Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appears on Fox News to discuss the upcoming impeachment trial and the processes within the Senate that will be followed.
McConnell states he will be working closely with White House counsel and the President’s lawyers.  The Senate Leader said “there’s no chance the President is removed from office”.

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[Sidebar (somewhat): I find it to be interesting timing for this interview… U.S-China trade agreement, phase-one, announced today and Senator McConnell comes out in full-throated defense of presidency. Perhaps just a coincidence.]
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It’s funny to watch this transparently predictable stuff play out in real time.
After Pelosi gives the nod for USMCA ratification in the House, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell declares he will not allow Senate support until he extracts his impeachment indulgency fees.

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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They are called “decepticons” for a reason. McConnell is king, and Cornyn, Thune and Barasso are his praetorian guards.  {Go Deep}
Senator John Cornyn (TX), a key member of the Senate GOP leadership; and a member of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees; warns the White House that a vote to immediately dismiss articles of impeachment and avoid a trial won’t work.

“There’s some people talking about trying to stop the bill, dismiss charges basically as soon as they get over here. I think that’s not going to happen. That would require 51 votes,” Cornyn told reporters Wednesday. “I think it would be hard to find 51 votes to cut the case off before the evidence is presented.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A top Senate Republican, John Cornyn, said on Wednesday that should the U.S. House of Representatives vote to impeach President Donald Trump, he doubts a motion in the Senate to immediately dismiss the charges would succeed.

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The crowd has realized that Senator Lindsey Graham is playing a role and has no intention to do anything to stop the malicious impeachment of President Trump.  Last night Senator Rand Paul went on the record and called attention to Senator Graham’s duplicitous lack of action…. Oh dear, people are catching on.
To protect himself from the disinfecting sunlight of scrutiny, Senator Graham runs to the office of Sean Hannity for protection.  Together they pitch the idea of a strongly worded letter as an action that might provide Graham some more time to hide and get away from the pesky spotlight….  Tonight, they sell it:

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In the background Senator Graham knows a democrat Senator will oppose the resolution (it only takes one). Because the procedure for a single senator to bring a resolution vote to the Senate Chamber requires unanimous consent, the resolution can also be blocked by a single senator.
[Don’t disregard which outlet Graham is using to sell his plan, that too is by design.]
This strategy provides Senator Graham the optic of doing something, being blocked by democrats…. which he expects, and actually accomplishing nothing.  That’s the plan; and it’ll probably work.  Too many people are fooled by the Decepticon tricks.
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The back-story here is likely worse than the obvious.  In a tweet today Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announces his resolution warning President Trump not to remove troops from Syria or Afghanistan.  [Not coincidentally the two countries visited by Speaker Pelosi and Adam Schiff last weekend.]

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Of course the obvious, albeit unwritten “or else” part, is Senator McConnell threatening to join with with Senator Lindsey Graham and support President Trump’s impeachment.
We cannot say we were not warned [ SEE HERE ] it was obvious immediately after the Democrats won the House in 2018 that McConnell was breathing a sigh of relief.  [Also reminder, the SSCI doesn’t run an operation against the President and the Leader of the Senate not know about it…. just sayin’.]

The level of political nonsense today from the House of Representatives is off-the-charts.  Speaker Pelosi calls a resolution to the House floor to denounce President Trump for removing 28 troops from a foreign war never authorized by the same House.
If Pelosi wants to have a war with Syria, then declare one.  Or, Pelosi could call a resolution to the House floor to condemn Turkish President Erdogan for invading Syria. Instead, the House votes to denounce President Trump for getting our military out of the way.   The Democrats are the party of war, and a whole bunch of republicans are supporting them.  Why?  Simply, because war is a big business from K-Street.

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Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Steny Hoyer walk out of a meeting with President Trump because, according to them, the president called the speaker a “third-rate politician”. Speaker Pelosi replied “I wish you were a politician”…. How typical is that?
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President Trump prefers to use targeted economic weapons instead of the U.S. military forces against foreign adversaries.  This is especially true if foreign actions are taking place amid the complex circle of geopolitical interests, against the interests of allies.
Today the White House has released a letter sent by President Trump to President Erdogan of Turkey dated October 9th.   The letter was sent two days after President Trump made the decision to pull 28 members of the U.S. military out of harms way; two days before President Trump outlined the sanctions against Turkey; and five days before President Trump initiated those sanctions through Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
The warning is clear.  President Trump is clear-eyed about the motives and intentions of the Turkish president, and Ergodan’s ideological alignment with political Islam, via The Muslim Brotherhood.
One of the reasons this strategy is better than any military action is simply because Turkey is a unique NATO ally, and the NATO alliance within Europe is insufferably incapable and unwilling to take action to defend their interests.
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….In 2016 a branch of the United States government (Legislative) was attempting a soft-coup against the leader of another branch of government (Executive); by using the Senate Intelligence Committee and designated corrupt agents within the executive branch cabinet… In 2019 the effort shifted to the House Intelligence Committee…

During the 2016 effort to weaponize the institutions of government against the outside candidacy of Donald Trump, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) was headed by Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein. After the 2016 election Senator Feinstein abdicated her vice-chair position to Senator Mark Warner in January 2017.
While the SSCI was engaged in their part of the 2016 effort Vice-Chair Feinstein’s lead staffer was a man named Daniel Jones.
Dan Jones was the contact point between the SSCI and Fusion-GPS.
After the election, and after Feinstein abdicated, Dan Jones left the committee to continue paying Fusion-GPS (Glenn Simpson) for ongoing efforts toward the impeachment insurance policy angle.
Senator Feinstein left because she didn’t want to deal with the consequences of a President Trump, IF he discovered the SSCI involvement. Dan Jones left because with a Trump presidency the SSCI, now co-chaired by Senator Mark Warner, needed arms-length plausible deniability amid their 2017 operations to continue the removal effort (soft coup).
The blueprint for this plausible deniability process, and ongoing soft-coup effort, first surfaces with Dan Jones appearing in the 2017 text messages between Senator Warner and the liaison for Christopher Steele, lawyer and lobbyist Adam Waldman:
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Representative John Ratcliffe was/is a key member of the House who has investigated the details of the DOJ and FBI intelligence abuse during the 2016 election.  Factually, Ratcliffe is one of only a few high-clearance House members who had seen all of the unredacted and classified documents associated with the DOJ and FBI activity.
Representative Ratcliffe appears for a discussion with Maria Bartiromo and states his confidence that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will be indicted for lying to internal investigators.  Additionally, and perhaps more interestingly, Ratcliffe outlines how SSCI Chairman Richard Burr working together with Majority leader Mitch McConnell, blocked his nomination to the Office of Director of National Intelligence.
There are always a few interviews and discussion per month that are more important than the general DC banter.  This is one of those insightful interviews:
https://youtu.be/1qFMj46Yp2c?t=25m24s
Long before most realized how specifically rigged and corrupt the current political system is, CTH was sharing research -very specific examples- highlighting the origin of the most consequential corruption.  Thankfully the election of Donald Trump helped to open many more eyes. People now see what years of ‘Last Refuge‘ discussions were all about.
Years of research indicated the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) was always the epicenter of the DC swamp; where an over-powerful and extra-constitutional group of UniParty senate power brokers gather ‘black files‘ on politicians, lobbyists and government officials for use in leveraging votes, support and changes in behavior for various corporate interests.  This intelligence exploitation is worth BILLIONS.
The potential for John Ratcliffe as ODNI to disrupt those long-constructed exploitation(s) of the intelligence apparatus [writ large] is exactly why he was kept out.
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