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Impeachment by Hearsay

WHEN THE $35 MILLION two-year Mueller investigation failed to find evidence of Trump collusion with the Russians, the White House was finally freed to go on the offensive. With a new attorney general in place, Trump was now able to pursue his accusers in the deep state by launching an investigation into how he had become the target of baseless charges that had handcuffed his presidency for two and a half years.

Under the auspices of the Departments of Justice and State, Attorney General William Barr, U.S. Attorney John Durham, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reached out to Britain, Italy, Australia, and Ukraine. They were seeking to learn how the Trump-Russia investigation originated, and the extent to which Democrats had colluded with foreign powers to undermine Trump and his 2016 campaign.

The Ukraine Connection

The origin of the anti-Trump investigations could be traced directly to a lawyer named Marc Elias with the firm Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Acting for both, Elias hired the strategic intelligence firm Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on candidate Trump. Fusion GPS, in turn, hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to compile a dossier of allegations against the candidate.

Among the sources of the Steele dossier was Russia’s Intelligence Service. Steele alleged that Trump and his campaign were actively colluding with the Russians to gain damaging information on Clinton—which, ironically, is precisely what Steele was doing against Trump. The dossier was then used by FBI Director James Comey to secure FISA warrants, which allowed the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on members of the Trump campaign, invasions of privacy otherwise forbidden by law.

Of all the foreign nations that the Obama White House and the Clinton campaign solicited to dig up dirt on Trump, none was more important than Ukraine, one of the most corrupt states in Europe. In 2014 a political upheaval ousted the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and threw the country into even greater crisis. The Obama administration stepped in with a billion-dollar loan and other financial assistance, putting Ukraine in a virtual receivership. Obama appointed Vice President Joe Biden to be the White House point man on Ukraine. The administration also sent political operatives, including lobbyist Tony Podesta who worked for Ukraine’s pro-Russia party, and former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Tad Devine, to help orchestrate U.S. influence.

In an article in The Hill dated September 23, 2019, veteran investigative reporter and Hill vice-president John Goldman laid out the known facts about Ukrainian intervention in U.S. politics. The article was titled: “Let’s Get Real: Democrats Were First to Enlist Ukraine in US Elections.”

Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine . . . to meddle in U.S. politics and elections . . . [since] as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country. The meeting . . . turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist. . . .

Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election. . . . Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS. . . . Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband—another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.¹⁹⁵

The Hill article also stated that the Democrats twice exerted pressure on Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s then-ambassador to the United States. In March 2016, a DNC contractor pressured Chaly to locate Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort in Ukraine’s intel files. The DNC contractor also pressed Chaly to have the then-president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, make derogatory public statements about Manafort during an upcoming election-season visit to Washington. Chaly refused both requests as improper attempts to get Ukraine’s help in influencing the election in Hillary Clinton’s favor.

Given the Democrat-Russia and Democrat-Ukraine collusion that clearly took place, the hypocrisy of the Democrats’ accusations against Trump is jaw-dropping. The Democrats accused Trump of the very crime they themselves had committed—colluding with Russia to influence an election (via the Steele dossier). When Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham vowed to uncover the origins of the false accusations against Trump, the Democrats tried to change the subject by concocting a new charge against the president—collusion with Ukraine.

Democrats claimed Trump had solicited Ukraine’s help in digging up dirt on political rival Joe Biden to influence the 2020 election. The charge originated from a July 25, 2019, phone call Trump made to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

On September 24, 2019, Speaker Pelosi held a press conference to announce an “impeachment inquiry” of the president. At that point, neither she nor anyone else had seen the transcript of the phone call with Ukraine’s president because Trump hadn’t released it. Pelosi said:

The actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections. Therefore, today, I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.¹⁹⁶

Pelosi offered no evidence for any of these charges that the president had committed treason. In fact, when asked by reporters about the call transcript, she admitted, “I haven’t seen it, but the transcript is, uh, the fact is, that the president of the United States, in breach of his constitutional responsibilities, has asked a foreign government to help his political campaign at the expense of our national security.”¹⁹⁷ In short, Pelosi made clear that this wasn’t going to be a serious “inquiry” at all. She had announced Trump’s guilt in advance of the evidence.

