The first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019 was no tragedy. It was always a farce. The second impeachment, in which Trump was acquitted on the night of Saturday, February 13 did not even rise to that. It was a hiccup, a non-event. The most solemn procedure in the sacred constitutional process of the United States did not even rise to the entertainment value of a bout of naked mud wrestling.

Washington during the week of the Second Great Impeachment Trial was a fascinating non-place to be. The skies were grey. It was quite cold: About minus Five Degrees Celsius most days.  There was a thin sprinkling of tired, dirty snow on the ground. The city was deserted. More virulent mutations of the COVID-19 virus from the United Kingdom and South Africa were said to be on the loose.

The streets were empty. There were no protests, wall graffiti, slogans or demonstrations either for or against Trump. Nobody cared. It echoed the empty deserted ghostly state of the city during Joe Biden’s non-existent presidential inaugural on January 20. Once again, all that happened was that someone taped a badly handwritten note on the Capitol saying “impeachment” and everything that followed was just a badly acted chaotic play performed by autistic children.

No real human being gave a second’s care for either convicting Trump or acquitting him. Not a single firework was fired off in celebrate his acquittal. Not a single liberal committed ritual suicide, tried to burn themselves to death in front of the Senate or even bothered to throw a rotten tomato or an egg at a single Republican Senator who voted for acquittal. It was never real. It didn’t matter. Nobody cared.

Yet impeachment is supposed to Mean Something. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 rather than melt into blubber beneath its merciless glare. Bill Clinton, who was widely suspected of being guilty of so much, beat an impeachment rap only for lying in public that he had slept with a naive young girl intern.

George W. Bush surely rated impeachment for his unprecedented incompetence in so many areas: He bankrupted the country: He destroyed civil liberties. He failed to prevent the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. He ignored Mississippi flood defenses thereby drowning of the city of New Orleans, killing thousands more. He unleashed unnecessary, endless wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. He got thosuands of youn g American soldeirs killed and ten thousands more hideously maimed for life – for nothing.

Yet the Democratic majorities that ran both chambers of Congress during the last two years of Bush’s presidency never had the guts or decency to dare to impeach him for any of these terrible, shameful things.

Bush’s successor Barack Obama blithely presided over the destruction of democracy in Ukraine, risking nuclear war with Russia. He locked the United States into a $1.5 trillion 30-years-long new nuclear arms race. He unleashed war, rebellion, anarchy and chaos in Yemen, Syria and Libya, killing untold millions more. The Republicans who controlled Congress never dared – or bothered – to impeach him either.

This non-existent second failed impeachment of Trump confirms what the world already learned in his farcical first impeachment in 2019. Impeachment as a solemn tool to preserve democracy, depose an unworthy national leader or mean anything at all is stone cold dead in the United States of America.

Like the rest of the Beloved, still so widely revered, more than 230-years-old US Constitution, impeachment has become a meaningless exercise in exhausted, archaic cliches. No one would ever dare to use it for anything that really mattered at all. Both Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly shown over the past 30 years that they are all too scared to.

The aging, absurd, senile and drooling old Democratic political elite in Washington were led over the edge of a political cliff yet again by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer and House congressional “expert” Congressman Adam Schiff.  They will still revere and mindlessly follow them. Gadarene Swine are incapable of doing anything else.

The Democrats failed to discredit or even politically damage Trump. They revealed themselves as stupid, malignant fools, trying to impeach a powerless president who had already been cast out of office. They failed to plausibly document any of their charges against him. They made a mockery of President Biden’s half-hearted, dazedly delivered pledge of bipartisanship and burying of political enmities in his already forgotten Inaugural Address.

They also handed to the Republicans a perfect precedent for impeaching Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris if they regain control of Congress in 2022, assuming the ramshackle US political system can even survive until then.

The outcome of Trump’s second impeachment was therefore a catastrophe for the Democrats. It repeated Obama and Biden’s disastrous bungled start to their 2009 administration and it already heralds the rapid isolation and collapse of the Biden regime

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the mad Roman boy-emperor Caligula declared war on the God Neptune by collecting sea shells on the beaches of France and Belgium. Caligula had more credibility and success than Pelosi, Schumer and Schiff: At least he got the sea shells.

What we have just seen is another example of the compulsion of America’s liberal ruling elite to make a sick, discredited joke of what is left of their own collapsing and totally bankrupt political system.

What was the Second Impeachment of Donald Trump? Shakespeare gave us the answer in his Scottish Play more than 400 years ago.

It was a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

One might be forgiven for thinking, at a time when panic over a pandemic is sweeping the land, and a political battle over control of the White House is raging, the Democrats would take a break from stoking partisan fires. Forgiven or not, you would be thinking wrong.

The social justice monster has come full circle and is now devouring its ‘Dr. Frankenstein’ creator. That much was clear this week as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in the name of “inclusivity” and “diversity,” tossed raw meat to the radical progressives inside of the Democratic Party by banning gender-specific terms.

The revamped House code of conduct now forbids use of those words that once made a Hallmark card worth sending. Intimate words that evoke familiarity, like ‘father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, and granddaughter… gone with the wind.

Because any allusion to the binary world of male and female is offensive to about 0.01 percent of the nation’s population, lawmakers will be forced to substitute those sex-stained terms with surgically sterile and neutered ones like ‘‘parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling, first cousin, sibling’s child, spouse, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, step child, stepsibling, half-sibling, or grandchild.”

“Amen” and “Awoman”? Really?

I guess the virtue signaling Democrats didn’t check the Herbrew etymology of the word “Amen” to realize it has NOTHING to do with gender.

But don’t let facts get in the way of a good virtue signal.

Also, didn’t those words just get banned?

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) January 4, 2021

At the same time, the new rules call for the creation of an Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which will be empowered to do, among other things, “direct and guide House employing offices to recruit, hire, train, develop, advance, promote, and retain a diverse workforce…” No chance of anything going wrong there.

So what is really going on here, aside from just more taxpayer-funded absurdity from brain-dead politicians? First, the new House rules represent just the latest broadside against the traditional nuclear family, which requires for its very survival a commitment to biological certainties, like the existence of just two reproductive sexes, known throughout millennia as ‘male’ and ‘female’ and denoted by the XY and XX chromosomes, respectively.

These days, however, a newborn baby can no longer expect to be delivered into a sane world where a doctor may freely congratulate its mother and father – excuse me, the parents – on the birth of a beautiful baby girl or boy – excuse me, offspring. That’s because “assigning sex” at birth is no longer acceptable to the cancel culture inquisition. That would be oppressing the little bambino with something called ‘science’ at a time when some politically motivated members of the medical community are insisting that gender is nothing more than a ‘social construct,’ a fluid concept that can change at any time.

This is stupid.

Signed,

– A father, son, and brother https://t.co/bG9SlRAy6N

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) January 2, 2021

In fact, for those who have not been keeping tabs on the escalating madness, there are now dozens of gender types, including male, female, transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender and genderqueer. Can anyone imagine what it must be like for a pimply pubescent to sit through a sex-education class in the midst of such infernal confusion and uncertainty? Moreover, it’s the height of irony and arrogance how Democrats are lecturing Republicans about “following the science” on Covid-19, yet they refuse to follow the simplest of all science, that is, the existence of exactly two human genders, male and female. The real ‘social constructs’ are the other dozens of categories that now wish to claim status as ‘genders.’

