Bryan Fischer
Will there even be an impeachment?
By Bryan Fischer
The Democrats' case for impeachment against Trump was pretty thin gruel from the start. And it's only gotten thinner with the release of the full transcripts of the witnesses who have testified in Adam Schiff's Star Chamber. As one reads through these transcripts, it's easy to see why the Democrats held all their hearings in the basement. They've got nothing. And the longer this charade lasts, the more obvious it becomes.
If you've got the goods, there's no reason not to hold public hearings. In fact, it looks hinky if you don't, because people immediately start wondering what you have to hide. If you've got bupkis, and you're getting ready to look like fools in front of the whole country, better to shut the door and hope people will actually think there's something going on in there.
Yesterday, Andy McCarthy at National Review exposed the whole charade surrounding the whistleblower. It turns out he's not a whistleblower at all, in any legal sense. He's just a hoaxblower. McCarthy points out that the statute every Democrat is breathlessly citing doesn't even apply to what this guy did, because he took it outside the intelligence community, which was the only place he could claim legal protection for his identity. Writes McCarthy, "The statute does not apply to the president's conducting of foreign policy, including his communications with foreign heads of state." Oops.
While regressives have been huffing and puffing in indignation at anyone who dare even think of revealing the hoaxblower's identity, it turns out his name is already in the public record. And who, you ask, is the culprit behind this heinous misdeed of exposure? Why, that would be Adam Schiff, who forgot to redact Eric Ciaramella's name in the transcript of Ambassador Bill Taylor's testimony. There's Ciaramella's name, as big as life, on page 236. Double oops.
No wonder the priggish Schiff wanted to protect Ciaramella's identity. (A "prig," by the way, is "a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner.")
Ciaramella is a card-carrying member of the Deep State, worked with Joe Biden in the Obama White House, ran with the gang of political assassins who launched the bogus Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and got smuggled into the West Wing to surveil Trump and manufacture something that looked like dirt on the president. After he got what he was looking for, he skedaddled out of the White House about the same time Bob Mueller finished his complete exoneration of the president on collusion and obstruction charges.
Now when you think of the dire threats made against any miscreant who would out Ciaramella, it sounds like Schiff better watch his back. He'd better thank his lucky stars that the Democrats are such hypocrites they only vent their vitriol toward Republicans they don't like.
After Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted out Ciaramella's name to the whole country, the Democrats were consumed with high dudgeon. The law firm protecting the fakeblower called on Attorney General William Barr to open a criminal investigation, "extremely concerned" about the "chilling effect" of the disclosure of his identity. The law firm insisted that "the laws protecting" scamblowers be "strictly enforced." Enforcement, they sanctimoniously insisted, must begin with the "immediate... arrest" of the president's son for "criminal obstruction of justice."
Not to be left behind, Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared that "attempts...to publicly identify the whistleblower are inexcusable and must stop."
The former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics tweeted: "To the thugs tweeting out the name of the purported whistleblower: ...This sort of intimidation tactic is for broken authoritarian countries and the mob. Shame on you."
The Talking Snake Media wasn't far behind. Said MSNBC contributor Joyce Alene: "Publicly naming a whistleblower doesn't harm just the person who came forward, it's intimidation to prevent others from doing so."
Their smoking gun witnesses showed up and shot blanks for hours. Bill Taylor, the senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine and supposedly the guy with the goods on Trump, was not even on the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky. Taylor blew the whole quid pro quo accusation out of the tub by admitting that Ukraine did not even know there was a hold on U.S. until a month after the July 25 call. As the president put it succinctly, "You can't have a quid pro quo with no quo."
Ambassador Gordon Sondland said only that he "presumed" that the suspension of aid was linked to an anti-corruption statement from the Ukrainian president. "Presumed" means he didn't have any firsthand evidence either.
Taylor confessed that he only developed his concerns about a quid pro quo from what other people told him. That's second hand, hearsay testimony which is inadmissible in a court of law. He wasn't a witness to anything.
Shredding what little remained of his credibility to tatters, he admitted open that his only source for his belief that a quid pro quo had happened at all was the New York Times. Besides the Times, he admitted, "I have no other information from what the president was thinking."
On top of that, Ukraine got all their money by September without doing a blessed thing – no investigation, no public announcement, no nothing. Boy, that Trump really knows how to squeeze people, doesn't he?
Sen. Coons of Delaware said this week that what Biden was doing with his $1 billion quid pro quo – you get the money if you do my son a solid – was just the vice-president "combating corruption" in Ukraine. I've yet to hear anyone explain why it's okay for Biden to fight Ukrainian corruption from the White House but not okay for President Trump.
The lawyer representing the fake whistleblower was exposed yesterday for tweeting out in January of 2017 – two weeks after the president had been inaugurated – that "the coup has started...impeachment will follow." All this makes it clear that the Mueller report was simply the first attempt at a coup d'etat and – after it's exoneration of Trump – impeachment is now the second.
In other words, the impeachment inquiry is not about justice or about the Constitution or anything of the sort. It's a raw, naked, power-grabbing attempt to carry out the first presidential coup in American history. The one thing they must not be allowed to do is get away with it.