The Deep State “Whistleblower”

Pelosi’s confidence in making extreme charges without corroborating evidence stemmed from the fact that she was aware of an alleged “whistleblower” report that was filed with the inspector general on August 12, 2019, but had been revealed only to Democrats at the time she spoke. On September 13, eleven days before Pelosi’s announcement, Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, whom Pelosi was about to put in charge of the inquiry, announced that the inspector general of the Intelligence Community (ICIG) had told him a few days earlier about the existence of an “urgent” yet unspecified “whistleblower complaint.”

Schiff was lying. In fact, he had known about the whistleblower complaint a month earlier because the whistleblower had secretly come to him. For a month Schiff had kept this fact a secret from his Republican colleagues on the Intelligence Committee. When asked whether he or his staff had met the whistleblower, he repeatedly lied. On September 17, at a time he, and evidently Pelosi too, was familiar with the whistleblower and the contents of his complaint, Schiff told MSNBC, “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.”¹⁹⁸

The faceless accuser remained faceless, but details of his identity were gradually uncovered by investigative reporters, notably Paul Sperry of RealClear Investigations. The whistleblower was a CIA analyst who was detailed to the White House during the Obama and early Trump administrations, then returned to working at the CIA. Sperry disclosed his name—Eric Ciaramella—in the belief that the public had an interest in knowing who was at the heart of yet another effort to impeach and remove a sitting president. Ciaramella’s status as a “whistleblower,” Sperry added, was compromised by the fact that IGIC Michael Atkinson found Ciaramella to have “an arguable political bias . . . in favor of a rival political candidate”—that is, Joe Biden.¹⁹⁹

The whistleblower’s allegiance to the Democrats explains why the accuser showed up on Adam Schiff’s doorstep—and why Schiff repeatedly lied and kept Republicans on the Intelligence Committee in the dark. This also explains why Ciaramella hired two Democrat attorneys to represent him. One was Andrew Bakaj, who had worked for the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the State Department, as well as Democratic senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton.²⁰⁰

Ciaramella’s other attorney was Mark Zaid, who had been openly fantasizing about toppling Trump ever since the inauguration. From his Twitter account, @MarkSZaidEsq, he tweeted in January 2017 that a “coup has started” and “impeachment will follow ultimately.” He also tweeted in July 2017, “We will get rid of him, and this country is strong enough to survive even him.” In response to the discovery of Zaid’s tweets, White House communications director Tim Murtaugh told Fox News, “It was always the Democrats’ plan to stage a coup and impeach President Trump and all they ever needed was the right scheme. They whiffed on Mueller so now they’ve settled on the perfectly fine Ukraine phone call. This proves this was orchestrated from the beginning.”²⁰¹

Worse, the whistleblower admitted to having no firsthand knowledge of the presidential call—the very facts on which the accusations were based. In short, Pelosi had launched an “impeachment inquiry” based entirely on hearsay evidence provided by a Trump hater from the deep state. This transparent attempt to frame the defendant would have been thrown out of any normal court of law—but not Pelosi’s court.

Compounding the Democrats’ credibility crisis was the fact that the accuser didn’t meet the legal definition of a whistleblower. On September 24—the same day Pelosi announced the Democrats’ “impeachment inquiry”—the intelligence community quietly uploaded new and revised whistleblower forms and guidance pages to the ICIG’s website. The new forms and guidelines were deceptively backdated to August—the exact time frame in which Ciaramella had lodged his complaint.

Why is it significant that the new whistleblower forms were backdated? Prior to September 24, the forms and guidelines stated that a whistleblower had to have “firsthand knowledge” of wrongdoing—not hearsay. But Ciaramella had no firsthand knowledge of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine. Ciaramella based his complaint entirely on reports from other people—anti-Trump, deep state officials in the White House, who may or may not have been on the call. The ICIG offered no explanation as to why the forms were backdated to August, but admitted changing the forms because “certain language in those forms and, more specifically, the informational materials accompanying the forms, could be read—incorrectly—as suggesting that whistleblowers must possess first-hand information.”²⁰² The problem, however was not that the original forms might be misunderstood, but that they would be clearly understood as invalidating this whistleblower and his hearsay complaint.