The presumptuousness and stupidity on the part of the Democrats does not end there. At a time when the Cultural Marxists cannot bear to hear familial terms dripping with sexual innuendo, they are gleefully introducing elementary school children to discussions on alternative sexual lifestyles, like transgender. Most adults have no problem with an individual identifying with whichever sex he or she desires. But would it be asking too much to let the children stick to learning the Three Rs before jumping headlong into an orgy of lifestyles choices? The danger of subjecting young and impressionable children to this pseudo-science is apparent in the increasing number of youth who are now regretting their irreversible sex-change operations.

The prayer to open the 117th Congress ended with “amen and a-women.”

Amen is Latin for “so be it.”

It’s not a gendered word.

Unfortunately, facts are irrelevant to progressives. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/FvZ0lLMDDr

— Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (@GReschenthaler) January 3, 2021

Finally, in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all is that these ridiculous word games only serve to cancel out legitimate movements. Concealed below the shroud of Orwellian doublespeak is a tyrannical word salad that does just the opposite of what it purports to do: increase “inclusion” and “diversity” in society.

For example, how can one have any sort of conversation on ‘women’s rights,’ for example, when any mention of the fair sex has been outright banned? The question is not a rhetorical one.

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for people who claim to be the champions of rights for women to deny the very biological existence of women,” former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who just might be the last Democrat in DC with a functioning brain, told Tucker Carlson. “Instead of doing something that could actually help save people’s lives, they are choosing instead to say ‘You can’t say mother or father.'”

I would ask for an ‘Amen!’ at this point, but, thanks to the clown work of lawmaker Emanuel Cleaver, who ended his congressional prayer opening of the very unsexy 117th Congress with the words “amen and awoman,” even that simple gender-free term (which simply means ‘so be it’) is now tainted with foul political intrigue.

With these sort of unforgivable stunts under the belt, the Democrats should be very grateful they have perfected the art of ‘winning’ elections, otherwise they would probably vanish from the political landscape simply out of lack of doing anything positive for the nation. Indeed, the term ‘Democrat’ may be on the way out faster than that of ‘male’ and ‘female.’

Pelosi, like many of her other Democratic colleagues, has demonstrated such a lack of connection and compassion with her constituency that it literally borders on the criminal. Caught red-handed on video having her hair done inside of San Francisco’s eSalon – and without the de rigueur face mask – the top-ranking Democrat broke with the state’s strict Covid-19 restrictions that the state’s 40 million other residents are expected to follow.

Conforming to the fashions of the times, however, Pelosi portrayed herself as the victim of a ‘set up’ for which she believes she is now owed an apology.

“It was a set up, and I take responsibility for falling for a setup,” the speaker told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I think that this salon owes me an apology for setting me up.”

Salon owner, Erica Kious, had a different take on the situation.

“It was a slap in the face that she went in, you know, that she feels that she can just go and get her stuff done while no one else can go in, and I can’t work,” Kious told Fox News. “I have been fighting for six months for a business that took me 12 years to build to reopen…I am a single mom, I have two small children, and I have no income.”

No word yet on possible any Russian connections at the salon.

As a San Francisco resident, I’ve followed the law & done my own hair for the last 5 months. My stylist also follows the law & hasn’t opened her salon all this time and is struggling. It’s pretty disgusting that @SpeakerPelosi plays by different rules. https://t.co/SeqXBFD60H

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) September 1, 2020

The Democrats, however, seeming to relish the power trip that the pandemic has afforded them, seem to be unfazed by the economic fallout. Back in April, shortly after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the shelter-at-home orders, Pelosi appeared on a late night show where she provided viewers with a peek into her refrigerator – which was possibly more spacious than your average trailer home – that was heavily stocked with gourmet ice cream. At a time when millions of Americans are staring into the abyss of unemployment and a possible depression, Pelosi was staring into the freezer section of her personal supermarket. It was a remarkably tone deaf moment, and certainly not an isolated one.

Indeed, Pelosi’s ‘blow out’ at the hair salon is all the more unforgivable considering the negative publicity Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot received for getting a haircut back in April.

Lightfoot defended her decision by explaining that she is the “public face of this city.”

“I’m on national media and I’m out in the public eye,” she told a reporter. “I take my personal hygiene very seriously. As I said, I felt like I needed to have a haircut. I’m not able to do that myself, so I got a haircut. You want to talk more about that?”

Is Miss Lightfoot the only person in the Windy City who “takes her personal hygiene very seriously,” or is regularly in “the public eye”? Probably not. But she is a Democrat, which seems to make all the difference.

Just this week, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, yet another privileged Democrat, took a road trip to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. His goal? Enjoy a meal inside of a restaurant. Kenney was not ‘masked up,’ nor was he seated outside away in the uncontaminated air. What American right now would not like the luxury of taking a trip to some distant free state just to enjoy the simple pleasure of eating in a restaurant? And let’s not forget the people who rely on this industry for their survival: an estimated 8 million Americans in the restaurant business have been made redundant by the coronavirus lockdown and are now struggling to make ends meet. Kenney’s arrogance ranks up there with Marie Antoinette’s ill-advised outburst about eating “cake” at the most inopportune time.

Restaurant owners are among the hardest hit by the pandemic. I’m sorry if my decision hurt those who’ve worked to keep their businesses going under difficult circumstances. Looking forward to reopening indoor dining soon and visiting my favorite spots. https://t.co/Ki3lIZV8i4

— Jim #MaskUpPHL Kenney (@PhillyMayor) August 31, 2020

These Democratic leaders are sending the message that they are important enough to behave ‘above the law,’ as it were, because they are the only “essential” people in the country. What that sheer arrogance overlooks is that millions of Americans, even with the occasional stimulus check, are fast approaching the breaking point. Food does not magically appear on family tables every evening; it gets there by hard work and sacrifice, with many families living paycheck to paycheck.

Sooner or later, the Democrat-run regimes are going to have to decide whether or not it is more dangerous to keep the economy shut down or finally come to terms with a virus that, according to updated statistics by the Centers for Disease Control, is not as fatal as we have been led to believe. Just 6% of the some 160,000 deaths recorded in the United States died from Covid alone, that is, without any other comorbidities. Meanwhile, the average age of the person who succumbs to Covid-19 is around 78 years old, which just happens to be the average life expectancy of Americans.

If some Democratic leaders have reached the conclusion that Covid-19 is not some kind of new Black Death, they should not wait until after November 3rd to inform the public of their revised opinion. Otherwise, they should be expected to follow the rules just like everyone else.

A series of explosions rocked a number of countries, the most significant being Lebanon. In Trump’s televised address in New Jersey in the first week of August, he explained that he would be laying low. Prior to that, in describing storm Isaiah, Trump gave a signal to his base, that the ‘storm’ was now at his back.

On July 21st Nancy Pelosi appears to have explained a large part of the game plan, to MSNBC.

“Well, that’s a loaded question there about coronavirus, what we do about it. But the fact is, whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving. Just because he might not want to move out of the White House doesn’t mean we won’t have an inauguration ceremony to inaugurate a duly-elected President of the United States and the – I just – you know, I’m second in line to the Presidency. Just last week I had my regular continuation of government briefing. This might interest you because I say to them, ‘This is never going to happen. God-willing it never will.’ But there is a process. It has nothing to do with the certain occupant of the White House doesn’t feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there because the presidency is the presidency. It’s not geography or location.”