The author may be contacted at bfischer@afa.net
Follow me on Facebook at "Focal Point" and on Twitter @bryanjfischer
Host of "Focal Point" on American Family Radio, 1:05 pm CT, M-F www.afr.net
© Bryan Fischer
November 8, 2019
The Democrats' case for impeachment against Trump was pretty thin gruel from the start. And it's only gotten thinner with the release of the full transcripts of the witnesses who have testified in Adam Schiff's Star Chamber. As one reads through these transcripts, it's easy to see why the Democrats held all their hearings in the basement. They've got nothing. And the longer this charade lasts, the more obvious it becomes.
If you've got the goods, there's no reason not to hold public hearings. In fact, it looks hinky if you don't, because people immediately start wondering what you have to hide. If you've got bupkis, and you're getting ready to look like fools in front of the whole country, better to shut the door and hope people will actually think there's something going on in there.
Yesterday, Andy McCarthy at National Review exposed the whole charade surrounding the whistleblower. It turns out he's not a whistleblower at all, in any legal sense. He's just a hoaxblower. McCarthy points out that the statute every Democrat is breathlessly citing doesn't even apply to what this guy did, because he took it outside the intelligence community, which was the only place he could claim legal protection for his identity. Writes McCarthy, "The statute does not apply to the president's conducting of foreign policy, including his communications with foreign heads of state." Oops.
While regressives have been huffing and puffing in indignation at anyone who dare even think of revealing the hoaxblower's identity, it turns out his name is already in the public record. And who, you ask, is the culprit behind this heinous misdeed of exposure? Why, that would be Adam Schiff, who forgot to redact Eric Ciaramella's name in the transcript of Ambassador Bill Taylor's testimony. There's Ciaramella's name, as big as life, on page 236. Double oops.
No wonder the priggish Schiff wanted to protect Ciaramella's identity. (A "prig," by the way, is "a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner.")
Ciaramella is a card-carrying member of the Deep State, worked with Joe Biden in the Obama White House, ran with the gang of political assassins who launched the bogus Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and got smuggled into the West Wing to surveil Trump and manufacture something that looked like dirt on the president. After he got what he was looking for, he skedaddled out of the White House about the same time Bob Mueller finished his complete exoneration of the president on collusion and obstruction charges.
Now when you think of the dire threats made against any miscreant who would out Ciaramella, it sounds like Schiff better watch his back. He'd better thank his lucky stars that the Democrats are such hypocrites they only vent their vitriol toward Republicans they don't like.
After Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted out Ciaramella's name to the whole country, the Democrats were consumed with high dudgeon. The law firm protecting the fakeblower called on Attorney General William Barr to open a criminal investigation, "extremely concerned" about the "chilling effect" of the disclosure of his identity. The law firm insisted that "the laws protecting" scamblowers be "strictly enforced." Enforcement, they sanctimoniously insisted, must begin with the "immediate... arrest" of the president's son for "criminal obstruction of justice."
Not to be left behind, Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared that "attempts...to publicly identify the whistleblower are inexcusable and must stop."
The former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics tweeted: "To the thugs tweeting out the name of the purported whistleblower: ...This sort of intimidation tactic is for broken authoritarian countries and the mob. Shame on you."
The Talking Snake Media wasn't far behind. Said MSNBC contributor Joyce Alene: "Publicly naming a whistleblower doesn't harm just the person who came forward, it's intimidation to prevent others from doing so."
Their smoking gun witnesses showed up and shot blanks for hours. Bill Taylor, the senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine and supposedly the guy with the goods on Trump, was not even on the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky. Taylor blew the whole quid pro quo accusation out of the tub by admitting that Ukraine did not even know there was a hold on U.S. until a month after the July 25 call. As the president put it succinctly, "You can't have a quid pro quo with no quo."
Ambassador Gordon Sondland said only that he "presumed" that the suspension of aid was linked to an anti-corruption statement from the Ukrainian president. "Presumed" means he didn't have any firsthand evidence either.
Taylor confessed that he only developed his concerns about a quid pro quo from what other people told him. That's second hand, hearsay testimony which is inadmissible in a court of law. He wasn't a witness to anything.
Shredding what little remained of his credibility to tatters, he admitted open that his only source for his belief that a quid pro quo had happened at all was the New York Times. Besides the Times, he admitted, "I have no other information from what the president was thinking."
On top of that, Ukraine got all their money by September without doing a blessed thing – no investigation, no public announcement, no nothing. Boy, that Trump really knows how to squeeze people, doesn't he?
Sen. Coons of Delaware said this week that what Biden was doing with his $1 billion quid pro quo – you get the money if you do my son a solid – was just the vice-president "combating corruption" in Ukraine. I've yet to hear anyone explain why it's okay for Biden to fight Ukrainian corruption from the White House but not okay for President Trump.
The lawyer representing the fake whistleblower was exposed yesterday for tweeting out in January of 2017 – two weeks after the president had been inaugurated – that "the coup has started...impeachment will follow." All this makes it clear that the Mueller report was simply the first attempt at a coup d'etat and – after it's exoneration of Trump – impeachment is now the second.
In other words, the impeachment inquiry is not about justice or about the Constitution or anything of the sort. It's a raw, naked, power-grabbing attempt to carry out the first presidential coup in American history. The one thing they must not be allowed to do is get away with it.
The author may be contacted at bfischer@afa.net
Follow me on Facebook at "Focal Point" and on Twitter @bryanjfischer
Host of "Focal Point" on American Family Radio, 1:05 pm CT, M-F www.afr.net
© Bryan Fischer
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(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