The timing of the changes to the forms—and the surreptitious attempt to hide the backdating to August—is more than suspicious. It is damning. The form the whistleblower filed on August 12, 2019, had two checkboxes to describe the complainant’s level of knowledge. One box read, “I have personal and/or direct knowledge of events or records involved.” The other read, “Other employees have told me about events or records involved.” The whistleblower had checked both boxes. One of those check marks was a lie.

Conspiracy to Convict?

Why did Schiff keep the existence of the whistleblower complaint secret for a month and repeatedly lie about it? Could it be that the Democrats were so eager to impeach the president they decided to construct an indictment based on hearsay evidence concocted by a politically motivated and hostile agent? Ciaramella had worked for John Brennan, Susan Rice, and other fervid haters of Trump and plotters against him. Ciaramella worked for Joe Biden in the White House on Ukraine matters during the 2016 election, while George Soros’s operatives kept Ciaramella updated on Soros’s activities in that country.²⁰³ Surely all these facts could not be coincidental.

Perhaps the anti-Trump plotters thought they could get away with the whistleblower ruse because the contents of the actual phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president remained secret. The contents of presidential phone calls to foreign leaders were never voluntarily released to the public. With the transcript of the call locked in a vault that only Trump could open, the plotters were confident they could make up their own narrative and not be challenged with actual facts.

But the next day, September 25, Trump released the transcript of the now infamous call, upending the Democrats’ schemes. Here is a key passage from the transcript:

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine. . . . The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.²⁰⁴

It is clear from this text that Trump’s purpose was to solicit President Zelensky’s help in investigating Ukraine’s role in the Democrats’ effort to rig the 2016 election by providing the “evidence” that triggered the Mueller investigation.

Later in the conversation, there is a passage about former Vice President Joe Biden—the White House’s point man in Ukraine during its intervention in the 2016 election. This portion of the call became the focus of Democrat attacks.

The President: I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. [This was a reference to Joe Biden’s threat that Ukraine would lose a billion dollars in aid if the prosecutor investigating his son Hunter’s corrupt company wasn’t fired “within six hours.” The firing followed.²⁰⁵] A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . . . It sounds horrible to me.

This is all Trump actually said about investigations and Vice President Biden during the phone call. There are two ways to look at his statements. According to Democrats, Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to “dig up dirt” on his political rival—a charge Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff had made many times during the Russia-collusion investigation without producing any evidence. An alternative interpretation of the same words would be that Trump was legitimately concerned about the apparent corruption of Vice President Biden, who oversaw Ukrainian affairs at a time when the Ukrainians were working with Democrats and DOJ officials to prevent Trump from becoming president.

The day after Trump released the transcript of his phone call, Schiff made a statement that proved to be one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the chamber, and showed how far Democrats were prepared to go to frame a president.

Schiff prefaced his presentation with these words: “This is in sum and character what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine. It reads like a classic organized crime shakedown. Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates.”

Then Schiff affected a ham-fisted mafia accent to impersonate the president and reprise Trump’s words: “We’ve been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don’t see much reciprocity here. . . . I have a favor I want from you though. And I’m going to say this only seven times so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand. Lots of it. On this and on that. I’m going to put you in touch with people, not just any people, I am going to put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States, my Attorney General Bill Barr. He’s got the whole weight of the American law enforcement behind him. And I’m going to put you in touch with Rudy. You’re going to love him. Trust me. You know what I’m asking. And so I’m only going to say this a few more times. In a few more ways. And by the way, don’t call me again. I’ll call you when you’ve done what I asked.”²⁰⁶

This was a shockingly malicious invention by Schiff. Trump had not asked for a quid pro quo, had not asked the Ukrainian president to “make up dirt on my political opponent,” and had not given him an ultimatum to carry out his bidding. Schiff undoubtedly expected his summary to be picked up by the anti-Trump news media, heard by millions of Americans, and mistaken for the president’s actual words.

But Schiff’s performance was greeted with disbelief in many quarters, though not by Democrats and their media allies. Still, the deriders were numerous enough to convince him he needed damage control. “My summary of the president’s call,” he attempted to explain, “was meant to be at least in part parody. The fact that’s not clear is a separate problem in and of itself. Of course, the president never said if you don’t understand me, I’m going to say it seven more times. My point is that’s the message that the Ukraine president was receiving in not so many words.”

In other words, “I made it up, but it’s true.” But it wasn’t.

