You want witnesses? I’ll show you witnesses.
A casual listener might have missed it, but Senator Lindsey Graham issued a colossal throw-down to Democrats in a brief interlude between sessions of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump.
In an interview during a media scrum on Tuesday, the South Carolina senator and Judiciary Committee leader made a “prediction” of his desired witnesses – witnesses that, you can bet, most Democratic senators would rather not hear from.
Graham said, “[I]f you go down the road of witnesses, it’s not going to be one, it’s going to be many.”
A reporter asked Graham about whether the GOP had 51 votes to keep the president out of trouble. Graham shot back: “I’ll make a prediction. They’ll be [sic] 51 Republican votes to call Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, the ‘whistleblower,’ uh, and the DNC staffer at a very minimum.”
Graham brought up the “DNC staffer” who is believed to be Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American and “contractor for the DNC” who tried to dig up dirt on Paul Manafort. The NY Post reported:
“Chalupa, a Ukrainian American who calls herself a “human rights lobbyist,” made a cameo minutes into the opening statement of House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in which he railed against the Democrats’ secretive impeachment process.
“Violating their own guidelines, Democrats repeatedly redacted from transcripts the name of Alexandra Chalupa, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee who worked with Ukrainian officials to collect dirt on the Trump campaign which she provided to the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Nunes said.
Chalupa is the founder of a Washington political consulting firm and is co-chair of the DNC’s Ethnic Council, which reaches out to diaspora groups around the country to increase voter turnout, according to her LinkedIn.
But her most important role to date appears to be her investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, and his ties with Russia — which she conducted with the help of Ukrainian officials. I was not an opposition researcher for the DNC, and the DNC never asked me to go to the Ukrainian Embassy to collect information,” she said in July 2017.”
Chalupa is no friend of Trump’s. Her Twitter timeline shows many retweets of Democrats’ and Adam Schiff’s protestations and the personal designation of Ivanka Trump as the “mafia princess”:
The Mafia Princess has spoken… https://t.co/WpFDkibtDg
— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 28, 2020
Graham says that the House of Representatives blew it in its “inquiry.” He said that instead of bringing impeachment counts against the president, “you could have litigated privilege in court rather than the Senate having to decide legal issues … and I think that’s bad for the country.”
No kidding.
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