A General Outline:

1. ‘Problems’ with the process and final count in the 2020 presidential election will render no clear winner
2. A legal battle will ensue, as both Trump and Biden will maintain they have won
3. Congress will move to execute constitutional provision to choose president – Pelosi
4. Trump will physically occupy the White House while Pelosi Seeks Inauguration
5. More violence and destabilization if Pelosi plan works

Trump’s Projected Victory Means the Deep State Moves for Election Spoilage

The deep state’s plan has worked through contingency plans to oust Trump. This is because a clean election has him 91% likely to win according to the only tested reliable method of evaluating the past century of presidential elections, the Norpoth/Primary Model. That same model had Trump 87% likely to win in 2016, despite push-polls and various other erroneous (but convenient for the DNC) models showing Clinton the likely winner. It is the gold standard. Other models either do not consider all the variables, or have weighted those variables incorrectly, and the Primary Model takes account for voter motivation.

Pelosi – Fauci – Gates

Pelosi and congressional Dems in concert with Fauci and Gates have made – between the forced lockdowns, explosive unemployment, and business closures – the very same mess that they will say is ‘Trump’s Economy’. Dems push divisiveness – blaming other Americans and Trump, while Trump unites all Americans using the xenophobic trope of Red China. On a deeper level, Trump blames Fauci and Gates, and was upset that Event 201 became a live exercise without telling the White House. ‘They should have told us’, he lamented, as Pompeo let the truth slip that ‘this is a live exercise’.

All the while Pelosi simultaneously pushes back against Trump’s moves to end lockdown and re-open the economy.

Animated Trump voters – whose excitement is enough to sway undecided neighbors and friends – are not fooled by this. They are ‘inoculated’ against this plan and they understand that, whatever his motives, Trump needs to improve the situation as much as possible to get re-elected. And because of the executive order, he will.

Trump’s political counter-moves are sure to shore up enough support in swing-states where he might have been flagging. We have seen this already, and will see more of it.

We must take this revealed development from Pelosi alongside this writer’s information directly from SEIU staffers themselves, who have explained what was said on the condition of anonymity as they are still in the employ of that organization. For it is these who are the driving force behind the ‘Our Revolution/Working Families Party’ organization – the wing of the Bernie (for Biden) campaign that also embeds with street activists as a ‘community organizing model’ outfit, and forms the organizational bridge between BLM and ANTIFA on the one hand, and the Biden campaign on the other. In standard SEIU form, the paid staffers coordinate with a network of NGOs backed by charitable trusts and that percent of COPA/COPE (Committee on Political Action/Education) funds from union members themselves that can be used for (in)direct political campaigns.

Some months ago, the SEIU staffers from the management echelon of the inner-party went on a retreat, as is their custom when it’s time to get their story straight. This involved political directors at the locals as well as high-paid managers at the ‘International’. This is often a camping trip or some similar outing over the course of three or four days, that includes the sort of outdoor ‘trust building’ exercises also used in corporate management.

Inside baseball and long-game strategy was discussed, and more to the point, how this can be sold back to the outer-party staffers of SEIU (who in turn must sell this to the rank and file members). Leading this exercise was SEIU’s Rafael Navar (furthest on our left, see photo above), who this writer worked with in SEIU at Local 99 in Los Angeles a decade ago. The issue in question as it pertains to our understanding, was that the DNC convention has been effectively brokered, and Bernie’s delegates were hand-picked by SEIU so as to avoid the grassroots embarrassment dealt to Clinton by Bernie supporters against Bernie’s wishes during the 2016 DNC convention. But what came out of this retreat is of particular interest.

Contrary to how conservative pundits misunderstand the dynamic, the DNC leadership and its SEIU inner-party functionaries are functionally pro-establishment and anti-socialist, who see themselves as anti-establishment socialists.

The outer-party are ‘true believers’ at war with the inner-party, seeing through their lies on the one hand, are fooled into believing that a socialist angle can be teased out of the corporatist DNC agenda nonetheless. The outer-party therefore hates Biden, and was keen on a Sanders campaign and presidency. The ‘socialism’ that conservative Americans oppose is better understood as ‘corporatism’ .

A big crisis that SEIU is aware of, is that Biden is unelectable and cannot win. They do not believe the fake news polls showing Biden leading or even close, because their trained senses and experience in the field, which is loaded with empirical evidence that leaves little room for interpretation, indicates that Trump will win by a landslide. The outer-party knows only a Sanders campaign could have motivated a Democrat victory in November – if we take a clean election for granted. Bear in mind that 40-45% of Americans see themselves as socialists according to several solid polls.

Coming back from this retreat, inner-party middle manager Rafael Navar communicated to recalcitrant outer-party leaders that the rumors to silence Sander’s real support at the convention was a ‘conspiracy theory’, and more that all their concerns should be put to rest. Why?

Because Biden will declare victory regardless of the outcome

It corroborates Pelosi’s interview which reveals that that the DNC plans to hold a parallel presidential inauguration – not for Joe Biden, but for herself – as “2^nd in line”. By not conceding, a door is opened for Pelosi’s move. Pelosi explains that even if Trump does not vacate the White House – that is, even if he maintains that he is the president after the election as a legal contest ensues – that the presidency is an institution and not a geographic location.

Fascinating here is that Pelosi reveals the mechanism that would be used: constitutional provisions for the continuation of government, and NSDP 51 signed to act towards the continuation of constitutional government. In the live TV interview, she bragged that she is prepared to assume the presidency if Trump does not concede, and has regularly been briefed on COG (continuation of government) provisions. Simultaneously, BLM/Antifa has called for a protest on September 17^th to ‘lay siege’ to the White House. If this goes forward, we should expect the ‘occupy’ tactic of the Color/Spring technology.

Why the revelation?

It is perhaps beside the point to dissect whether she was inebriated or if we can chalk this one to over-confidence, or something else. At this point, all of their communications are monitored, and they are under investigation for both related and unrelated matters. The justice department has substantive predicate for an investigation of all their comms because of Obamagate. Information on this plan if kept a secret would be revealed anyhow because of the fact that they are under investigation. AG Barr would rely upon parallel construction to make that evidence usable if it could not be tied to the initial FISA warrant. Therefore it is probable that they will have two separate (parallel) evidentiary lines to arrive at the same outcome.

To be secretive about this plan may lend it the appearance or even facticity of illegality, or add a layer of illegality (conspiracy) which they would maintain anyhow is not the case. Speaking openly about this plan on live television, even if most were not entirely paying attention, may indeed be a legal requirement. The warning has been given. So we proceed.

‘No one Qualified, No one Chosen’: An inconclusive election to appoint Nancy Pelosi as President

Between contact tracers and other paid ‘volunteers’ working this project within the context of the non-profit industrial complex, an over-burdened postal office using old equipment, and outright violence and disruptions at polling locations, we will have an inconclusive election.

The underlying problem will be the mailed-out ballots combined with Antifa (posing as/alongside BLM) violence. Test cases used already in New York, as Trump has explained in his press briefings, have only on August 5^th some six weeks already after the election, declared a winner. Trump has also said that they are suing Nevada over similar. In a number of imaginable scenarios, this already compromised and marred election could be determined in the final instance on the outcome of a state like Nevada.

An inconclusive election without a qualified/chosen elected president, requires a process, and neither Trump nor Biden can be declared the winner or be inaugurated.

Constitutional provisions on the continuation of government then require a vote in the House of Representatives to elect a president, and for the Senate to elect the vice president. This is pursuant to Article XX of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1933, in language generally explained in Sections III and IV.

