Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (20 page)

According to a Ukrainian deputy foreign minister, the country didn't find out about the hold until nearly a month after the call. Even when the Ukrainians did find out, they had no idea why the aid had
been delayed—Ukrainian officials did not connect it to any demands for investigations.
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Fact #4:
The Ukrainians didn't have long to wait—the Trump administration released the aid on September 11. So the Ukrainians got the money, despite never announcing or starting an investigation into Burisma or the Bidens. The Trump administration has been immensely more supportive of Ukraine than the Obama White House. Trump has supported Ukraine with lethal aid in its fight against Russian aggression, which his predecessor would not do. And yes, Trump sent Ukraine its aid in 2019, a show of support for the country's young reformer. He released that money without any conditions. Even as the House held its partisan impeachment vote, even as the Senate conducted its impeachment trial, Ukraine had the money despite never having taken a single act to benefit the president.

Those are the facts.

Indeed, every single witness in the sham impeachment hearings was either a hearsay witness or an opinion witness, which is disgraceful in a proceeding of such monumental import. The sole fact witness who actually talked to the president said there was no quid pro quo.

The Democrats' impeachment was, by contrast, pure fiction—a fiction that did enormous damage to our country, our Constitution, our core values, equal justice, transparency, and future presidencies.

As previously noted, Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the spring of 2019 told the
Washington Post
, “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there is something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, it divides the country.”
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Correct, Madame Speaker.

But Pelosi doesn't run the Democratic Party; it's run by their radical, socialist base, the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar,
and Rashida Tlaib. They give the orders, and they demanded impeachment. So Pelosi chose to rip up the fabric of the nation and drag its citizens through an exhausting, polarizing spectacle.

The Trump impeachment was the first in modern history to be conducted entirely on partisan lines. The House vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry into Richard Nixon was 410–4. Thirty-one Democrats joined Republicans to authorize the House Judiciary Committee to investigate Clinton's perjury. But Pelosi initially refused to even hold a vote for a formal impeachment inquiry; she worried she didn't have a majority. When she finally got around to it—on October 31, 2019—she couldn't even keep all her own people on board. Two Democrats—Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey—voted with every Republican against the farce. Both also voted against the final impeachment of the president, and Van Drew was so disgusted he switched parties. Pelosi, by contrast, spent the “solemn” (her word) hours after she signed the impeachment articles handing out commemorative pens and mugging for pictures.

The Democratic impeachment process was an assault on fairness and due process. The left decided it wasn't going to make the same mistake it did with Mueller—wait three years, only to be disappointed. Schiff and Nadler made sure to control every last choreographed aspect of their narrative, even though that meant robbing Republicans and President Trump of basic rights.

In the Clinton impeachment, the president had the right to have his counsel present, to cross-examine, to call witnesses, to submit evidence, and to build a defense. Schiff conducted his witness depositions in a basement of Congress—secret testimony recorded in secret transcripts. He barred most Republicans from attending and from reading the documents. Those Republicans who were allowed to take part were barred from calling their own witnesses or issuing their own subpoenas. Even when they were allowed to ask questions, Schiff often directed witnesses not to answer.

Schiff likewise barred the president's attorneys from attending. The White House was therefore unable to present evidence, or call witnesses, or cross-examine those Schiff summoned, or defend itself in any way. Senator Lindsey Graham was so offended by the House's sham process that he collected fifty Senate cosponsors for a resolution condemning it as a farce.

Ironically, this Soviet-style proceeding was conducted by the same Democrats who a few months earlier had screamed for the right to see a “fully unredacted” Mueller report. Their secrecy allowed Schiff to mine his depositions for juicy tidbits and leak them to the media mob to spin his one-sided narrative. Only after Schiff had conducted his entire, illegitimate investigation did he send his impeachment “report” to Nadler's Judiciary Committee. And only then did the White House get an invitation: Would the president's lawyers like to come to Judiciary's two public hearings—one of which would feature a panel mostly comprising far-left, sanctimonious law professors—and explain why the president shouldn't be impeached? The White House correctly declined. Democrats had made a mockery of due process.

The House's final two articles of impeachment were an assault on constitutional principles and a threat to future presidencies. Democrats had started out with accusations of quid pro quo. Then they used focus groups to determine that the words “bribery” and “extortion” sounded better! Their problem was that our federal laws provide real definitions of “bribery” and “extortion,” and nothing Trump did came close to measuring up.

So Democrats instead impeached him for two fictional “high crimes”—acts that don't exist in the Constitution, in any statute, or any prior impeachments. Their first article vaguely claimed an “abuse of power.” That definition is so broad that any Congress could use it against any president. Remember when Obama in 2012 got caught in a hot-mic moment asking the Russians to lay low on missile defense until after he got reelected? Obama was asking that as a personal political favor, to help him in his race against Mitt Romney. Under the
Democrats' “abuse of power” standard, Republicans would have been in their rights to immediately impeach him.

The second article was even wilder. It accused the president of “obstruction of Congress” for refusing to hand over documents Democrats wanted for their impeachment inquiry. Every modern president has exerted executive privilege and refused to comply with certain congressional document demands. We have a remedy for these standoffs: the courts. The judicial branch exists to resolve disputes between the two other branches of government. But Democrats didn't want to take the time to resolve this dispute in court. They were in a rush to get impeachment done before their own Democratic presidential primary. As Democrats had openly stated, they also feared if they didn't impeach Trump, they might lose the election.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, the only sane professor invited to Judiciary's impeachment hearings, put it this way: “I can't emphasize this enough, and I'll say it just one more time. If you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It's
your
abuse of power. You are doing precisely what you are criticizing the president for doing.”
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Pelosi couldn't even
transmit
the articles of impeachment in a constitutional fashion. Democrats jammed through impeachment in record time, holding a final vote on December 18. They told us impeachment was urgent; they said their case was rock-solid. Yet Pelosi said she wouldn't formally deliver the articles to the Senate unless Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to her demands to call new witnesses and subpoena new documents. Democrats in particular wanted the Senate to haul in former national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—neither of whom the House had itself bothered to subpoena for testimony.

