Maria Bartiromo interviewed Representative John Ratcliffe, R-TX, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, about the Democrats’ impeachment star chamber on her Sunday program She led off her FNC show with a video capturing Rep. Ratcliffe’s excellent question posed to Acting Ambassador to the Ukraine Bill Taylor at the Democrats’ impeachment charade last week. In that video, Ratcliffe asked whether Taylor could identify anything that the President has done that rises to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors. And of course, there was dead silence, as there ISN’T anything, despite what the Democrats falsely claim.

Bartiromo then began her questioning of Rep. Ratcliffe as follows: [paraphrased]

Bartiromo to Ratcliffe: What is your takeaway from the week?

Ratcliffe: None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25^th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?

Bartiromo: What is the process for getting the transcripts out for the public to review?

Ratcliffe: The process is whatever Schiff decides for that particular day. This is the equivalent of the person who accuses you of a crime deciding on who the witnesses are, what order they will testify, how much they will be allowed to testify, & who will be allowed to ask questions. The rules and procedures change just as the crimes of which the president is accused change, almost on a daily basis. For example, the President was originally accused of a quid pro quo, and now the Democrats have changed to extortion and bribery. Regardless of what they claim, the president of Ukraine said there was no pressure and no conditions, and he was happy with the call. You’ve got no crime and no victim, which is the worst impeachment trial ever.

Bartiromo: Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter to her colleague about the Trump administration supposedly blocking the claims made by the whistleblower from being brought forward, yet Adam Schiff now says he doesn’t want to speak to the whistleblower.

Ratcliffe: What we keep getting is parading through one ambassador and diplomat after another without hearing from the most important witnesses, who are the whistleblower, Adam Schiff who met with the whistleblower, and Hunter Biden whose testimony became indispensable this week. We learned that it wasn’t a sham to be concerned about Hunter Biden, but that the Obama State Department was concerned enough about that to have pre-briefed their ambassador-designate before her confirmation hearing on the conflict of interest! Republicans who asked questions about that were gaveled down. The Democrats want to send this to the Senate without testimony from THE most important witnesses.

Bartiromo: The Obama Administration was prepping Yovanovitch for her confirmation hearings…

Ratcliffe: There are thousands of companies doing business in Ukraine, and the Obama-Biden State Department briefed her on ONE company – one CORRUPT company – who was paying Hunter Biden obscene amounts of money. A company who was being investigated. A Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating that company was fired 6 hrs after then-VP Biden demanded it. @POTUS has every right to investigate that criminality because that is a prima facie case of corruption. We ought to have that testimony in this impeachment hearing.

Bartiromo: There is a strong belief that the Democrats are railroading this through before Thanksgiving in order to “beat” the IG report on the origins of the Russia probe. What’s your response to Lindsey Graham’s comments last week that it’s impossible to bring the case forward without bringing the whistleblower forward before it gets to the Senate (it will be thrown out).

Ratcliffe: Several Democrat members of this House Intel committee have already voted to impeach this president. They’ve already made up their minds without regard to evidence. Yes, this is dead on arrival at the Senate without looking at the most important witnesses. They don’t want the whistleblower to testify because we now know that that person coordinated with Schiff’s committee in order for that person to become the whistleblower. Schiff hasn’t even released the first transcript of the first witness (the IC IG) because it will tell you what the IG knew and didn’t know about the relationship between Schiff and the whistleblower based on what the whistleblower and Schiff did or didn’t reveal to the IG. This is such an unfair process. An impeachment should be clear, egregious, and bipartisan, and it’s none of those things.

Bartiromo: We understand that the IG report on originations of the Russia hoax investigation is imminent, and I want to ask you about the connections to this impeachment inquiry. Are congressmen themselves under oath in these hearings, or can he say whatever he wants?

Ratcliffe: Adam Schiff is not sworn in as a witness. Much of what he says is simply not true. We’d like him to testify. Congressman Doug Collins (R-GA) is going to ask him to do that when the House Intel Committee sends its report to the House Judiciary Committee. I doubt that Jerry Nadler (Judiciary Chairman) will allow that, so that is another reason why this will be dead on arrival in the Senate.

Bartiromo: The IG report. When do you expect it? You’ve helped expose the wrong-doing. What will it say?

Ratcliffe: I expect to see it the first week of December. I agree with your earlier point that the Democrats are racing to get this done before that report comes out. That’s why we have 8 witnesses this week. The Democrats know the report will be devastating and detail the role played by Obama administration officials in the set-up. Supposedly 500 pages long. It doesn’t take 500 pages to say that everything was just fine! The IG is going to have to find that things were done wrong, that there was exculpatory information that wasn’t provided to the FISA court, and that I think it’s going to be an indictment of Adam Schiff’s own rebuttal memo that he wrote in 2018 saying, “how dare Republicans criticize Strzrok, Page, McCabe, Ohr, and others who have done nothing wrong?” The IG report is going to find problems with the FISA application process, and Democrats don’t want it to come out before they impeach the President.

Bartiromo: Schiff sent a letter to ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA) stating that the impeachment hearing is only to be about Ukraine, nothing about Hunter Biden, or supposedly debunked interference in the 2016 election. What exactly is “debunked” about 2016 interference given that John Durham has opened a criminal investigation?

Ratcliffe: It’s not debunked, and the IG report is going to validate the Nunes memo about the FISA abuses. There was some exculpatory evidence about George Papadopoulos that was not delivered to the FISA court in a timely manner. I promise you that the IG report is going to address that. When that is confirmed in the IG report, you’ll probably see a shifting narrative from the Democrats that it didn’t make any difference. There are legitimate questions who have seen the classified documents about the origin of the 2016 election investigation. It’s unraveling, and that’s why they’re rushing to impeach the President. They failed to impeach him for being a “Russian agent” because that was a joke, they failed to impeach him for obstructing justice because it was a joke, and this impeachment charade based on a phone call with a Ukrainian president who said he’s not a victim and nothing happened is also a hoax.

Bartiromo: What are your expectations for when the House will vote to impeach President Trump?

Ratcliffe: Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff are racing the clock; they want to get it done before information comes out damaging to the Obama-Biden administration from the IG report or from John Durham’s criminal investigation.

<end of the interview>

Reminder: Rep. Ratcliffe is a former federal prosecutor and is one of the most effective cross-examiners of the witnesses who have been paraded during the charade, both behind closed doors in the SCIF, as well as during the public hearings last week. In this interview, he clearly stated that there has been no criminality or impeachable crimes attributed to the President by ANYONE. And, by the way, that would almost certainly include the witnesses whose transcripts we’ve not seen yet.

He also inferred that this impeachment star chamber is in reality a political charade on the part of Democrats, who wish to rush to an impeachment vote before the release of the DoJ IG report that looked into the predicate for the 2016 Russian counter-intel investigation which will disclose damaging information on DoJ and FBI officials (and others?) in the Obama-Biden Administration. They want to get the impeachment vote out there for political reasons in order to deflect from that IG report.

This is typical Democrat modus operandi – everything is sacrificed on the altar of Democrat political gain. Never mind doing the country’s business, or actually working toward any bipartisan solutions. And they know they’re in deep kimchi with the DoJ IG report coming out soon.

I love this answer from Rep. Ratcliffe, as this sums up the impeachment charade. Based on Schiff’s tyrannical and one-sided control of the process, “an impeachment should be clear, egregious, and bipartisan, and it’s none of those things.” That’s your takeaway, folks! I expect that this week’s hearings should be more of the same.

The end.