-hour contender to do.
He hasn’t given major policy speeches. He hasn’t made the television rounds—not the Sunday shows or daytime cable shows or prime-time opinion shows. He hasn’t done a lengthy interview with a major newspaper.
In short, people haven’t heard his voice, except in paid commercials in which he approves this message. That’s an especially big vacuum since, by funding his own campaign, he won’t be included in the debates. And it’s exacerbated by his decision to skip Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, a maneuver that has never worked.
I don’t think he can spend his way to the nomination. He’s got to get in the batter’s box and show he can hit the pitching.
When Bloomberg launched his campaign in Norfolk, he told reporters that “I know how to win because I’ve done it time and again,” touting his advocacy on climate change, gun control, smoking and education.
Politico Magazine has a how-he-can-win piece that begins with the Beltway/Twitter take “that this is little more than a vanity run for the presidency—a play for the political affinities of the pundit class on the Acela corridor, a low-energy answer to a question no Democrat is asking. Bloomberg is, as he puts it himself, a short, Jewish, divorced billionaire from Manhattan. He is an avowed defender of Wall Street. He has been an apologist for #MeToo offenders. He oversaw a police department that stopped and frisked half a million primarily young men of color a year. Even putting all that aside, he is audaciously pledging to skip the first four primary states.”
The gist of the argument is that Bloomberg was a relative unknown when, a couple of weeks after 9/11 and with a tepid endorsement from Rudy Giuliani, he won the mayor’s office. Therefore don’t count him out.
But New York City is not America, which is why none of its mayors have ever come close to winning the White House.
The piece does sketch out an agenda: “It is easy to imagine him calling for filibuster reform, or strengthening voting rights, or even adding a Supreme Court justice. His comments over the past several years defending Wall Street have gotten him in trouble, but his aides point out that not only did Bloomberg raise taxes in a way that no other candidate in the field has, but he also built 185,000 units of affordable housing (a figure that essentially means building another South Bend, Indiana, and still having tens of thousands of housing units to spare), lowered the racial temperature in a city reeling from 9/11 and eight years of Giuliani, defended the right of Muslims to build a mosque near ground zero, drastically raised teacher pay, reduced the city’s prison population by 40 percent, mounted an aggressive anti-poverty campaign that recalculated the city’s poverty rate to allow more people to receive federal benefits, and spent $3.1 billion on new school construction.”
But Bloomberg himself should be making that case, not a Politico writer. Meanwhile, Bill de Blasio is “having a fit,” says another Politico piece, over Bloomberg’s candidacy. Having utterly flamed out in his own presidential bid, the mayor now spends considerable time attacking his predecessor.
De Blasio is quoted as saying “before his millions and millions of dollars of advertising ... we need an honest conversation about what really happened.” He also thinks Bloomberg gets better press, saying, “I think a lot of media outlets were literally worried he might buy them some day. And I think a lot of the leaders in those media outlets did not want to make waves or alienate him.”
Some allies say it helps de Blasio at home to remind people of his criticism of the former mayor, but in any event he can’t run again. The mayor may be 6’5, but this makes him look awfully small.
Bloomberg was in Mississippi Wednesday for a roundtable discussion on criminal justice reform—part of his effort to court minority voters after apologizing for his years of backing stop and frisk. But it’s late in the game for him to be doing the listening-tour thing.
Mike Bloomberg would have an outside shot if Biden’s campaign cratered, as the pundits endlessly predict it will. But as famous as the 77-year-old billionaire thinks he is, he needs to raise his profile fast, and that takes more than a bunch of slickly produced ads.

Massachusetts governor defends 'integrity' of EBT system following report of abuse