Masks, Goggles, Gloves – Pandemic Preparedness or Antifa Uniform?

Barr’s federal police force have captured a number of Antifa terrorists caught setting fires to federal property during the opposition planned riots, and they were able to use face recognition technology that only requires eyes to positively ID. Fauci is now talking goggles, and face recognition doesn’t deal well with covered eyes. Media has already ‘lauded’ the violent manifestations because the ‘protestors’ wore masks. Now the media will note how responsible disruptors of the elections were, because they also wore goggles, following Fauci’s recommendations. DNC-Antifa believes this will allow their high profile members to avoid arrest through face recognition. Goggles also protect from tear gas. It may also be why the push for cell-phone contact tracing apps has suddenly been quieted, as the contingency has changed/adapted to the evolving situation. Contact tracing apps can be used by law enforcement to identify terrorism at polling locations, or attacks on mass ballot collection ‘efforts’ that are part of the mass ballot mail-outs. Those following recent Congressional hearings know that Google was just cross-examined on their reluctance to work with law enforcement to hand over GPS information on suspected perps.

Trump is Actively Working Against The Coup Plot

Showing the problematic result of the test of mailed out ballots in New York, legally challenging Nevada’s push to do the same (outcome of which would also effect all other states), pushing to expose Antifa violence and plan to work with contact tracers and similar NGO-sphere employees to ‘stuff ballot boxes’, AG Barr to release Obamagate findings before the election, and managing the messaging and promoting sensible cures for the plandemic, are part of Trump’s moves against this.

Trump’s ability to effectively politicize a sector of his base around the Epstein/Maxwell revelations will bring back the excitement generated by the phenomenon named after the famous Italian fast food, and the FBI’s announcement of investigating Clinton over Weiner’s laptop. If this happens within a week or so of the election, it’s possible that Trump will win 45 states without a further contest over a lesser victory, because of the recency effect in psychology.

These all seem like a lot of different variables to factor. While people talk about strategies, and broad and sweeping generalizations can be communicated conversationally – contemporary strategic planning requires help. We are talking about thousands of plans within thousands of plans, multivariate analysis, and the use of super computers using complex Bayesian statistical models on probabilistic outcomes. Because there are a finite number of possibilities, and Trump has made it to election 2020 so-far, it is likely that Trump already believes he has won. Laplace’s Demon is Trump’s Guardian Angel.

Reach the author at FindMeFlores@Gmail.com

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed the next multi-trillion dollar “coronavirus relief” spending bill that will support testing, tracing, treatment, isolation, and mask policies that have been part of a “national strategic plan” she has been advocating. The Trump administration is not opposing Pelosi’s plan on principle. Instead, it is haggling over the price.

But, even if the strategic plan could be implemented at little or no monetary cost, it would still impose an unacceptable cost in lost liberty.

Pelosi’s plan will lead to either a federal mask mandate or federal funding of state and local mask mandate enforcement. Those who resist wearing masks could likely be reported to the authorities by government-funded mask monitors. We can label this the “Stasi” approach to health policy, after the infamous East German secret police force.

Contact tracing could lead to forcing individuals to download a tracing app. The app would record where an individual goes and alert authorities that an individual has been near someone who has tested positive for coronavirus.

The strategic plan could eventually include Bill Gates’ and Anthony Fauci’s suggestion that individuals receive “digital certificates” indicating they are vaccinated for or immune to coronavirus. A certificate would be required before an individual can go to work, to school, or even to the grocery store. The need to demonstrate vaccination for or immunity to coronavirus in order to resume normal life would cause many people to “voluntarily” receive a potentially dangerous coronavirus vaccine.

The Trump administration has already spent billions of dollars to support efforts of companies to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Policymakers have stated that once a vaccine is developed it will be rushed into production and onto the market. Supporters of expediting production and use of a vaccine should remember the 1976 swine flu vaccine debacle. The swine flu vaccine was rushed into production in response to political pressure to “do something.” The result was a vaccine that was more of a danger than the flu.

Unfortunately, those who raise legitimate concerns regarding the safety of vaccines are smeared as “conspiracy theorists.” This is the equivalent of stating that anyone who dares criticize our interventionist foreign policy “hates freedom” and is probably a “terrorist sympathizer.”

The coronavirus panic has given new life to the push for a unique patient identifier. The unique patient identifier was authorized in 1996, but appropriations bills since 1998 have contained a provision forbidding the federal government from developing and implementing the identifier. Unfortunately, two weeks ago, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the ban. The unique patient identifier would aid government efforts to track and vaccinate every American, as well as to infringe in other ways on liberty in the name of “health.”

Politicians and bureaucrats cannot eliminate a virus any more than they can eliminate terrorism. What they can do is use terrorism, a virus, and other real, exaggerated, or manufactured crises to expand their power at the expense of our liberty.

Politicians will never resist the temptation to use crises as excuses to gain more power. Therefore, it is up to those of us who know the truth to spread the message of liberty and grow the liberty movement, A strong liberty movement is the only thing that can force the politicians to stop stealing our liberty while promising phantom security from terrorists and viruses.

ronpaulinstitute.org

The Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is reportedly perplexed by the lack of official interest in what might have been a foreign intelligence operation that had major impact, all too plausible given that it is assumed that Moscow would have welcomed Brexit as a first step that will eventually put an end to European political and economic unity.

So, no one knows if Russia or anyone else interfered in Britain, which is perhaps just as well as inquiries into voting in the U.S. also in 2016 have likewise created nothing but confusion and no smoking pistol. And, of course there is a question of definitions of interference. Millions of pounds were spent on advertising by those pro- and con-Brexit, just as billions were spent in political adverts in the United States. Much of the “information” provided in that fashion was deliberately misleading, often fearmongering, both in the U.K. and the U.S., suggesting that the problem is much bigger than one country’s possible attempt to influence the vote, if that even took place.

There were similar claims about Russian generated fake news and “a massive hacking attack” in the French presidential election in 2017, while Germany’s Federal Election was notable for a lack of any identifiable Kremlin interference in spite of warnings from some observers that Berlin would be targeted.

So, while claims of Russian interference in elections are fairly common, they are difficult to prove in any serious way. And one should recognize that the “victimized” governments and political parties have strong motives to conjure up a foreign enemy to explain to the public why things are going wrong, be it for coronavirus fumbling or for general political ineptitude. To be sure, as the allure of blaming Russia has faded China is increasingly being targeted by American politicians as a scapegoat, indicating that there must always be a foreigner available to blame for one’s problems.

The most recent nugget to come out of the U.S. Congress on foreign interference in elections originates with Adam Schiff, the sly head of the House Intelligence Committee. In an interview with MSNBC, Schiff revealed that U.S. intelligence has obtained information suggesting multiple nations could be trying to meddle in the 2020 U.S. elections, to include feeding or “laundering” possible disinformation through Congress.

Schiff explained how various nations us different tactics to get “fake news” messages through to the American voters. Some governments openly support a particular candidate or policy, while others like the Chinese provide misinformation during their trade negotiations with Washington. He observed that “The Russians may get involved in hacking and dumping operations or social media campaigns. The Iranians may have their own tactics and techniques like the North Koreans may have theirs.”

A letter signed by Schiff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va has asked for a counterintelligence briefing for Congress regarding foreign efforts to interfere in the upcoming election. It includes “We are gravely concerned, in particular, that Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November.”

Democratic Party presidential candidate presumptive Joe Biden also has confirmed that he has received briefings about Russian alleged plans to interfere in November saying “The Russians are still engaged in trying to delegitimize our electoral process. China and others are engaged as well in activities that are designed for us to lose confidence in the outcome.”

Of course, there are a number of things to say about the claims that other nations are possibly planning to meddle in the voting. First, the list of possible players being presented by Schiff and others is all too convenient, kind of like a Congressional dream list of bad boys. Russia pops up because of longstanding claims about it, but China is a new entry in the game because it all ties up into a neat package, including the “Wuhan virus” and its challenges both to American economic supremacy and to U.S. naval power in the South China Sea. And of course, there are Iran and also North Korea.

One should ask what exactly China, Iran and North Korea stand to gain by attempting to “interfere” in the election? What message could they possibly be sending and what would be the mechanisms they would use to get their points of view across to a skeptical American public? In a campaign that will undoubtedly cost hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising and other “messaging,” what exactly is the possible place of Iran and North Korea?

There is also a lack of “realism” in the Schiff comments. By far the country that interferes the most in U.S. politics is Israel. Israel and its domestic Lobby initiate legislation relating to the Middle East and Israeli diplomats, lobbyists and soldiers all have free access both to Capitol Hill and to the Pentagon. If a Congressman dares to speak up against the Jewish state’s crimes he or she is smeared in the media and eventually forced out of office by a well-funded pro-Israel opponent. No other country gets away with all that. As it is highly likely that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be pulling out all the stops to reelect Donald Trump in November, why isn’t the Jewish state included on Schiff’s list?

And then there is the tantalizing bit about concerns over disinformation being “laundered” through Congress. It is difficult to imagine what exactly Schiff is referring to as the corrupt gasbags in Congress already constitute one of the world’s biggest sources of false information, second only to the fully coopted U.S. mainstream media.

In any event, if some countries that are accustomed to being regularly targeted by the United States are taking advantage of an opportunity to somehow diminish America’s ability to meddle globally, no one should be surprised, but it is a politically driven fantasy to make the hysterical claim that the United States has now become the victim of some kind of vast multi-national conspiracy to interfere in its upcoming election.

She’s always there to take the spotlight onto herself, make herself the story to detract from President Trump. This year she didn’t disappoint against the backdrop of the greatest political defeat of her career.

Bookending Trump’s self-congratulatory speech where he took credit for a stock market he has nothing to do with and celebrating the starving and terrorizing the people of Iran, Pelosi first made a big show of Trump refusing to shake her hand and then tore up her copy of his speech after making sure the cameras were on her.

But what did she expect from someone who hasn’t spoken to her since October and who she hounded with an impeachment that garnered zero support from a single Republican? Flowers?

Remember, Trump called Nasty Nancy a “Third rate politician” before she stormed out of the room, again playing to the cameras with all the sincerity of your average 1990’s late night TV huckster selling steak knives. She’s certainly got the hair color and botox levels adjusted correctly for that gig.

And at this point she should actually apply to QVC for that gig. Because the longer she holds onto the ‘awesome power’ of the Speaker’s gavel the more damage she does not only to the U.S. and what’s left of its constitutional authority over its people but to the party she’s supposedly leading into the 2020 election in November.

In making the State of the Union all about her, Pelosi sent the very strong message to her party operatives that opposition to this President is now their number one priority. The impeachment was something that she knew would damage the party, but she went along with it and the lies it was built on because she was told to.

That much she betrayed by her flip-flopping on it. Remember, this time last year Pelosi was talking down impeachment. But, her inability to control the far left within her own party as well as Trump stepping on the third rail of Democratic corruption – the entrenched malfeasance in Ukraine – put her in no position but to try and turn it around on him.

It failed spectacularly.

There’s plenty not to like about Trump’s presidency but it is still his presidency, won against all odds and the kind of under-handed electioneering that was on full display in Iowa this week. And Pelosi acting like she doesn’t believe that is the height of tragi-comedy.

Because, as I said, she’s not that good an actress.

She knows the impeachment was garbage, but she can’t say that. The goal of propaganda is shame. Getting people to believe something that isn’t true puts them into a place where they have to defend it lest they admit to themselves and the world that they were 1) wrong and 2) a fraud.

We saw this clearly on display during Brexit where the hardest of hard-core Remainers were gaslit into believing things that were simply not true. And they used those fake facts as justification for treating everyone who wanted to leave the EU as sub-human.

In a remarkable moment, Nigel Farage took a phone call on his radio show the Monday after Brexit where the caller was ashamed of the person he’d become during the Brexit fight. He realized how vile his behavior had been and was self-aware enough and strong enough to admit it in public. Sure, he still didn’t agree with Brexit but that didn’t excuse his treatment of his fellow Britons.

Do we see anything like that coming from the Democrats in the U.S.? Even Tony Blair realized the fight was lost and asked everyone to put the bitterness behind them. Tony “Mr. Globalist Himself” Blair!

Does Pelosi, as leader of the party, realize the damage she’s doing? Does she understand what message she’s sending in her refusal to admit that she lost and that there are limits to the fight if you care at all about anything other than yourself?

No.

I don’t think she gives one whit about any of that. And that’s why the U.S. is headed for a real civil war not the internal power struggle of factions in D.C.

It’s clear the DNC bosses don’t want Bernie Sanders as their nominee. They will lie, cheat and steal delegates from him to ensure that happens. We saw this in Iowa as somehow they concocted the outcome they wanted – Pete Buttigieg gets the plurality of delegates while Bernie wins the popular vote and has no momentum coming into New Hampshire.

This much is a given. I laid out some of my early thoughts on this in my last article.

This primary season will spell the end of the Democratic Party as a viable political construct after this election cycle. Hillary is the stalking horse for the nomination. She’ll lose to Trump. They will alienate Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard in the process, all those voters will either jump to their potential independent ticket, back Trump or sit on their hands.

Pelosi has signaled her troops to go on the warpath but she also just sent all the centrists that Bernie supposedly has trouble with more forcefully back under Trump’s umbrella.

And with the impeachment’s end Trump will be free to enact revenge against those who have tormented him for the past three years. The most deeply despised members of Congress will now fall under investigation. Trump has the neocons happy right now. The Republicans who work for AIPAC will side with him as long as he keeps things as they are between now and November.

His speech was nothing if not grist for that mill and it’s a shame. It spoke to the civilizational fight that is the backdrop of U.S. foreign policy, which Alistair Crooke touched on in his latest piece here. It’s something that needs changing but it’s not going to happen on either Pelosi’s or Trump’s watch.

It’s our job to win that fight.

But what Pelosi did at the State of the Union tells us what comes next. She knows now that they cannot win in November on ideas, issues or facts. All they have is emotion and envy.

And envy never wins elections, persuasion does. So, violence and theft is all that’s left.

Pelosi’s lack of self-control is the cancer eating at the heart of the political left in the U.S. It overshadows their real and reasoned criticisms of Trump and the Republican party and it will destroy them.

What comes next is full on insurrection against Trump the Impeached. Nothing he says is valid. Nothing he wants is reasonable. And from here to November it will be every decent American’s duty to obstruct this illegitimate president and work for his removal from office.

Now you expect some of that metaphorically in an election year. But I think we’re far beyond metaphor and will be looking at outright thievery.

And the vestiges of the Democratic party still exist within the state and local governments. They exist, like Brenda Snipes the disgraced Supervisor of Elections in Broward County Florida, as wrenches to openly throw into the gears of an election to ensure their person wins.

