When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi abruptly announced in September that the House was moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry related to President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, it left many long time Washington insiders scratching their heads. After all, since she picked up the gavel a year ago, Pelosi had been persistently pushing back against the hard left squad who were squawking for impeachment even before Inauguration Day, insisting that any legitimate impeachment effort would have to be bipartisan in nature.
A savvy politician, Pelosi is well aware of how the Clinton impeachment boomeranged on Republicans when they were in the majority — and that GOP impeachment effort was undertaken only after a lengthy and exhaustive investigation that documented clear violations of the law by the Chief Executive. After the failure of the long-running Mueller investigation to produce anything of value, the thin gruel of President Trump’s phone conversation with the president of Ukraine has never seemed any less than absurd as a basis for removing a United States President from office in accordance with the constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The argument that Pelosi could simply no longer resist the agitation of her party’s leftist base makes little sense. If the two-year investigation of a Justice Department-appointed special prosecutor provided no actionable pretext for commencing impeachment proceedings, then the idea that an anonymous whistleblower complaint about the content of a phone conversation with a foreign leader impelled Pelosi to call for Trump’s impeachment (even before any formal congressional “investigation” began) is utterly ludicrous. If she could resist the leftist loonies determined to run her party over the cliff with impeachment over “Russian collusion,” she could certainly reject their calls for impeachment over the even more transparently ridiculous charge of an “improper” call, particularly when it distracts valuable attention from her party’s looming presidential primaries.
No, the real explanation for Pelosi’s sudden flip is that those in the know — in the intelligence community, on congressional committees, and even in the Democratic mouthpiece media with their Deep State sources — warned her in early September of the potential political catastrophe that would ensue as a result of the devastating revelations in both the Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process and U.S. Attorney John Durham’s more comprehensive investigation into the origins and perpetuation of the bogus “Russian collusion” narrative. That transparently preposterous conspiracy theory, cooked up by the Clinton campaign as an explanation for their disastrous loss, was then propagated with help from the exiting Obama administration, the intelligence community, anti-Trump operatives in the federal bureaucracy, and of course Democratic members of Congress and their lapdog allies in the mainstream media. Both of these reports will confirm every one of Donald Trump’s allegations of a baseless witch hunt orchestrated by the Deep State to overturn the results of the 2016 election. In order to preemptively mitigate the political fallout, Democrats had to go on the offensive and accelerate impeachment proceedings, no matter how flimsy the pretext.
The truly remarkable story of the past month is how well this desperate gambit to prevent the public from grasping the full reality of the ongoing Deep State coup against our duly elected president worked. The content of Inspector General Horowitz’s report completely eviscerated the carefully-crafted narrative of former FBI Director James Comey and his minions in the corrupt media and on Capitol Hill. Far from exonerating the FBI leadership of wrongdoing, it revealed rampant abuse of the FISA process, misrepresentation of facts and forgery of documents to the FISA Court, and the use of unsupported opposition research documents by the FBI as the basis to spy on and entrap a presidential campaign.
Every single one of President Trump’s supposedly “unhinged” assertions about Comey’s FBI — and more — were proven true by the IG report. And yet, almost all the mainstream media coverage parroted the Democratic talking points that the report had somehow “exonerated” the FBI of accusations of political bias. But for anyone paying attention, it was obvious that the IG’s report came to no such conclusion — it simply asserted that in lieu of any smoking gun documents or testimonial evidence, it was not possible to determine whether the egregious misrepresentations of fact and alterations of documents presented to the FISA court were the result of gross incompetence or political bias.
The problem is, with the circus of impeachment as background noise, too few people were paying attention, making it difficult for many Americans to penetrate the propaganda of “exoneration” being peddled by the compliant corporate media. Even so, commentators expressed bewilderment that despite weeks of wall-to-wall coverage of “historic” impeachment proceedings by the cable news subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, public opinion had actually shifted substantially against impeachment rather than coalesced behind it. The IG report, it seems, actually did have an impact on those who are not inclined to mindlessly accept any and all anti-Trump narratives at face value.
Let’s hope that voters continue to see through the charade, and that justice finally comes to those who conspired against our President and our democracy.
Robert Wasinger served in senior advisory and liaison roles in President Trump's campaign and transition team, after extensive experience on Capitol Hill.