Trump vs. Schiff, Soros, and socialism

By Cliff Kincaid

Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was given a prestigious seat on the Congressional Host Committee for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation "Triumph of Liberty" dinner last Friday in Washington, D.C. This makes Schiff look like a tough anti-communist as he proceeds with the impeachment of President Trump this week.

But analyst Trevor Loudon has a long entry on Rep. Schiff in his Keywiki database, documenting his connections to left-wing labor unions with a socialist bent, George Soros-funded groups, and the pro-Communist Chinese Committee of 100. He says the latter essentially runs "influence operations" for the communist Chinese regime.

The impeachment drive is taking place at a time when the Trump administration is attempting to confront China over its unfair trading practices and drive for tech dominance.

What's surprising to some observers is that the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation would accept Schiff as a sponsor of the event. Republicans, who comprised the majority of congressional dinner sponsors, say Schiff's process to remove Trump has been unfair and secretive. Indeed, many conservatives call it a Soviet-style process, with one critic saying Schiff is going "full Stalin" in his zeal to destroy Trump.

The Ukraine connection

In leading the effort to impeach and remove Trump from office, Schiff is focusing on Trump's alleged improper call to Ukraine's president about investigating corruption charges against potential rival Joe Biden's son. Trump also wanted to know if Ukraine had a role in devising the phony "Trump Dossier" used to justify surveillance of the president and his aides.

The call was revealed by an anti-Trump "whistleblower" from the CIA whose identity is being protected by Schiff, the major media, and the social media companies. Trump released a transcript of the phone call and suggests treasonous behavior on the part of "Shifty Schiff."

As the process has unfolded, Schiff "expressed regret" for lying about having no prior contact with the CIA "whistleblower" behind the impeachment. "We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower," he said on September 17. But a member of his staff had in fact spoken to the CIA analyst.

Before the current impeachment drive, Schiff was also a leading maker of false claims of Russian "collusion" against President Trump. There was "ample evidence of collusion in plain sight," Schiff had said about Trump and Russia. But Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation found no such collusion.

A controversial pick

The November 8 "Triumph of Liberty" dinner recognized Joachim Wilhelm Gauck, a German politician and former pastor in East Germany, with the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, named for the Democratic and Republican presidents most associated with anti-communism. However, Gauck was also the recipient of the Open Society Prize from the controversial Central European University, an institution founded by billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros. CEU founder Soros, who supports Marxist and left-wing causes and candidates in the U.S., said that Gauck "has spent his life ensuring that people who suffered under communism were not forgotten and that the crimes of the Stasi [East German secret police] did not go unpunished."

In fact, leaders of the Stasi such as Markus Wolf escaped prison time, following a conscious decision by Western elites not to hold Nuremberg-style trials of the communists that could have resulted in the death penalty. As a result, Vladimir Putin, a former Soviet KGB colonel stationed in East Germany, became president of Russia, and Germany has been ruled since 2005 by Angela Merkel, a communist youth activist in East Germany who, as Chancellor, made Germany more dependent on Russian oil and gas by terminating Germany's nuclear energy program. She also welcomed the Muslim invasion of Europe, leading to increased Islamic terrorism.

These and other developments help explain why the subtitle of the late Soviet dissident Vladimir Buovsky's massive book, Judgment in Moscow, refers to Soviet crimes and "western complicity." He called for Nuremberg-style trials for the communists.

"The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation long has studied the possibility of putting communism on trial before the world court of public opinion," says Dr. Lee Edwards, the co-founder and chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. "Perhaps, as an homage to Vladimir Bukovsky, it is time to begin planning such a historic event."

It's about time.

Schiff vs. Trump

Trump continues to highlight the cause of anti-communism. One day before the "Triumph of Liberty" dinner, Trump hosted an event to commemorate the victims of communism and issued a statement on the matter.

But Trump's disgust for the "anti-communist" Schiff on national security grounds is well-known. Trump told reporters in Washington on October 28 that the White House didn't notify the House Intelligence Committee about the raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, because of concern that the information would be leaked by Schiff. Trump said, "...I think Adam Schiff is the biggest leaker in Washington."

Bukovsky's Judgment in Moscow discusses how some of Schiff's congressional associates or former colleagues in Congress tried to undermine President Ronald Reagan's anti-communist foreign policy, in order to benefit the Soviet Union and install a communist regime in Nicaragua. He cites a secret document showing ties between the Soviet Communist Party and the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua.

In this regard, Trevor Loudon notes that the second-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Jim Himes of Connecticut, traveled to pro-Soviet Nicaragua in the late 1980s to research his undergraduate thesis, "The Sandinista Defense Committees and the Transformation of Political Culture in Nicaragua." Loudon asserts that Himes "essentially whitewashed" the civilian spy networks for the Marxist-Leninist regime.

"Luckily for Jim Himes," commented Loudon, "there are no security background checks required to serve on the House Intelligence Committee. In fact, security background checks are not required to serve on any congressional committee – even those with access to sensitive classified material."