If you think Brenda Snipes is bad, imagine multiplying her by a thousand in every ‘purple’ county in the U.S. This isn’t a conspiracy I’m talking about. This is pure naked hatred manifest as political action. This is the stuff pogroms are made of.

It is that which all dying empires face as ego and self-interest overwhelm the impulse to decency. Democracy exists, if it exists at all, on the principle of Loser’s Consent. Without that, societies tear themselves apart. Pelosi may as well have torn up a copy of the Constitution the other evening.

I’ve said for a long time that the U.S. is too big to govern as a single entity. Maybe Pelosi did us a favor here in the long run, but as a leader she had the opportunity and, frankly, responsibility to rise above this and be better. To find a way to communicate something other than vitriol and vindictiveness.

Now we all pay the price for her lack of humility.

The fact that the impeachment is dead in the water, by Pelosi’s own admission, is evident in Trump’s being adamant that indeed it must be sent to the Senate – where he knows he’ll be exonerated. But even if it doesn’t go to the Senate, what we’re left with still appears as a loss for Democrats. Both places are his briar patch. This makes all of this a win-win for team Trump.

Only in a country that produces so much fake news at the official level, could there be a fake impeachment procedure made purely for media consumption, with no real or tangible possible victory in sight.

For in a constitutional republic like the United States, what makes an impeachment possible is when the representatives and the voters are in communion over the matter. This would normally be reflected in a mid-term election, like say for example the mid-term Senatorial race in 2018 where Democrats failed to take control. Control of the Senate would reflect a change of sentiment in the republic, which in turn and not coincidentally, would be what makes for a successful impeachment.

Don’t forget, this impeachment is fake

Nancy Pelosi is evidently extraordinarily cynical. Her politics appears to be ‘they deserve whatever they believe’. And her aim appears to be the one who makes them believe things so that they deserve what she gives them. For little else can explain the reasoning behind her claim that she will ‘send the impeachment to the Senate’ as soon as she ‘has assurances and knows how the Senate will conduct the impeachment’, except that it came from the same person who told the public regarding Obamacare that we have to ‘We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”.

In both cases, reality is turned on its head – for rather we will know how the Senate intends to conduct its procedure as soon as it has the details, which substantively includes the impeachment documents themselves, in front of them, and likewise, legislators ought to know what’s in a major piece of legislation before they vote either way on it. Pelosi’s assault on reason, however, isn’t without an ever growing tide of resentment from within the progressive base of the party itself.

We have quickly entered into a new era which increasingly resembles the broken political processes which have struck many a country, but none in living memory a country like the US. Now elected officials push judges to prosecute their political opponents, constitutional crises are manufactured to pursue personal or political vendettas, death threats and rumors of coups coming from media and celebrities being fed talking points by big and important players from powerful institutions.

This ‘impeachment’ show really takes the cake, does it not? We will recall shortly after Trump was elected, narrator for hire Morgan Freeman made a shocking public service announcement. It was for all intents and purposes, a PSA notifying the public that a military coup to remove Trump would be legitimate and in order. Speaking about this PSA, and recounting what was said, would in any event read as an exaggeration, or some allegorical paraphrasing made to prove a point. Jogging our memories then, Freeman spoke to tens of millions of viewers on television and YouTube saying:

“We have been attacked. We are at war. Imagine this movie script: A former KGB spy, angry at the collapse of his motherland, plots a course for revenge – taking advantage of the chaos, he works his way up through the ranks of a post-soviet Russia and becomes … president.

He establishes an authoritarian regime, then he sets his sights on his sworn enemy – the United States. And like the KGB spy that he is, he secretly uses cyber warfare to attack democracies around the world. Using social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political processes, even their neighbors. And he wins.”

This really set the tone for the coming years, which have culminated in this manufactured ‘impeachment’ crisis, really befitting a banana republic.

It would be the height of dishonesty to approach this abuse of the impeachment procedure as if until this moment, the US’s own political culture and processes were in good shape. Now isn’t the time for the laundry list of eroded constitutional provisions, which go in a thousand and one unique directions. The US political system is surely broken, but as is the case with such large institutions several hundreds of years old, its meltdown appears to happen in slow motion to us mere mortals. And so what we are seeing today is the next phase of this break-down, and really ought to be understood as monumental in this sense. Once again revealed is the poor judgment of the Democratic Party and their agents, tools, warlords, and strategists, the same gang who sunk Hillary Clinton’s campaign on the rocks of hubris.

Nancy Pelosi also has poor judgment, and these short-sighted and self-interested moves on her part stand a strong chance of backfiring. Her role in this charade is duly noted. This isn’t said because of any disagreement over her aims, but rather that in purely objective terms it just so happens that her aims and her actions are out of synch – that is unless she wants to see Trump re-elected. Her aims are her aims, our intention is to connect these to their probable results, without moral judgments.

The real problem for the Democrats, the DNC, and any hopes for the White House in 2020, is that this all has the odor of a massive backfire, and something that Trump has been counting on happening. When one’s opponent knows what is probable, and when they have a track record for preparing very well for such, it is only a question of what Trump’s strategy is and how this falls into it, not whether there is one.

Imagine being a fly on the wall of the meeting with Pelosi where it was decided to go forward with impeachment in the House of Representatives, despite not having either sufficient traction in the Senate or any way to control the process that the Senate uses.

It probably went like this: ‘We’ll say we impeached him, because we did, and we’ll say he was impeached. We’ll declare victory, and go home. This will make him unelectable because of the stigma of impeachment. ‘

Informed citizens are aware that whatever their views towards Trump, nothing he has done reaches beyond the established precedent set by past presidents. Confused citizens on the other hand, are believing the manufactured talking points thrown their way, and the idea that a US president loosely reference a quid pro quo in trying to sort a corruption scandal in dealings with the president of a foreign country, is some crazy, new, never-before-done and highly-illegal thing. It is none of those things though.

Unfortunately, not needless to say, the entirety of the direct, physical evidence against Trump solely consists of the now infamous transcript of the phone call which he had with Ukrainian president Zelensky. The rest is hearsay, a conspiracy narrative, and entirely circumstantial. As this author has noted in numerous pieces, Biden’s entire candidacy rests precisely upon his need to be a candidate so that any normal investigation into the wrongdoings of himself or his son in Ukraine, suddenly become the targeted persecution of a political opponent of Trump.

Other than this, it is evident that Biden stands little chance – the same polling institutions which give him a double-digit lead were those which foretold a Clinton electoral victory. Neither their methods nor those paying and publishing them, have substantively changed. Biden’s candidacy, like the impeachment, is essentially fake. The real contenders for the party’s base are Sanders and Gabbard.

The Democratic Party Activist Base Despises Pelosi as much as Clinton

The Democratic Party has two bases, one controlled by the DNC and the Clintons, and one which consists of its energized rank-and-file activists who are clearer in their populism, anti-establishment and ant-corporate agenda. Candidates like Gabbard and Sanders are closest to them politically, though far from perfect fits. Their renegade status is confirmed by the difficulties they have with visibility – they are the new silent majority of the party. The DNC base, on the other hand, relies on Rachel Maddow, Wolf Blitzer, and the likes for their default talking points, where they have free and pervasive access to legacy media. In the context of increased censorship online, this is not insignificant.

