House Democrats’ impeachment theater was always shoddy. The reasoning was ridiculous, their demeanor absurdly transparent, and the self-righteousness was nauseating. President Trump now faces impeachment proceedings because he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July. Trump allegedly shook down the leader, saying he would withhold aid unless a corruption investigation was launched against Hunter Biden, who was sitting on the board of an energy company there without any prior experience. And then, a transcript of the call torched all of that. There was no quid pro quo as alleged in a whistleblower complaint. The complainant is reportedly a CIA officer, who didn’t listen in on the call and the entire report is grounded by second-hand sources. It’s all hearsay, which explains the oodles of errors. And did Democrats read the complaint before executing their impeachment fantasy? No.
With every passing day, it’s becoming clearer that we have a nothing burger. Democrats wanted to impeach Trump because he won the 2016 election. Here was their window before the 2020 cycle to avoid angering their base. It’s truly pathetic. To show that this whole effort has truly gone off the rails, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is not talking about a new dossier the supposedly related to the Trump-Ukraine story is not supported by evidence—and no one knows where it came from. State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was on the Hill Wednesday to discuss it. Raskin said it really has nothing to do with Trump’s impeachment inquiry, but then decided to suggest that it follows the narrative the Trump team is trying to peddle regarding this Ukraine story (via Roll Call):
The State Department’s inspector general on Wednesday shared with Congress a dossier of unknown origins that one lawmaker said contained conspiracy theories and was hand-delivered to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo months ago.
With members away from the Capitol for a two-week recess, Steve Linick, the State Department’s top watchdog, briefed congressional staffers Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, on the documents that Raskin said arrived at the department in May.
“It raises more questions than it answers,” Raskin said of the documents. “The inspector general had no idea where it came from.”
[…]
Raskin said the documents are unclassified and posited that they came from the White House. He said they mention the family of former vice president and 2020 hopeful Joe Biden, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was abruptly recalled in May.
Raskin reiterated that he and Linick are unaware of the documents’ origins, but said the information in the dossier fits with the narrative espoused by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
[…]
“It’s pretty clear whoever put it together was attempting to advance exactly the storyline Mr. Giuliani was,” Raskin said.
Uh, how can it be clear if you don’t know the origins, Jamie? You don’t know. And maybe it is a distraction, but since you don’t know where this came from, perhaps you shouldn’t have given it the light of day. But we get it; ‘orange man, bad.’ So, you turn nothing into something by taking a swipe at the Trump White House, weaponizing unknown documents for which you cannot corroborate in order to score points…because that’s the responsible thing to do. CNN Contributor Phil Mudd, a former CIA and FBI agent, called this whole spectacle a “hot mess” (via Free Beacon):
Mudd criticized Raskin for sharing information from a briefing with State Department inspector general Steve Linick. He said that it was irresponsible for the Democratic congressman to talk about the documents without confirming their origin.
"Let me give you another interpretation," Mudd told host CNN's Jake Tapper. "The congressman put his foot in a cow pie and said isn't this cool. What a hot mess that was."
Raskin insinuated that the inspector general was sitting on devastating information that could support President Trump's impeachment.
"The inspector general was basically just saying, we're sitting on this packet of disinformation which came from some uncertain place," Raskin told reporters. "And again this is my interpretation of it. There may be misconduct by the secretary of state or other State Department employees in distributing this if they know where it comes from and they know that it does not have any authentic source in the White House."
Mudd questioned the validity of Raskin's information. He said it would be easy to supply misinformation that would attract attention even if it was false.
"They don't know where this stuff came from," Mudd said. "I could have sent it for all they know. He clearly hasn't reviewed it. He hasn’t had the time to review it so we don't know exactly what’s in there."
It’s a fishing expedition. They have nothing. They have less than nothing. The Democrats were already pushing it with this Russian collusion myth for which there was zero evidence to support that claim. Many of us knew that from the get-go. The media still peddled this manufactured story until Robert Mueller’s report torpedoed it. Shoot first, ask question later. That’s the ethos of the Left right now with this impeachment circus, which is doing more damage to our institutions that Trump could allegedly ever do.