It's clear that, before ultimate victory over communism can be achieved, an official Nuremberg Trial for the communists and their fellow travelers in the West must be held. But that might expose the Marxists in Congress that anti-communist President Reagan publicly expressed so much concern about. In fact, Reagan reminisced about the days when Congress had a committee (the House Committee on Un-American Activities) that would investigate even its own members if communist involvement was suspected.

Communism never died

The real Russia scandal, as explained by Bukovsky in his book, is that both major political parties have acted as though communist leaders, first in the Soviet Union and then China, could be reasoned with, and that Western aid and trade would transform communist dictatorships into responsible members of the international order. He explained how the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, had a plan to change the face of Soviet communism and integrate the world through regional blocs such as the European Union into international socialist structures. Gorbachev used demands for UN global action against "global warming" as a means to bring that about.

In a speech titled "October and Perestroika: The Revolution Continues," Gorbachev openly declared his commitment to a one-world communist state, saying on November 2, 1987, "We are moving towards a new world, the world of communism. We shall never turn off that road."

Yet, the George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service, named for the first President Bush, was given to Gorbachev in 2001. The award was given at the time in honor of Gorbachev for supposedly finding "common ground" on such matters as human rights and arms control and presiding over the transition to a "democratic Russia." A big ceremony was held at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.

President George W. Bush has said about Russian President and former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, "I looked the man in the eye.... I was able to get a sense of his soul."

Western leaders, including both American Presidents Bush, wanted to believe that communism was dead, or dying, and that the world could come together as one, in favor of what the first President Bush called a New World Order.

By contrast, Trump has rejected that approach, most notably in his "The future does not belong to globalists" speech at the UN.

Based on an analysis of their programs and events, it seems clear that the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has not done an adequate job of explaining how Gorbachev's policies of Perestroika and Glasnost were designed to fool the west and duped Democrats and Republicans. The group has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Scaife Foundations, whose late founder, Dick Scaife, was a staunch anti-communist who recognized the nature of the communist enemy. He would be disappointed in the failure to pursue a strategy of victory over communism.

It's time not only for the Victims of Communism Memorial foundation to join the call for Nuremberg Trials for communism, as Bukovsky recommended, but endorse the formation of new congressional committees on un-American activities and internal security.

In this context, the fact that members of the Bush administration are prominent figures in the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation may help explain the failure to address what communist defector Anatoliy Golitsyn called in his 1995 book "The Perestroika Deception." These Bush officials are associated with globalist organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission, the latter implicated in Bukovsky's book in facilitating Gorbachev's schemes and plans. The CFR was tainted by having communist spy Alger Hiss as a prominent member and has recently been asked to explain how and why convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein joined the organization.

The mission of the Victims of Communism group was compromised from the beginning, owing to the fact that it was authorized by a Congressional Act signed by President Bill Clinton and had to take practical measures not to offend establishment Democrats or Republicans. But history shows that Congressional Democrats terminated the House Internal Security Committee, the successor to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and its Senate counterpart. There is no way to escape this critical fact.

Fighting communism with socialism

In another indication of left-wing drift that makes accountability for socialists and communists difficult, the Victims of Communism group features Carl Gershman, a socialist, on its advisory council. Gershman is the long-time president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a federally-funded entity which spends $180 million a year on "democracy assistance" in foreign countries.

President Ronald Reagan had started the NED program in 1983 and figured it would maintain an anti-communist bent. But so-called non-communist socialists who support globalism and American intervention in foreign countries quickly took charge. Many of them are commonly called "neoconservatives." Until Trump ran for office and was elected, they were part of the Republican coalition. Today, many are Never-Trumpers.

For his part, Gershman was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League and Executive Director of Social Democrats, U.S.A., an offshoot of the U.S. Socialist Party. He once sought "to transform the Democratic party into the Social Democratic party" and was quoted as saying, "Our goal as socialists is to create a political structure in America which is equivalent to a social democratic party." They seem to operate on the assumption, also embraced by the CIA since the end of World War II, that "democratic socialism" was "the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism," in the words of liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger.

In August, Gershman, speaking in Ukraine, said the National Endowment for Democracy "has made support for democracy in Ukraine one of its chief priorities." He previously wrote an extraordinary September 26, 2013, article in the Washington Post that called Ukraine "the biggest prize" in a confrontation with Russia and suggested that Russian President Putin's days in power could be numbered.

Trump, who has sought better relations with Russia and wants to avoid a military confrontation over Ukraine, seems to think the NED is meddling in the affairs of other countries. His budget office has proposed a major reduction in the NED budget. But Democrats joined Republicans such as Senator Lindsey Graham in pronouncing the proposal "dead on arrival."

Irritating Trump and his supporters, the National Endowment for Democracy earlier this year honored the late Senator John McCain, a major Trump critic, with a posthumous presentation of NED's Democracy Service Medal. McCain had turned the "Trump Dossier" over to the FBI at the suggestion of his close friend, Senator Lindsey Graham.

Graham has come under strong criticism for failing to follow through on his promise to use his Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the Deep State operatives trying to remove Trump. Lou Dobbs of Fox calls Graham a fraud.

As a result, Trump, the most anti-communist president since Reagan, is facing impeachment and possible removal from office.

© Cliff Kincaid