McConnell set up a Senate trial based entirely on the precedent of the Bill Clinton trial. But Pelosi suddenly wanted to dictate to the U.S. Senate its job. Her very suggestions were an offense to the Constitution. That founding document gives the House the sole power to
impeach—to investigate, produce evidence, and vote on articles. It was the House's job to call Bolton and any other witnesses. The Constitution gives the Senate the sole power of a trial. The Senate had no business assisting or legitimizing Pelosi's warped and twisted impeachment investigation, which she herself was now apparently admitting was inadequate. And Pelosi had no business telling the Senate what to do.

Pelosi held on to the articles for nearly a month. Even Senate Democrats lost patience with her theatrics and demanded a start to the trial. But the Pelosi pressure campaign raged on. The House continued issuing new “evidence,” which they claimed bolstered their demands for new Senate witnesses. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held daily press briefings, insisting that only new witnesses would result in a “fair trial” and that anything less would amount to a Republican “cover-up.” “Leader McConnell is plotting the most rushed, least thorough and most unfair impeachment trial in modern history,” complained Schumer, even as he simultaneously claimed he had a slam-dunk case.
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The Witness Games hit their hysterical peak on January 26, with a perfectly timed leak courtesy of the
New York Times
. The paper claimed—based, as usual, on unnamed sources—that Bolton was accusing Trump of a Ukrainian quid pro quo in a new book he was writing. It didn't matter to Democrats that the
Times
gets everything wrong, or that the paper didn't have a draft of Bolton's book. (Its information came from sources who claimed to have seen it.) It didn't matter that Bolton's attorneys refused to confirm the contents of the report.
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Nor did it matter that Bolton was on record describing Trump's calls with Zelensky as “warm and cordial.”
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Democrats bellowed that a trial without Bolton was no trial at all.

Senate Republicans remained true to their constitutional duties, and none of them except Mitt Romney fell into this trap. Some of them deserve extra credit, since Schumer's witness campaign was about more than just smearing Trump. He also hoped to use impeachment to take back the Senate by undercutting vulnerable Republicans up for
reelection in 2020. The media assisted this ploy by writing nonstop articles claiming that senators like Colorado's Cory Gardner and Arizona's Martha McSally risked losing their seats if they didn't capitulate to Schumer's demands.

Also worthy of extra credit were those Republican senators who made clear to the Senate the ramifications of Democrats' witness demands. Texas senator Ted Cruz insisted that if the Senate sent out subpoenas, he'd demand “witness reciprocity.” For every witness Democrats called, Republicans would get to call one, too. GOP senators floated the idea of subpoenas for Quid Pro Quo Joe and Hunter Biden. They also debated calling the whistle-blower and potentially even Schiff—whose early interaction with the whistle-blower made him a fact witness in the case. The reciprocity demands rightly worried a number of Democrats. And they reminded the entire chamber that reopening the House's partisan work by calling new witnesses would add months to the trial.

In the end, nearly every Republican senator stood for truth, facts, and fairness—despite having to suffer a trial based on a warped and wholly partisan impeachment. They listened to Shifty Schiff and his fellow Democrat impeachment managers as they spent days on monotonous, repetitive talking points, indulging in their unhinged hatred of the president. The Schiff sham-show left even Democrats bored. Senator Elizabeth Warren was spotted during the proceedings playing a game on a piece of paper.

The hardest part was listening to Democrats accuse Trump of all their own despicable behavior. The hypocrisy was rank. To this day, precisely one guy in Washington has been caught on tape trying to elicit dirt from foreigners on a political rival: Adam Schiff. In 2017, during Congress's Russia collusion investigation, a Russian prankster called Schiff, pretending to be a Ukrainian official. The prankster claimed to have “pictures of naked Trump.” Schiff asked the caller if Putin was “aware” of the “compromising material.” He asked for the spellings of names.
⁴⁵
And he had his staff contact the prankster after
the call to try to arrange delivery of the material.
⁴⁶
Democrats care about “foreign interference” only when it suits their political agenda.

They impeach Trump for allegedly making threats against Ukraine? He never did. Read the transcript. But in September 2019, Democratic senator Chris Murphy actually bragged that he had threatened Ukraine's new president with consequences if he dared looked into the Biden-Burisma scandal. “I cautioned [Zelensky] that complying with the demands of the President's campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship,” Murphy told John Solomon.
⁴⁷

This is also the same Democratic Party that had a paid operative, Alexandra Chalupa of the Democratic National Committee, working with the Ukrainian government in 2016 to spread dirt on Donald Trump.

Republicans did confront the House impeachment team with its hypocrisy at least once, and the response was priceless. Senator Richard Burr submitted the following question for Chief Justice John Roberts to read to Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat impeachment manager: “Under the House managers' standard, would the Steele dossier be considered as foreign interference in a U.S. election, a violation of the law and/or impeachable offense?” Jeffries was totally taken off guard. He finally replied that the “analogy” wasn't right, since Democrats had paid for the dossier.
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Got that? It's okay to solicit foreign dirt, so long as you get a receipt.