DEMOCRAT’S STRAINED IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY – World Affairs Brief Fri Sept 27th Section >>

Late Tuesday afternoon, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unilaterally declared an impeachment inquiry over President Donald Trump’s telephone conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s newly elected president, asking (without any pressure or threats) that Ukraine investigate the Biden family’s influence-peddling in that country. Pelosi’s headline-grabbing move was an improper way to begin impeachment proceedings, which can only be authorized by a majority vote of the House after debate. This was avoided on purpose—even though Democrats have a majority—because Pelosi wanted to avoid putting Democrats, who were elected in Republican leaning districts, on the spot by voting to impeach the president on tenuous grounds at best. The entire process will be risky for democrats because all of the evidence of “abuse of power” by Trump has to be inferred, since there were no threats or direct demands for a quid pro quo. I will also discuss the second hand claims of the anti-Trump whistleblower and his cohorts within the White House, which appear to be working day and night to destroy the president.

The next day the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, drafted a resolution formally condemning the manner in which Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry, without a vote of the House. As Breitbart noted, McCarthy used his unique position as the Minority leader to push for a vote on a privileged resolution that could not be blocked:

Since Democrats are in the majority, they control what votes happen on the floor. But as the GOP leader in the House of Representatives, even though he is in the minority, McCarthy has the ability–he is the only Republican with the ability–to force a vote on a privileged resolution almost immediately. So McCarthy did just that–he introduced the resolution as privileged and forced the full House of Representatives to vote on it on Wednesday evening:

McCarthy’s resolution stated that,

House Practice states that: “Under the modern practice, an impeachment is normally instituted by the House by the adoption of a resolution calling for a committee investigation of charges against the officer in question.”

McCarthy also referenced the impeachment proceedings against then-President Bill Clinton, and House resolution 581 which stated,

“Because the issue of impeachment is of such overwhelming importance, the Committee decided that it must receive authorization from the full House before proceeding on any further course of action.”

Therefore, it is resolved that, “the House of Representatives disapproves of the actions of the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi of California, to initiate an impeachment inquiry against the duly elected President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”

This forced all 231 Democrats to come out in force to defeat the resolution. Breitbart claims this puts all the Democrats on record as voting for impeachment, but it is not the same thing and the mainstream media will downplay it. They were voting to keep Pelosi’s unconventional inquiry alive, not to impeach directly. Still, it is indicative of the Democrat’s irrational passion to damage this president and protect themselves.

Trump immediately sought to defuse the Democratic fire by releasing a transcript of his telephone conversation with president Zelensky. You all ought to read it, since there have been so many exaggerated claims made about what Trump said. I did so, and when I heard Democratic hatchet-man Adam Schiff giving the world his version, I could immediately tell that he was inventing and extrapolating on what was really said.

Before I go into the substance I want to point out a very inaccurate caveat the White House staff inserted into the transcript, saying that

CAUTION: A memorandum of a telephone conversation is not a verbatim transcript. The text of this document represents the notes and recollections of Situation Room duty officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form.

This implies that there is no tape recording that can be used to reconstruct a verbatim transcript but this is absolutely false. Everything in the White House is recorded, so why would they claim this was based on note taking? There is no way anyone can take notes with the precision this transcript shows without going back and transcribing a digital recording. The transcript contains only quotes. Notes would use different phraseology like, “The president responded with…”

Why say something like this that is patently untrue? From what I have learned from the whistleblower complaint, several people in that Situation Room were enemies of Trump and the crafters of this caveat gives an opening to Democrats to claim there may be hidden parts of the conversation that are not mentioned—even though there is no evidence of that.

The call starts of with a euphoric congratulations by Trump of Zelensky’s “come from behind victory,” winning the runoff with reigning president Poroshenko by 73%—a landslide.

Let me take a few lines to review some background about Ukrainian politics. Just as the “fall of the Soviet Union” was falsified by the Communists, so the Maidan revolution of 2014 in Ukraine was a false win for freedom. The pro-Russian communist government actually let the protestors in the Maidan square “win” by ordering the Berkut (riot police) to retreat and stay in their barracks. Petro Poroshenko, like other false “anti-communists” before him (including the so-called opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko) before him were actually puppets of Moscow.

As in the phony fall of the Soviets, the communist bureaucrats all kept their lucrative administrative positions after the uprising, even in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. They would continue to demand kickbacks and other forms of corruption which has always plagued every country in the Soviet system. In Ukraine, neither Tymoshenko nor Poroshenko followed through on their promises to end corruption and they never purged the old guard from their positions in government.

Poroshenko betrayed almost all of his campaign promises once in office and effectively sabotaged the Ukrainian war in the East against Russian proxies in the Donbass. That is why Zelensky said he voted for Poroshenko but regretted it later, as did three-fourths of Ukrainians.

Zelensky is a quasi libertarian, actor and film producer. He played a role as the president of Ukraine in a popular television sitcom about a president fighting against corruption. That image played a real role in elevating his polling numbers as a future president. When he won the presidency in April 2019 he didn’t have a majority in parliament which rejected most of his change initiatives. All that changed in July when his Servant of the People party won an outright majority—the first time since Soviet times and the Communist monopoly.

Because Zelensky is an outsider, he is having a constant battle with the entrenched bureaucracy in Ukraine, just as Trump has in this country. And, like Trump, he’s not very knowledgeable about the globalist conspiracy and Deep State—which exists in some version in every country. He is attempting to join the EU, which would be a mistake, as it has been for the UK.

But Zelensky really likes Trump, and it is evident in his responses during the telephone conversation with Trump. He said, “I have to confess that I had an opportunity to learn from you. We used quite a few of your skill and knowledge…”

When Adam Schiff and all the mainstream media pundits try to make the case about Trump acting like a mafia boss and twisting the arm of the young Ukrainian president you immediately know they are inventing a coercive relationship that is totally absent in the call. It is clear Zelensky would bend over backward to try to please and help Trump in any way he could. He said, “we are trying very hard to drain the swamp here in our country…. you are a great teacher for us in that.”

Then Trump reciprocates the compliment by saying, “We do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and time—much more than the European countries are doing….Germany does almost nothing for you.” Then Trump makes a statement that the Left interprets as some kind of hidden quid pro quo: “…the United States has been very good for Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal because things are happening which are not good.”

What Trump is referring to is the case of a Ukrainian-based cyber security firm whose server was linked with the Democrats that sought to promote the falsehood that a Russian hacker stole the files from the Democratic National Committee. The company, Crowdstrike, was in charge of computer security for the DNC. He’s not “hinting” that Ukraine should reciprocate and help Trump, but that Ukraine hasn’t been able to reciprocate because of certain elements in Ukraine that are hostile to Trump.

As proof that Zelensky agrees, he goes on for a large paragraph talking about how the Europeans have not supported him. That doesn’t sound like someone who is being pressured or set up for a quid pro quo. Both Trump and Zelensky also mention the former US ambassador to Ukraine as a “bad ambassador” that was pro-Obama and anti-Trump.

Following this Trump does ask for a favor—to find out what happened with this whole Crowdstrike thing. “They say, Crowdstrike….I guess you have one of your wealthy people…the server.. They say Ukraine has it.” Trump often talks in fragments, but we get the picture that he is asking Zelensky to look into who is sponsoring Crowdstrike’s Ukrainian server.

On a side note, a self-proclaimed hacker came forward this week claiming he is Russian and “Guccifer 2.0″. His/her claims further the disinformation about hacking into DNC computers and called Crowdstrike’s cyber protections lousy. In fact the DNC leaks were not caused by a hacker; Wikileaks themselves said that the files they received came from a leaked source within the DNC and that the files were too big to be transferred in a hack. As I previously covered in the brief, the source was Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who was killed soon after the leaks.

Back to Trump’s conversation with Zelensky: Trump asks if Attorney General and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, could converse further about the corruption issues he had mentioned. Rather than take this at its face value, the Democrats say that this puts the Attorney General into a position of helping a foreign country interfere with our election.

Actually, it is not. This is about getting to the bottom of the false claim of Russian interference, and besides, this mention of AG Barr comes BEFORE Trump mentions going after the Biden appearance of influence peddling, so there is no connection between Barr and Trump on a vendetta to get Biden. In any case, Barr is Deep State and wouldn’t help Trump anyway.

Now, Trump comes to the Biden issue:

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son [Hunter], that Biden stopped the prosecution [probe into Biden’s son’s being put on the board of a gas company with an extravagant salary, with no experience in the field]

Zelensky agrees and talks about having a good prosecutor in mind to put into position. “First of all I understand and am knowledgeable about the situation.” He mentions that he has a full majority in parliament and that his new prosecutor will “look into the situation, and specifically to the company that you mentioned.” Zelensky offers all this unsolicited and appears to fully agree, because he wants to “restore the integrity” of the country. He then asks Trump to send him any information he has on the subject. That doesn’t sound like hidden threats or coercion to me.

The Biden Influence Peddling:

You have to understand what Joe Biden did while VP to Barack Obama to understand how blatant a corruption it was and how hypocritical the Democrats are in accusing Trump and excusing the Bidens.

Apparently the multi-million dollar sweetheart deal Hunter Biden got with a Chinese investment company after traveling with his father to China on official government business wasn’t enough to satisfy his greed.

Somehow, Hunter Biden was appointed a director of an oligarch-owned natural gas company (Barisma Holdings) in Ukraine even though he has zero experience in the energy industry. As Michael Rozeff wrote,

Hunter Biden pulled down about $50,000 a month for 5 years as a director of a Ukrainian gas company, according to the New York Times. That’s $600,000 a year for sitting on the Board of Directors.

How much do directors get paid typically? For the really major companies in the S & P 500, the median [annual] pay in 2016 was $254,700. Hunter Biden’s deal brought him more than double the median director compensation.

Compare, for example, the gas company named Spire. Its directors are paid in the range of $173,480 to $358,517 a year for the Chairman of the Board.

The fact that he was added to the board while his daddy dealt with Ukraine officials was corrupt to start with. The grossly inflated pay is frosting on the cake, but it is a definite indication of the corruption.

Hunter Biden made a sweetheart deal with China too. In that case, his daddy was also dealing with Chinese officials. Son Biden ended up as a principal in an investment management company with $1 billion in assets, later to become $1.5 billion.

How much did Hunter Biden pull down from this sweetheart deal? He gets director fees and/or investment management fees. A management fee of 0.5 percent a year is typical, or even on the low side. Even at that rate, the amount of income is $5 million dollars a year on assets of $1 billion.

What needs investigation by the Ukraine government is just how Hunter got that appointment without speaking Ukrainian or Russian and with zero experience. It had to be a secret payoff to Joe Biden the father. Rudy Giuliani thinks that Biden worked out a secret payoff of $3M to his son for funneling $1billion in aid to Ukraine—sort of a cut of the taxpayer aid package. People in corrupt bureaucracies tend to know who is getting the latest big bribe and how. Surely, others had to know about the Biden payoff, which opens Biden to perpetual exposure should it leak out.

To make things worse, compared to the impeachment of Trump, Joe Biden bragged to an audience at the globalist Council of Foreign Relations that he used the threat of withholding $1B in aid to Ukraine unless President Poroshenko fired the prosecutor looking into his son’s appointment—which happened within a short time. As Big League Politics writes,

As Democrats ready a doomed impeachment inquiry on the basis of Trump’s supposed Ukraine scandal that’s set to accomplish nothing except ensure the concerns of the American people are ignored, they’re conveniently ignoring a tape in which Joe Biden admits using the office of the Vice Presidency to intimidate the Ukrainian government.

Biden admitted he pressured Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor investigating his son Hunter Biden for payments he received from an oligarch-owned gas company, Burisma Holdings. Biden claimed that the prosecutor investigating his son, Viktor Shokin, was corrupt, and informed Poroshenko that Ukraine would be denied a billion dollars of foreign aid if Shokin wasn’t fired.

Sure enough, Shokin was fired shortly thereafter. It didn’t occur to Biden that he held a massive conflict of interest in orchestrating the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating his own son for receiving millions of dollars from a suspicious oil company.

In fact, Biden bragged about his role in firing Shokin while speaking at an event for the globalist Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.

Watch the video of Biden bragging, in detail, about how he got the prosecutor fired. Pres. Poroshenko protested about the firing and challenged Biden, saying, “you’re not the president.” Watch Biden affirm the threat, saying. “I’ll be leaving in six hours, and if he’s not fired by the time I leave, you’re not getting the billion dollars.” The prosecutor was fired.

Now that is corruption and abuse of power, and the Dems are silent….well, mostly. Elizabeth Warren never mentioned Biden’s abuse of power, but she did say she wouldn’t allow the son of her VP to get involved in lucrative business deals while in office.

Can you imagine what an advantage Trump would have in a debate with candidate Biden, bringing that up? Even though the media is refusing to show this video, it is getting out, and Biden may be finished as a candidate.

Now, let us take a look at how the Trump haters twist and interpret what was said. The most egregious and “over the top” exaggerations were expressed by Rep Adam Schiff, chief inquisitor in this inquiry into Trump’s impeachment.

First, Schiff characterized the phone call between the two as “a classic Mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader.” If you have read the transcript, you will agree that no sane reader of the English language could possibly interpret that friendly self-congratulatory phone call as a hostile shakedown, unless you add to it things that simply aren’t there—which Schiff does in spades. Here’s a sampling:

1. He says “immediately after the Ukrainian president asks for military weapons, the President says “has a favor to ask.”

There is no mention of military weapons, only a general discussion about help, and how the US compares to Europe in helping Ukraine. You don’t get the feeling from the transcript that there is any direct relationship between the help talk and the favor. It is a change in subject.

2. Then he brings up how much the US has helped Ukraine, but “there’s not much reciprocity… This is how a mafia boss talks.” As I said before, there are two ways to take the reciprocity remark–either that Ukraine can’t or won’t help the US. Zelensky’s expressions of praise and sincerity with Trump certainly can’t mean that he won’t help, so it has to be that Ukraine has been inhibited by bad actors like the US ambassador or the deep underlying corruption from communist holdovers from prior administrations.

Then he runs three statements all together as if they were said consecutively, which they weren’t: “What have you done for us?… I’ve done a lot for you…. I have a favor to ask of you.” This takes things totally out of context and compresses them into a fiction of Schiff’s corrosive mind.

3. He claims that Trump invokes the office of the Attorney General and his own personal attorney to help him take down a political opponent. Schiff admits that AG Barr responded by saying he has no involvement with Ukraine, but then Schiff claims Barr was part of the coverup holding back the whistleblower complaint from Congress and hiding the transcript of the call. He further claims that Trump’s mentioning the Attorney General means that “this is not just me asking, but the US government.” Is that somehow wrong? It is as if Trump’s motive is purely political, but the president and AG are also duty bound to stop internal government corruption, which Biden’s conduct clearly represents—so there is nothing wrong with the AG’s involvement. In fact, his refusal to follow up is a further indication that Barr is Deep State. He should prosecute Biden for abuse of power.

4. “Even as Trump withholds vital military aid to an ally, he asks for a favor to investigate his political opponent.” Schiff refers to the hold on $400 million in military aid to Ukraine dating back to mid-July and released in September. The Trump administration claims the hold was based on both concern about corruption in Ukraine (siphoning off aid for personal gain) and whether or not the new president was really pro-US or secretly pro-Russian like the former president Poroshenko.

Even the mainstream media admits there’s no proof of quid pro quo and the release of the funds, but even if there were, Biden’s bragging about using the threat of a billion dollars in aid to get a prosecutor fired makes the claims against Trump look petty. Biden actually used the threat and Trump never discussed any threat at all.

5. Schiff insists that Trump betrayed the national security of this nation and our relations to an ally (Ukraine) to advance his election campaign—having already sought for help from another country previously (Russia) is the most fundamental betrayal of his oath of office.

Of course, it is an egregious lie to refer to Trump soliciting help from Russia to win the election. That never happened. In fact, Trump doesn’t need Ukraine’s help to win against Biden. He already has all the dirt he needs on Biden and his billion dollar threat to Ukraine. Trump simply wants to know what all of us are interested in—the influence peddling Joe Biden did in Ukraine in order to get his son on that board of directors. Sadly, I don’t have much hope that we will ever find out the truth.

The Whistleblower document

You can read the anonymous whistleblower document here. The most dramatic takeaway I got from reading it is that this person knows very little first hand. “I was not a direct witness to most of what is described,” he said. Almost everything written is quoted from multiple officials within the White House. What that tells me is that the White House is a nest of spies for the Deep State, constantly looking for anything to transmit to the media to destroy Trump.

The charge made is that Trump is abusing the powers of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election.

I have news for these people. If soliciting dirt on a candidate is having a foreign country interfere in an election, then Hillary Clinton should be in hot water. After all, she paid for the falsified Steele dossier from the UK and Russia in order to derail Trump.

In fact, sharing true information about a candidate is not a crime and never should be. But what the CIA does all the time, which is a crime, is to use illegal spying inside foreign nations so they can share illegally acquired surveillance tapes of many forms of misconduct to derail a candidate for office when they don’t want that person elected. It happens all the time. That’s direct interference, not requested fact finding, like Trump is asking for. He begins,

“Over the past 4 months, half a dozen officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.”

He claims it is “routine for US officials with responsibility for a particular region … to share such information with one another in order to inform policymaking and analysis.”

This is only true if it relates to the policy subject or the country, NOT the president personally. It is a violation of their paid service in the White House to conspire together to discredit the president for political bias—and there is a lot more anti-Trump bias in the White House than anyone realizes.

Even the Director of National Intelligence in his testimony before Congress yesterday said that the unnamed person displayed “arguable political bias” against Trump. He also said that Trump has never asked him to reveal the identity of the whistleblower.

His comment on the July 25 telephone call with Zelensky was steeped in political bias:

“Multi White House officials with direct knowledge of the call (meaning they were in the situation room) informed me that after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the president used the remainder of time to advance his personal agenda. Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the president’s 2020 election bid.”

