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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If Senator Lindsey Graham is correct – tomorrow the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz will release a much anticipated review, looking into how the FBI and DOJ used an application to the FISA court to investigate the Trump campaign. There are wide-ranging opinions about what exactly this report may, or may not, outline.

The IG review has been ongoing for 21 months.  This report is anticipated to be a culmination of that investigative effort.  The ‘tick-tock club’ of Sean Hannity, Sara Carter, John Solomon and various Fox pundits have promised the report will be the most devastating outline of gross FBI and DOJ misconduct in the history of IG review.
Additionally, a network of financially dependent social media voices, book writers, podcast pundits and Q-theorists collectively known as the ‘trusty plan group’, have predicted criminal indictments, wide-scale arrests and a shock to the DC system that will fracture the foundation of the administrative state and simultaneously drain the swamp.
Meanwhile the Lawfare group has been the most visible advocacy network for the current and former DOJ and FBI officials who participated in setting up and using the FISA surveillance system now under IG review.   The Lawfare group has stated the IG report will exonerate all of their pre and post election activity; validate the justification for their predicate efforts; and leave the ‘tick-tockers’ and ‘trusty planners’ having to reconcile to their stunned audiences how they interpreted all the data so incredibly wrong.
A review of the last three IG reports which brush up against the same DOJ and FBI network: (1) IG review Clinton email/FBI conduct; (2) IG review of McCabe/media leaks; and (3) IG review of James Comey conduct; shows the IG report on FISA is likely to come down somewhere in the middle.  ie. mistakes were made; poor judgements were evident; some unprofessional conduct was found; some lack of candor was identified; department policies were not followed; but no direct evidence of intentional wrongdoing was attributable to a coordinated political effort.
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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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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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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!”

Shortly after 6pm this evening Supreme Court Justice Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put a prior 2nd Circuit ruling on hold until next Friday, December 13, at 5 p.m.

President Trump went to the Supreme Court after the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Capital One seeking President Trump’s tax records. In his request to the court [Read Here] Trump asked SCOTUS to block the subpoenas on the ground they go beyond the committees’ powers.
Justice Ginsburg’s order tonight gives the justices time to rule on Trump’s request for a longer stay of the lower court’s decision while he files a petition for review. Ginsburg ordered the House of Representatives to file a response to Trump’s request by 11 a.m. on Wednesday, December 11.
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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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House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has announced the date for the next impeachment hearing.   The date is Monday, December 9th – 2019 It appears from the announcement the HJC hearing will be set up to receive the impeachment recommendation(s) from Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee:

(HJC) The Impeachment Inquiry into President Donald J. Trump: Presentations from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Judiciary Committee  (link)

Monday December 9th, is also the same date that IG Horowitz is expected to release the results of the 21-month-long FISA investigation.
Two days later on Wednesday December 11th, Michael Horowitz will be testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his investigation…. Therefore we can expect Nadler, Pelosi and Lawfare to schedule another House event for Wednesday Dec. 11th.

Earlier today President Trump responded to the House Judiciary Committee farcical construct of a constitutional academic panel:
Moments later, Speaker Pelosi announced her instructions to the House Chair to assemble articles of impeachment for House floor vote consideration.  In response to the Pelosi announcement President Trump tweeted: