The Democrats’ Impeachment of Trump Will Live in Infamy

Written by Jonathan Clay de Hale

“A date that will live in infamy.” ~President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
addressing the nation on December 8, 1941, the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor

Those words apply equally to the partisan vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 18, 2019 to impeach President Donald J. Trump. Not everyone will see the deed as infamous, but at least half of American voters will. Historians 50 years from now will agree that the attempt to impeach this president was politically motivated, did great damage to our system of government, and was an unprecedented abuse of power.

The articles of impeachment are as thin as the farinaceous gruel served in Oliver Twist. They stand or fall not on a phone call, not on a “scheme,” and not on whether Trump pressured Ukraine to open an investigation into the Bidens. They stand only on why Trump pressed for the investigation—his intent.

No one disputes that President Trump asked the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, “to do us a favor” and “look into” former Vice President Biden’s role getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. It’s right there in the call transcript.

It also seems evident that there was some sort of “this for that,”–i.e., quid pro quo–going on. Ukraine wanted “lethal aid” and a White House visit. Trump wanted a couple of probes potentially linked to corruption and the deep state efforts to overthrow the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

But keep in mind that a quid pro quo is not, in and of itself, wrong. That’s how political deals get done all the time. It’s only wrong if, as charged in this case, the president used such an arrangement to personally benefit his reelection campaign. But did he?

As our chief executive, Trump had every reason to ask for the probe since we have video of Joe Biden bragging that he threatened to withhold $1B in loan guarantees to Ukraine if they didn’t fire a certain prosecutor. In the video Biden says, “If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Less than six hours later the prosecutor was fired and Ukraine got the money. If ever there was a textbook example of quid pro quo, that’s it.

As with Trump, however, the central question is why Biden wanted that prosecutor fired. Using $1 billion dollars as leverage to oust a prosecutor in a foreign country conducting an investigation into corruption seems rather extreme.

We learn that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, was on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company. Burisma was being investigated in connection with the loss of $1.8 billion (out of $3B) in aid funding arranged by Joe Biden as the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine. Hunter was being paid more than $50,000 per month even though he had no relevant experience in oil or gas exploration. Biden’s successful effort to quash the investigation into Burisma provides a possible explanation for his quid pro quo: to protect his son.

Before giving the security assistance and a White House visit that Ukraine sought, is it plausible that Trump wanted to find out whether any U.S. aid to Ukraine had made its way to Burisma and into Hunter’s pockets? If it had, that would appear to be a case of laundering U.S. taxpayer dollars through a foreign oil company to enrich the son of a sitting Vice President who was overseeing our policy toward Ukraine. It would also establish a justifiable reason to deny such assistance until the U.S. government was certain it would be used for a legitimate purpose.

To be sure, neither Biden has been accused of wrong doing, but Democrats clutched their skirts in horror at Trump’s request while ignoring Joe Biden’s obviously suspicious conflict of interest. Instead of finding out what Biden was up to, Democrats seized on Trump’s request and accused him of trying to damage Joe’s candidacy in the 2020 presidential election—something they cannot prove.

“Using the powers of his high office,” they intone, President Trump solicited “the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage.”

Asking a foreign government to agree to and publicly announce investigations is not a crime, especially one for which you have probable cause. It’s not a crime even if it may look shady and involves someone challenging your presidency. The best Democrats can do until there is incontrovertible evidence of mens rea, is assume criminal intent—and a third-party assumption is insufficient to accuse someone of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” said Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s chief of the Soviet secret police apparatus. Trump’s enemies have been looking for “the crime” since he thrashed Hillary Clinton and have now conveniently constructed one on a motive that is, at best, ambiguous.

The Democrats are political and cultural Marxists who are clawing for anything that will allow them to regain power. Their entire impeachment charade was a pretentious, scripted play that openly broke historic norms in the lower chamber and deprived the president of due process—a first in the history of the United States.

They should be branded a hate group. They have regularly denounced Trump supporters as racists, misogynists, xenophobes, bitter clingers, deplorables, and the dregs of society. It’s they who are full of hate and seek to dismantle the gift of self-rule our Founders established. It’s they who should be ridiculed, shunned, and made pariahs in the public square.

Some, like the foul troika that led this travesty—Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler—should themselves be impeached and removed from office. They have abused the levers of government to maintain power and advance their radical ideologies. They launched an attack on our country like the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor, only worse because it’s an inside job.

Like it or not, we are in a civil war fighting for our destiny as a nation because the Democrats have become a corrupt, totalitarian, anti-American mob of shameless liars and partisan hacks. They must be severely punished at the voting booth in November 2020. If not, they will take it as permission to continue using our constitutional government to bring their delusional revenge fantasies to life and force the rest of us to live under their corrupt idea of justice.

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