Among the important reasons this ‘impeachment’ strategy will lose is that it will not energize the second and larger base. Even though this more progressive and populist base is also more motivated, they have faced – as has the so-called alt-light – an extraordinarily high degree of censorship on social media. Despite all the censorship, the Democrats’ silent majority are rather well-informed people, highly motivated, and tend to be vocal in their communities and places of work. Their ideas move organically and virally among the populace.

This silent majority has a very good memory, and they know very well who Nancy Pelosi is, and who she isn’t.

The silent majority remembers that after years of the public backlash against Bush’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, destruction of remaining civil liberties with the Patriot Act, torture, warrantless search – and the list goes on and on – Democrats managed to retake the lower house in 2006. If there was a legitimate reason for an impeachment, it would have been championed by Pelosi against Bush for going to war using false, falsified, manufactured evidence about WMD in Iraq. At the time, Pelosi squashed the hopes of her own electorate, reasoning that such moves would be divisive, that they would distract from the Democrats’ momentum to take the White House in ’08, that Bush had recently (?) won his last election, and so on. Of course these were real crimes, and the reasons not to prosecute may have as much to do with Pelosi’s own role in the war industry. Pelosi couldn’t really push against Bush over torture, etc. because she had been on an elite congressional committee – the House Intelligence Committee – during the Bush years in office which starting in 2003 was dedicated to making sure that torture could and would become normalized and entirely legal.

It seems Pelosi can’t even go anywhere with this impeachment on Trump today, and therefore doesn’t even really plan to submit it to the Senate for the next stage. The political stunt was pulled, a fireworks show consisting of one lonely rocket that sort of fizzled off out of sight.

Trump emerges unscathed, and more to the point, we are closer to the election and his base is even more energized. Pelosi spent the better part of three years inoculating the public against any significance being attached to any impeachment procedure. Pelosi cried wolf so many times, and Trump has made good on the opportunities handed to him to get his talking points in order and to condition his base to receive and process the scandals in such and such way. This wouldn’t have been possible without Pelosi’s help. Thanks in part to Pelosi and the DNC, Trump appears primed for re-election.

Trump energizes his base, and the DNC suppresses and disappoints theirs. That’s where the election will be won or lost.

Peter VAN BUREN

Disregard all the dramatic accusations in and around the whistleblower’s complaint; they’re just guff. This entire impeachment brouhaha hinges on Donald Trump’s own words in the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president. Is he demanding foreign interference in the 2020 election? Or is he asking an ally to run down unethical actions by a man who might become president (here’s a 2018 letter from the Dems asking Ukraine to help them investigate Trump to compare it to)? Or is it mostly just Trump running his mouth off in a rambling, often disconnected, stream-of-consciousness phone call that means very little?

If you read Trump’s words as impeachable, you are asking to impeach on something that was talked about but never happened. Ukraine never handed over dirt on Biden. Trump never even asked Attorney General Bob Barr to contact Ukraine. Rudy Giuliani may or may not have had meetings with someone but no one is claiming that anything of substance happened in them. There is no evidence military aid was withheld in return for anything. If nothing happened, then nothing happened. You need a body on the ground for a smoking gun to matter.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice had already adjudicated the whistleblower complaint before the thing was leaked to the Washington Post. The original complaint was passed from the Intelligence Community Inspector General to the DOJ, which determined there was no crime and closed the case. Officials found that the transcript did not show that Trump had violated campaign finance laws by soliciting a thing of value, such as the investigation, from a foreign national. Even as Democrats bleat about how corrupt the DOJ is, at some point during any impeachment, they will need to make clear what evidence they have that finds crime where DOJ did not. No one is above the law, sure, but which law exactly are we talking about here?

Trump is apparently no better at cover-ups than he is at extortion. He got no dirt on Biden even as Ukraine pocketed its aid money (Ukraine, in fact, knew nothing about the aid being frozen while Trump supposedly was shaking them down), and his so-called cover-up concluded with him releasing in unprecedented fashion both the complaint and the transcript. For a cover-up to even begin, you have to have something to cover, and a phone call that led nowhere doesn’t need to be covered up. In fact, it’s on the internet right now.

But the complaint says that the transcript was moved from one secure computer server inside the White House to an even more secure server. That’s a cover-up! Not discussed is that Congress had no more access to the first server than the second. Exactly who was blocked from seeing the transcript when it was on the more secure system who would have had access to it otherwise? It seems the main person who suddenly couldn’t grab the transcript was the whistleblower. To make all this work, Democrats either have to argue for less cybersecurity or impeach for over-classification. And of course, the Obama administration also stored records of select presidential phone calls on the exact same server.

Bottom line: Trump asked the Ukrainian president to take calls from Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani to talk about corruption, a bilateral issue since the Obama administration with or without Hunter Biden. There was no quid pro quo. Maybe a good scolding is deserved, but sloppy statesmanship is not high crimes and misdemeanors.

Something else is wrong. The whistleblower is a member of the intel community (the New York Times says CIA), but the text does not read the way government people write. It sounds instead like an op-ed, a mediocre journalist “connecting the dots,” a Maddow exclusive combining anonymous sources with dramatic conclusions. Sure, maybe the whistleblower had help writing it, but that’s not the point. The point is that the complaint was written for the media. It was written to be leaked. It wasn’t even about an intelligence matter. Maybe that’s why the DOJ quickly rejected its accusations, and why both the Times and the Huffington Post praised the writing, commenting on how much clearer the complaint was than Mueller’s legalese.

And that’s a problem. A whistleblower complaint is meant to point out violations of law in the language of prosecutors. It is legalese. A complaint requires data and references. The evidence I needed to explain waste in Iraq’s reconstruction ended up at over 230 published pages. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers originally ran into multiple volumes to prove that the government lied about Vietnam. Ed Snowden needed terabytes of data to demonstrate NSA illegality.

If the whistleblower really is an analyst, he is not a very good one. He mixes second-hand sources with public ones to mimic a weary Dem narrative of foreign election help much like the Steele Dossier. The complainant witnessed nothing himself and produced no primary documents. The sourcing is as vague as “more than half a dozen officials have informed me of various facts.” No law is cited because none applied; the whistleblower simply recorded his interpretation into bullet points, like the punchlines from Russiagate no one laughed at.

The whistleblower’s expected testimony will be played as high drama but actually it is meaningless; he has an opinion but his accusations were made without hearing the call or reading the transcript. At least he’s in good company: Nancy Pelosi also declared her support for impeachment before she’d heard the call or seen the transcript.

Here’s where things stand. After three years of trying to keep Trump from assuming office, then cycling through ways to throw him out, this plops onto the field. If an impeachment vote comes, it will literally be with Trump having only a few months left in his term. This is no longer about overturning 2016; it is about circumventing 2020, fear by the Democrats of what will happen if they let the deplorables vote again. Is the Dem slate that weak? They are acting as if they have nothing to lose by trying impeachment.

Pity Nancy Pelosi, who tried to hold back her colleagues. Now instead of answering the needs of constituents, Democrats will instead exploit their majority in the House to hold hearings that will likely lead to a show vote that would have embarrassed Stalin. History will remember Pelosi as the mom who, after putting up with the kids’ tantrums for hours, finally gave in only a few blocks from home. She’ll regret spoiling dinner over a hefty glass of white wine, but what could she do: they just wouldn’t shut up and her nerves were shot. Have you had to listen to AOC complain from the back seat for two hours in traffic?