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker defended the state’s Electronic Benefits Transfer system on Tuesday after a report published earlier in the week suggested some participants in the tax-funded welfare program committed fraud to pay for vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas and Alaska.
The Republican governor responded to a Monday report in the Boston Herald that said a review of more than 2 million EBT expenditures in the 2019 fiscal year revealed thousands of out-of-state transactions. EBT cards were swiped on 18 different occasions in Hawaii, including one that was used twice at a posh island resort where rooms fetch $800 a night, the paper reported. In one instance, an EBT card was also used to buy a $700 round-trip ticket from the state to Hawaii.
The state’s Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), which operates welfare programs including the EBT system, bars cardholders from using the EBT cards for vacation services — but hotels are not banned. Baker's administration sent a response to the Herald Tuesday, saying that the governor has invested $1 million into “program integrity” at the DTA to bolster protocol already in place that detects forms of fraud.
The statement said the DTA conducted a “residency verification check” after two transactions mentioned in the report: a $400 EBT transaction in November 2018 at the Hanalei Bay Princeville Resort on the island of Kauai, in addition to a $140 transaction in January at the Sheraton Waikiki in Honolulu. Under current DTA rules, “if an EBT card is exclusively used out of state for 45 days, a household must provide proof of current Massachusetts residence.”
The household whose card was swiped at the Princeville resort “was asked to verify residency and did not, so the case was closed and benefits expunged from the card,” according to the DTA. The second household who used their EBT card at the Sheraton “was able to prove that their travel was temporary,” but their account was later closed “because they began receiving (Social Security), which makes them ineligible for cash benefits, and system controls closed the case.”
The DTA’s response failed to address the EBT transactions recorded in Las Vegas and Alaska. The agency added that it “will continue to focus on identifying potential areas of fraud and abuse and strengthening internal controls so that benefits are administered to eligible households and used for permitted purposes.”
Fox News' Edmund DeMarche contributed to this report.

Sean Hannity blasts impeachment inquiry report

Sean Hannity slammed the House Intelligence Committee impeachment inquiry report released Tuesday, calling it "nothing but an insane, convoluted 14,000-word diatribe concocted by their fearless, compromised, corrupt, coward, congenital liar" House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff.
"The report is chock full of nothing but conspiracy theories, left-wing opinions, conjecture, hearsay, witnesses, complaints about Donald Trump's foreign policy by people that think they're more important than a duly elected president and a whole lot of outright lies," Hannity said on his television program Tuesday.
The host criticized Schiff for the timing of the report's release.
"And let's not lose sight of something very important. Schiff's rambling report was released just hours before the first official proceeding," Hannity said. "There's no time to mount any legal defense, President Trump isn't even in the country, and they knew that, too."
Hannity continued to criticize Schiff's credibility and his role in the report.
"A congenital liar compromised. Adam Schiff, who conducted the investigation, wrote the report," Hannity said. "He is a known repeated congenital liar. He lied repeatedly about Trump Russia collusion."
The Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee will move to the forefront of President Trump’s impeachment inquiry Wednesday morning with a hearing featuring four legal scholars, but no fact witnesses.
Hannity moved his focus to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler.
"[Nadler is] going to attempt to rush the impeachment sham across the finish line and get it done before Christmas. Like it or not, Nadler's planning on, well, jamming impeachment down all of our throats," Hannity said. "They don't care about the country. They've done nothing for us for three years except hate on Donald Trump."
Fox News' Gregg Re contributed to this report.

Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings by featuring four law professors

The Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee will move to the forefront of President Trump’s impeachment inquiry Wednesday morning with a hearing featuring four legal scholars, but no fact witnesses.
In the same pillared room that hosted last month's House Intelligence Committee hearings, lawmakers will hear from Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, Harvard law professor and Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman, University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt, and George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.
All are Democrat witnesses except for Turley -- a point that did not escape the notice of the president Tuesday evening.
"They get three constitutional lawyers ... and we get one," Trump said during a bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in London. "That's not sounding too good, and that's the way it is. We don't get a lawyer, we don't get any witnesses -- we want Biden, we want the son Hunter, where's Hunter? We want Schiff. We want to interview these people. Well, they said no. We can't do it."
Following opening statements from Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and ranking member Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., the witnesses will be sworn in and give opening statements of ten minutes apiece, followed by questioning.
The Judiciary Committee could approve articles of impeachment against the president within days. However, a senior member of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership team told Fox News Tuesday evening that it seems unlikely the full House can vote on impeaching Trump before Christmas, saying it's "too complex" a process.
“I just don’t see it,” the source said. “It’s too big.”
In the meantime, Democrats are trying to pass the annual defense bill. Congress has to fund the federal government by Dec. 20 or risk another shutdown. The House and Senate are expected to approve several of the annual 12 spending bills and then pass an interim spending bill for the remainder – or perhaps glom the remainders together and approve them for the rest of the fiscal year.
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) also looms large. If the decision is made to forge ahead with the USMCA this calendar year, then there is almost no way Congress can tackle impeachment. Democrats would face both a messaging problem and a floor traffic problem. Fox News has been told repeatedly in recent days that the USMCA is not ripe and action on that will likely take place after the turn of the year.
Nevertheless, Democrats have moved aggressively on impeachment. Late Tuesday, the intelligence committee voted to adopt and issue its scathing report on the findings from its impeachment inquiry, accusing Trump of misusing his office to seek foreign help in the 2020 presidential race.
The 13-9 party-line vote on the 300-page report was a necessary step before the document could be transferred to the Judiciary Committee. The report included call logs documenting apparent conversations involving Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes R-Calif., and Soviet-born businessman Lev Parnas, who was arrested in October.
"We have Americans and foreigners contact us every single day with information," Nunes told Fox News' "Hannity" on Tuesday night. "I was talking with Rudy Giuliani, and we were talking about how [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller bombed out."
Nunes added that it was possible he had spoken to Parnas. Separately, Republicans called for phone records belonging to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has acknowledged that he should have been "more clear" about his communications with the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment inquiry.
While invited to participate in the opening Judiciary hearing, the White House declined. “This baseless and highly partisan inquiry violates all past historical precedent, basic due process rights, and fundamental fairness,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote in a letter to Nadler on Sunday.
Cipollone accused Nadler of "purposely" scheduling the proceedings to coincide with Trump's attendance at the NATO Leaders' Meeting in London. He also said Nadler provided "vague" details about the hearing, and that only then-unnamed academics -- and not "fact witnesses" -- would apparently be attending.
Wednesday's hearing is expected to mirror the format used by the House Intelligence Committee last month. The proceedings start with a 45 minute period for the Democrats, most likely led by Judiciary Committee counsel Norm Eisen. Republicans will then get 45 minutes.
Then, the hearing will go to five-minute rounds for each of the 41 members. The five-minute round alone should consume three hours and 25 minutes.
Fox News expects the House to hold a vote series around 1:30 p.m. ET, forcing a recess in the committee. There will probably be some parliamentary fighting and stunting, which could delay proceedings further.
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and other administration officials have long argued that Democrats are wasting valuable legislative time with their impeachment probe.
“At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman [Adam] Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” Grisham said Tuesday, adding that Democrats' impeachment report "reflects nothing more than their frustrations" and "reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”
During a press conference Tuesday, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy called on Democrats to end the impeachment “nightmare," saying “They’re concerned if they do not impeach this president, they can't beat him in an election."
The Schiff-led Intelligence Committee conducted extensive interviews with witnesses connected to the Trump administration’s relationship with Ukraine after an anonymous whistleblower filed a complaint alleging that during a July 25 phone call, Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help Rudy Giuliani investigate Democratic activities in 2016 as well as former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
"The President engaged in this course of conduct for the benefit of his own presidential reelection, to harm the election prospects of a political rival, and to influence our nation’s upcoming presidential election to his advantage," the Democrats' report said. "In doing so, the President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security."
Schiff also tweeted: "The impeachment inquiry uncovered overwhelming and uncontested evidence that President Trump abused the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference in our election for his own personal, political gain."
Schiff’s committee held closed-door sessions before opening up the inquiry to public hearings, which featured testimony from witnesses including National Security Council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
The report concluded that Trump withheld nearly $391 million in military aid from Ukraine, conditioning its delivery as well as a White House visit for Zelensky on a public announcement that Zelensky was conducting the investigations. It also accuses Trump of committing obstruction by instructing witnesses not to comply with congressional subpoenas.
Republicans drafted a report of their own, which rejected the Democratic majority's claims.
"The evidence presented does not prove any of these Democrat allegations, and none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor,” the GOP report said.
If the House should vote to impeach, the Senate would hold a trial, where a two-thirds majority would be needed to convict.
A Senate trial could also dig deeper into at least one of the issues Trump once sought to have investigated: Joe Biden's role ousting a Ukraine prosecutor who had been looking into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter had a lucrative board role.
Fox News' Chad Pergram, Ronn Blitzer, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Warren's Medicare Cartoons