Impeachment Theater is now a full-blown production. It was a gathering storm since 2016. It accelerated when the Democrats retook the House in 2018, and now they’re going full steam based on some shoddy whistleblower complaint about a phone call President Trump had with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July. The so-called whistleblower alleges through second-hand sources that Trump tried to pressure the Ukrainian leader into launching a corruption investigation involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and may have tied foreign aid to the matter. There are allegations of quid pro quo as well (via NYT):
Mr. Trump is said to have pressured Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden and his younger son, Hunter — both directly and through a proxy, Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers. As a leading candidate to be the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominee, Mr. Biden is Mr. Trump’s political rival.
As vice president, Mr. Biden pushed the Ukrainian government in 2015 to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as an obstacle to reform because he failed to bring corruption cases. At the time, Mr. Biden’s son sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.
[…]
Did Mr. Trump use American foreign policy to try to damage a political rival?
This is the big question. The White House froze more than $391 million in military assistance to Ukraine this summer that Congress had appropriated. The money was intended to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian territorial aggression, including a military conflict in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000 people since 2014.
It’s just what the Left need to start a formal impeachment push. In reality, this was an inevitable event. The Democrats retook the House based on their promise to impeach Trump. Democrats couldn’t use the Trump-Russia collusion hoax since there is no evidence of any conspiracy between the Trump team and the Kremlin and Robert Mueller, the ex-special counsel who conducted the investigation, and his soporific testimony on the Hill on his report only reinforced the idea that impeaching Trump over this was a bad idea. Or was it? The theme of foreign interference in an election is once again recycled in this effort, so as you'd expect it was just the Democrats waiting for another moment...to get ahead of their skis. And now, we have an impeachment proceeding before anyone on the Hill had read the full complaint.
Now, the transcript of the phone call was released yesterday. It showed Trump asking Ukraine if they could possibly help with the Department of Justice’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation—that’s not unusual—it was Ukraine who brought up Biden, and there was no quid pro quo discussed; neither was there a foreign aid shakedown. This whole Democratic narrative that Trump was some sort of mob boss on the phone was proven false—how shocking.
Now, the complaint has been declassified. It should be available this morning, with Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) saying that there’s nothing surprising in it and that he’s more confident than ever that this impeachment circus isn’t going anywhere (via Fox News) [emphasis mine]
Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart announced on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" and on social media late Wednesday that the explosive whistleblower complaint concerning President Trump's July call with Ukraine's leader has been declassified -- and Stewart said that it doesn't contain any damning information.
"I encourage you all to read it," Stewart tweeted. The complaint was not immediately available to the public, but was expected to be released Thursday morning.
"It's been declassified and it's been released," Stewart told anchor Laura Ingraham. "So it should be available for everyone to go and look at, and I encourage everyone to go and look at it." Stewart added that he has viewed the complaint, and was initially "anxious" before viewing the complaint, but now is "much more confident than I was this morning that this is going to go nowhere. ... there are just no surprises there."
He continued, "The entirety of it is focused on this one thing, and that's the transcript of one phone call, the transcript that was released this morning."
Oh, and this so-called whistleblower was cited to have a political bias against Donald Trump, according to the intelligence community inspector general. This push had slim chances of being successfully from the get-go, as the Republican Senate was never going to convict the president over the Democrats’ years-long temper tantrum over losing the 2016 election.
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