The last thing Joe Biden needed was more baggage. It’ll take awhile for him to realize it, but he’s done, doomed by kompromat never actually found. Impeachment will so dominate the media that no one will listen to whatever the other primary Dems have to say. Kamala Harris in the midst of all this was so desperate for attention she was still trying to drum up support for impeaching Brett Kavanaugh. Elizabeth Warren will emerge as the nominee. Goodbye then to all the minor Dems, see you in 2024, perhaps running against Mike Pence after Trump’s second term.

The case is weak, though with their House majority, that might not stop the Dems from impeaching a president just months ahead of an election based on a partisan interpretation of a few words to a minor world leader. Impeachment didn’t even come up in the last Democratic debate, yet heading into the early caucuses, the faces of the party will be Adam Schiff and the agita-driven Hillary. Democrats are taking that road instead of talking about jobs, health care, immigration, or any of the other issues voters do care about.

theamericanconservative.com

Peter VAN BUREN

This is the moment Democrats—the entire #Resistance—has been waiting for. A formal inquiry, announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, has brought the much anticipated impeachment train into the station, ready for boarding.

There are few hard facts: a leak claims a whistleblower in the intelligence community believes that during a July 25 phone call, Trump made unspecified “promises” to the Ukrainian president in return for his investigating Biden family corruption. The whistleblower did not have direct knowledge of what was said, and may have read a transcript or summary. Trump knew the call was monitored by multiple people yet said whatever he said anyway.

Despite the lack of real information, the story blossomed until the hive concluded that Trump had illegally withheld $391 million in military aid from Ukraine in a direct quid pro quo for the Ukrainians finding dirt on Joe Biden. Correlation was turned into causation and a narrative was created in mid-air. That was then crowd-refined into a tweetable “Trump is again inviting foreigners into our democratic process.” From there, it took The New York Times only 48 hours to questionwhether the “president can get away with weaponizing the federal government to punish political opponents.” Impeachment was called for, and one nominal Trump challenger literally demanded on MSNBC that execution be considered.

Democrats also decided that all sorts of procedural and legal stuff the public does not pay attention to has been trod upon because the whistleblower complaint had not been handed over to them. In sum, per the New York Times, “many elements are murky, but something clearly stinks,” which suggested that’s good enough as a standard for demanding regime change in the middle of an election.

On Tuesday night, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for a formal impeachment inquiry. The complaint seems to be enough to start things, but finishing this to the point of an actual vote to impeach will require much more.

The big difference this time around is that there’s no holy grail pee tape to quest after for three years. A transcript of the call between Trump and the Ukrainian president exists. What did Trump say? The Ukrainian government version, which is as close as we have to the truth at present, has been quietly online for two months now. It reads, “Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA. [sic]”

The actual words matter a lot. If this whole thing turns out to be shoehorning some broad or flippant statement by the president about investigating corruption that may involve the Biden family into a quid pro quo accusation, it will fail spectacularly with voters. If we all have to become whistleblower law experts the same way we all were obstruction experts just a few weeks ago, it fails. The Dems might as well bring Congressman Wile E. Coyote onto the floor with his Acme Impeachment Kit.

Yet while the actual words matter, it should not be lost that none of what Trump was supposed to have really done—using military aid to get dirt on Biden—happened. We’re talking maybe burning the Reichstag, just not in so many words.

No one claims the Ukrainians investigated Biden at Trump’s demand (and Dems insist there was no Biden wrongdoing anyway, so an investigation would be for naught). It is thus a big problem in this narrative that the long-promised military aid to the Ukraine was only delayed and then paid out, as if the bribe was given for nothing in return—which makes it hardly a bribe. Trump is apparently bad at bribing. Even though he made the decision to temporarily withhold the aid for some reason, the Ukrainians were never even told about it until weeks after the “extortion” phone call, meaning nobody’s arm got knowingly twisted. So no bribe was given, or to the Ukrainians’ knowledge, no money withheld.

As with all the souls Trump supposedly sold to get his Moscow hotel only for there to be no Moscow hotel, the Dems claim they see a smoking gun. But there is no body on the ground under the muzzle. So will this devolve into another complicated thoughtcrime, another “conspiracy” to commit without the committal? “No explicit quid pro quo is necessary to betray your country,” helpfully tweeted Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Three years ago, “almost” might have worked, but we are far too cynical now following the collapse of Russiagate. The gray areas will fall to Trump in the court of public opinion.

Sigh. This will drag on for a while. So the next step is for someone to see the actual whistleblower complaint, or, better, the transcript of the call itself. Because absolutely everything else swirling around Washington today is based on just a leak.

Prying things loose if Trump wants to keep them from Congress will not be easy. The law sets conditions for disclosure of the whistleblower complaint itself, based on the specific legal definitions of credible and urgent; the media is mangling this part of the story by using vernacular definitions. How to apply those criteria can be argued over to Kiev and back. For example, the complaint itself seems to have nothing to do with intelligence operations except that it was allegedly filed by an intelligence staffer. That could make it not an “urgent” matter in the definition of the law and thus not available to Congress.

Trump’s withholding of the whistleblower complaint is also consistent with the stance taken by both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Bill Clinton, in a signing statement accompanying the original 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, wrote that this “does not constrain my constitutional authority to review and, if appropriate, control certain classified information to Congress.”

Obama also reserved the right to withhold information “in [undefined] exceptional circumstances” when the original Act was updated as Congress created the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General in 2010. Trump is thus the third president to assert that a whistleblower complaint does not grant the filer the right to force classified, privileged information into the public sphere. That right rests with the president—Clinton, Obama, Trump, as well as the next one. Citing long precedent, the courts would likely agree if asked.

While there is room to argue over the release of the complaint to Congress, there is nothing to compel the release of the presidential call transcript itself. What presidents say to other world leaders with the expectation of privacy is at the core of conducting foreign policy. Right now, no world leader is willing to interact frankly with the American president, worried that the conversation might appear on CNN the next day. That was one of the arguments used to assess the damage whistleblower Chelsea Manning did revealing State Department documents containing such conversations.

On the other hand, if the contents of the transcript might exonerate Trump or weaken the whistleblower complaint, there is nothing to prevent Trump from shutting this all down by simply releasing the transcript (he said Tuesday that he would). Remember, he knows what was said and the Dems demanding impeachment do not.

Of course, law and precedent are on Trump’s side if he chose to withhold the complaint and transcript from Congress. And if no one can see those documents, there is no means to move any investigation decisively forward, though theatrical hearings are always possible. A full leak of those specific, highly classified materials would be unprecedented. And if illegally obtained, leaked docs were used in an impeachment process, it would amount to a true constitutional crisis.

There’s more. As a whistleblower myself, I know well the personal cost of telling the truth. It requires enormous courage to place yourself at odds with the full power of the government. You risk your job, your life as you know it, and your freedom. Our democracy requires such people to come forward despite all that. So it is with some mixed feelings that I record my skepticism here. At the core, whistleblowers are different solely in motive; they act because their consciences tells them they must. They understand their allegiance is to The People, not a party (leakers) or self-interest (traitors).

If the whistleblower here is wrapping themselves in hard-fought legal protections to score points snitching over a difference in partisan politics, it will contribute to ending what little faith the public has in the vital process of revealing the truth at whatever cost, and will cause those with legitimate concerns to sit down. I hope with all of my soul, and with respect for those like Ellsberg, Manning, and Snowden, that this whistleblower proves worthy to stand next to them. And God help him and our country if not.

theamericanconservative.com