First, there was no pressure, and second, why can’t any of Trump’s critics acknowledge that the president of the US had a fiduciary responsibility to root out corruption, and that Biden’s conduct represents a clear cut case? Sure, it may benefit his reelection if pitted against Biden, but Biden was clearly guilty of abuse of power and should be nailed for it.

By the way, this document has all the characteristics of a official agency piece written by lawyers, not a whistleblower. Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow believes that too:

Donald Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow ridiculed the whistle-blower’s report alleging President Donald Trump abused his office… ‘Just look at the phraseology!’ Sekulow told ‘Fox and Friends’ Friday morning. ‘The footnotes. This wasn’t drafted by this individual. This was written by a law firm and you know what? … Sekulow pointed to the inclusion of the Latin phrase inter alia (among other things) as evidence that the whistle-blower had help.

It turns out the whistleblower is a male CIA agent that once worked in the White House but is now back in the Deep State CIA collecting intelligence from anti-Trump spies still in the White House.

Does the whistleblower add anything new to the transcript? Yes, and some of it proves that he has access to US intelligence which provides spy data on foreign countries and tracks the movements of everyone around Trump.

1. He quotes from a Ukrainian memo of the phone call which indicates a link between ending corruption in Ukrainian as a condition of aid—but that wasn’t in the actual call, that was Ukraine’s interpretation.

Linking cleaning up corruption with aid is not new or unique to Ukraine. The US has a vested interest in seeing that aid is not diverted to corrupt bureaucrats or their cronies. Notice that Ukraine did not say the aid was contingent upon investigating Biden’s son, although that would clearly be included in rooting out general corruption.

2. The whistleblower outlines the efforts of the White House to restrict access to the recordings of the call—implying something to hide. Those efforts deviated from normal procedures so, if true, it does seem to show that aides to the president wanted it suppressed. But this point is nullified by the open release of these documents by the President.

3. The Whistleblower provides additional evidence (from others) of Rudy Giuliani’s travels and meetings with Ukrainian officials before and after Zelensky’s election dealing with DNC election alleged interference and the Biden corruption. He never mentions Biden corruption but interprets all those efforts as meant to “help the presidents’ re-election bid.” That’s a narrow interpretation which shows bias throughout. It is hard to interpret the meaning of all these meetings as we don’t know the content or the intentions of the participants, though the whistleblower always paints them in a negative light against Trump.

In short, what becomes clear to me is that this whistleblower is acting as a clearinghouse for anti-Trump spies within the White House, compiling second hand information and giving them cover so they can’t be found out and fired.

If this kind of innuendo and implied evidence ever aired in a public impeachment trial a defense team would have a field day picking it apart. All I can say is that the Democrats must be grasping at straws if they think this could lead to an impeachment conviction.

Unfortunately, there are not a few RINO Republicans like Mitt Romney in the Senate that are looking for a way to undermine the president and pave the way for a mainstream replacement. They are expressing “deep concern” over these fabricated interpretations. I believe strongly that Romney is trying to position himself to replace Trump in case Trump gets impeached. Though not Deep State, he is the favored one of the GOP establishment because they know he will always try to please the establishment.

Are there enough Republican Senators that would go along with impeachment? Several people in Washington think so, but the anti-Trump senators have to keep their real views a secret in light of Trump’s popularity within the right-wing of the party. Breitbart reported on a former anti-Trump advisor to Romney who says there are 30 potential Republican turncoats within the Senate:

Appearing Wednesday on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, Mike Murphy, a former senior adviser to Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and John McCain (R-AZ), claimed a Republican senator told him that 30 of the party’s U.S. senators would support impeaching President Donald Trump in a “secret vote” in light of the president’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

I believe there is a secret cabal of Republicans who want to see impeachment succeed. Even Paul Ryan is moving back to Washington and making anti-Trump noises like Romney about how disturbing the phone call is. That’s a telling sign that there is an establishment GOP movement against Trump.

But those who end up voting for impeachment would be hated by Trump supporters, making it difficult for anyone who voted against Trump to replace him as president. If there is such a conspiracy among Republicans, they would probably be smart enough to let Romney vote against impeachment and have other RINO Republican liberals vote in favor—so Romney doesn’t get the backlash.

But generally, Republicans in the party are confident this is a “nothing burger” and that an impeachment trial is unlikely over this. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said. “Nancy Pelosi is simply too shrewd to let things get out of control.”

I think Pelosi realizes this could be very damaging to the party. Trump has already raised a quick 50 million for reelection in response. My sense is that this could go either way. Based on the evidence, it should die a quick death, but if there is a broad enough conspiracy to remove Trump, including some Republicans, we could see it squeak through.