Miranda Devine: Impeachment ruse just an attempt to overturn 2016 election
The Resistance’s determination to oust President Trump by any means necessary before next year’s election is sabotaging the Democrats’ electability, writes Miranda Devine.
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The impeachment farce continues in Washington DC this week as the sore losers of the new American Resistance attempt to redo the 2016 election just 12 months before voters get another go.
The Democrats have chosen the grandest room on Capitol Hill to try and add gravitas to their thin gruel. Room 1100 of the Longworth House Office Building also happens to be the coldest room on the Hill.
As you shiver, you can’t help but think of the ghost of the whole pointless enterprise — the Democrats’ so-called whistleblower.
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That is the anonymous person who never heard Donald Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky but then lodged a formal complaint alleging the President was demanding a corruption investigation of his political rival Joe Biden and son Hunter in return for American military aid to defend against Russian aggression.
Even though an investigation never eventuated and, unlike the Obama administration, Trump delivered the aid, the impeachment gambit rolls on in pursuit of a crime.
So, you’d think the whistleblower who launched this whole storm in a tea cup would have been the first called to testify, even anonymously.
But, no, Democrat ringmaster and chief Trump-hunter Adam Schiff now says he has no idea of the whistleblower’s identity and, in any case, he won’t be fronting up.
No wonder Schiff wants to keep his distance if the whistleblower is a partisan hack up to his neck in the Biden family’s shonky business dealings in Ukraine.
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A registered Democrat, who worked for Obama national security adviser Susan Rice and Trump-hating CIA director John Brennan.
A CIA operative whose principal duty in the Obama administration was to assist Vice President Biden, then the US special envoy for Ukraine.
A party loyalist believed to have facilitated five phone calls for Biden in four days to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
A person who colluded with Schiff’s staff to tip them off on his complaint before he filed it.
No, because the person who fits that description is just another Trump denouncer in a town full of them.
The Republican-controlled Senate quickly will kill off any Democrat impeachment referral so the whole exercise is useful only as an opportunity to goad Trump and soften him up for the 2020 election.
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But Attorney-General William Barr delivered a speech on Friday which seemed to presage a turning of the tables.
Barr railed against “The Resistance [who] essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
The specifics will soon be apparent when various reports are released from the Justice Department. The first is expected to be Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report into alleged abuses of surveillance powers during the FBI’s ill-fated Trump-Russia collusion probe. Next will be the criminal investigation by US Attorney John Durham into the origins of that wild goose chase.
Then, just as America is getting ready to go back to the polls, we will see how low the Resistance was willing to go to overturn the voters’ will.
It’s hard to see it working out well for Democrats.