The president’s response to Schiff’s “parody” was a damning tweet: “Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?”²⁰⁷

Schiff never explained how he justified such a gross (and seditious) misrepresentation of the president’s words in so solemn a forum as an impeachment inquiry. Yet Schiff’s “parody” was in keeping with the Democrats’ entire approach to the inquiry, which they ran as a Star Chamber proceeding, replete with secrecy, denial of due process, selective leaking of damaging claims, and suppression of contradictory testimony. Democrats controlled the release of information to the public and denied Republican members basic rights that had always been provided to the minority in past impeachments. As Republican committee member Mark Meadows observed grimly: “A hardened criminal has more rights than the president of the United States.”

On October 8, 2019, White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and three House committee chairmen, stating that the Trump administration would not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Though the eight-page letter is worth reading in its entirety, this excerpt encapsulates the administration’s argument:

implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process. For example, you have denied the President the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence, to have counsel present, and many other basic rights guaranteed to all Americans. You have conducted your proceedings in secret. You have violated civil liberties and the separation of powers by threatening Executive Branch officials, claiming that you will seek to punish those who exercise fundamental constitutional rights and prerogatives. All of this violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent.²⁰⁸

During a political rally in Monroe, Louisiana, the following month, Trump told the crowd, with chilling accuracy: “On their campaign to transform America, Democrats are becoming increasingly totalitarian: suppressing dissent, defaming the innocent, eliminating due process, staging show trials and trying to overthrow American democracy to impose their socialist agenda. . . . The radical left Democrats are trying to rip our nation apart.”²⁰⁹

“A Legislative Coup”

The president’s senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, echoed the president with an equally damning description to Breitbart News of what was taking place: “The attempt at impeachment is best understood as a legislative coup against a democratically elected president, and the radical leftists in Congress are working arm-in-arm with the deep state saboteurs and their allies in the media in order to try to effectuate this illegal coup.”²¹⁰

According to Miller, the real whistleblower was Trump, exposing the elements of the Washington swamp that had conspired against him. The Democrats’ whistleblower, on the other hand, was an agent of the deep state, which had been trying to prevent and then overthrow the Trump presidency for more than three years.

“The deep state,” explained Miller, “is a collection of permanent bureaucrats enmeshed inside the federal government who can’t be fired or removed . . . because of misguided civil service laws. They believe they know better than you, and your listeners, and the voters how the country ought to be run. At this moment in time, the deep state has a knife aimed at the heart of American democracy, and that’s what you’re seeing playing across your TV screens and newspapers’ pages and online, with these so-called whistleblowers, who are, of course, in fact, angry hate-filled rage-driven bureaucrats determined to take down the President of the United States and illicitly and improperly using the Whistleblower Protection Act in order to effectuate their designs.”²¹¹

How does the deep state advance its agenda? Miller explained that if the deep state careerists don’t like the direction the president and his team are taking, “they will leak and spin and lie about the contents of your meetings. They’ll take it to the Washington Post and the New York Times and to MSNBC. They’ll share private documents, they’ll share private emails, they’ll share private correspondence, and then they’ll spin and fabricate and lie to create their desired narrative to try to steer policy in the direction they want to steer it in, and the most dangerous expression of this—of course, we’ve seen—has been in the intelligence community, which is amassed with awesome power, awesome capabilities, and they’re directing that and wielding that—in some cases—against a duly-elected President of the United States of America, which is a form of sabotage that should terrify everyday American citizens. That is now the situation we find ourselves in.”²¹²

Support for Miller’s concerns came from an unlikely source in the person of Matt Taibbi, a veteran journalist who had written two best-selling anti-Trump books. In an article published five days after Miller’s interview and titled “We’re in a Permanent Coup,” he warned of the threat to America’s democratic order posed by the deep-state conspiracy: “The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.

“My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.”²¹³

This warning from Taibbi was echoed by another liberal critic of Trump—Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. In a talk show appearance on New York’s AM 970 radio on Sunday, November 10, 2019, Dershowitz said, “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, whether you’re from New York or the middle of the country, you should be frightened by efforts to try to create crimes out of nothing. . . . It reminds me of what Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the KGB, said to Stalin. He said, ‘Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,’ by which he really meant, ‘I’ll make up the crime.’ And so the Democrats are now making up crimes.”