TRIAL AND ERROR

Nancy Pelosi has announced that Articles of Impeachment against Donald Trump are being prepared and will be presented Monday. This has zero chance of succeeding, if only because there is not enough time. Right now, the vote in the Senate is a tie, the President of the Senate is Mike Pence, and he has the vote to break any ties. That means Mitch McConnell calls the shots. He has already announced that the earliest the Senate could even receive the Articles of Impeachment, if passed by the House, would be January 19th. The day before the inauguration. The only alternative to that would be if all 100 senators voted to go into special session. There is no chance that will happen.

So, why do this at all? This clearly has no chance of removing Trump from office, even 24 hours early. I have tried to identify possible motives. This is challenging, because it is hard to predict rational thought from people who show little or no ability to think rationally. I came up with five possible motives, none of them very impressive.

  1. Maybe they are truly terrified that Trump will do something horrible. What could that be? Are they worried about him launching nuclear missiles against China? That is absurd. While Trump has the nuclear codes, he can’t just launch a nuclear attack all by himself. It doesn’t work that way. In addition, Trump is not showing much interest in international affairs at the moment, so this seems unlikely.

 

  1. Perhaps they are terrified that Trump will do something dramatic to overturn the results of the election. I am not sure what that would be, but if Democrats really fear this there may be a reason for that fear. For example, what if Trump had solid evidence that the election was stolen with ballots printed in China prefilled with votes for Joe Biden. One would think that if Trump had such evidence, he would have already produced it. One thing everyone agrees on is a lack of indisputable evidence.

 

But perhaps he doesn’t have the evidence, yet. Jovan Pulitzer says that he can prove whether that happened if he could just get a couple of hours to scan ballots.  He has been authorized by the Georgia Senate to do that. So far, that has not been done, because of continued obstruction. But Trump just dropped his lawsuit against the Georgia Secretary of State, in exchange for a consent decree to give Trump access to those ballots. The Secretary of State is screaming that this deal is illegal. Why? If there was nothing wrong with those ballots, why would he care? The lawsuit has been dropped. Trump has already admitted defeat, so why the concern. But obviously there is concern.

  1. What if they are worried about something else? That something else could be the John Durham report. That wasn’t released before the election because there was concern it would impact the election. Think about that. William Barr also covered up the Hunter Biden investigation because he feared it would interfere with the election. He was right by the way. Numerous post-election surveys show that if this investigation had been made public, Biden would have lost.

Let me pause to point out something that should be obvious to everyone not named William Barr. While we can understand why the FBI would hesitate to get involved in a politically motivated investigation, the Hunter Biden investigation was not politically motivated. Unlike the Russian collusion investigation, it wasn’t started by a political campaign. It was triggered when the FBI got Hunter Biden’s laptop in the fall of 2019. It was and is a legitimate criminal investigation.

William Barr failed to realize, is that failure disclose a legitimate criminal investigation is also interfering with an election. Covering up criminal activity is interfering with an election. Even James Comey figured that one out. That is why he delivered the report regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. It is also why he disclosed receipt of Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Remember he said, that he would rather take the hit for disclosing this than to have it all come out after the election. Bingo. Comey botched this, probably because of political pressure, but he at least understood that!

Though Barr blocked John Durham from releasing his report before the election, he secretly made Durham a Special Counsel, to guarantee it would come out after the election. In other words when it would no longer matter.

Barr is gone, there is a new temporary AG and there are a lot of people begging Trump to declassify things while he can. Perhaps this explains why Nancy Pelosi, and a lot of other people in the establishment on both sides of the aisle, might be desperate to change the subject until Trump is safely out of office.

  1. Perhaps she just hates Trump that much. She is, sadly, that petty. This is the woman who literally tore up the State of the Union address. Maybe she just wants to humiliate him. To force him to leave office as ruined as possible, to kick him while he is down, to destroy his life. She may hate him that much, but that would be the dumbest possible reason.
  1. I suppose she could genuinely believe he tried to overthrow the government and fears what else he might do. This seems the least likely reason because it would require Nancy to be doing this based on common sense, facts, and a sense of duty. She has never demonstrated any of that before and is not demonstrating that now.

Impeaching Trump now is a high-risk exercise in futility. If there are impeachment hearings in the House, Trump will have the opportunity to present a defense. Since Nancy is accusing him of inciting people to riot by falsely claiming the election was stolen, the obvious defense would be that Trump was telling the truth. Ironically, these impeachment hearings could give Trump the day in court he could not get anywhere else.

During the first impeachment trial, Trump declined to attend any hearings, question any witnesses, or even ask the Committee to call any witnesses in his defense. He was entitled, by the constitution to do that, but he declined. Instead, Trump blocked 12 administration officials from testifying. He probably did this, on advice of counsel, because Democrats had no case. If you have a trial, and the other side has no case, why risk accidently giving them some evidence? He may not make the same decision this time. For one thing, what is at risk? Another 24 hours in the White House?

Since Wednesday, Donald Trump has been accused of inciting a riot because he keeps saying he believes this election was stolen. A lot of people are furious that he keeps saying that. After all, they have arrogantly told him and us that this was the most secure election in our nation’s history. That there is zero evidence of a problem. But do you believe that? We know that close to half the country believes this election was stolen. Are they all delusional? Perhaps I am wrong, but from here it looks like a lot of people are desperate to convince everyone of something that is obviously not true. We may not know exactly what happened, but to pretend there is no evidence of serious problems is delusional. Were we delusional when we saw Trump leading on election night only to wake up the next morning and learn that massive votes for Biden had appeared miraculously during the night?  By the way, all from Democratic districts with a reputation for election fraud. Who’s delusional here?

Let me try to put this in perspective. Suppose you just got done sweltering through a July heat wave where the average temperature was over 100 degrees. You watch your TV, and you see news reports that this is happening all over the country. Then the head of the national weather bureau comes on and says this was the coldest July in the history of our country. Would you believe him, or your lying eyes?  Then imagine CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, FOX News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and senior members of congress arrogantly lecturing you to listen to the science. That if you don’t believe this wasn’t the coldest July in the history of this country, you are dangerously stupid and delusional and must be silenced. How would you feel about that? Probably pretty similar to how you and about 50 million other Americans feel right now.

TDM