***BREAKING NEWS*** After this article was completed, on January 17, the defense team of President Trump filed their initial legal brief on January 18, to refute the fraudulent impeachment articles submitted by House Democrats to the Senate, for trial. In this submission, his attorneys confirm the message of this article, that impeachment has become one of the leading strategies for the Democrats in the 2020 presidential election.
In their answer, they refute the charge that President Trump committed impeachable acts. They correctly describe the articles of impeachment as “a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president,” calling the impeachment “a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election.”
The Democratic Party presidential candidate’s debate on January 15 in Des Moines, Iowa put a spotlight on the problem the party is having in choosing a candidate who could defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Coming three weeks before the campaign’s first major contest, the caucuses in Iowa, in the midst of major developments of great urgency—for example, the continuing tensions between the U.S. and Iran, the U.S.-China trade deal, the Senate preparing for a trial following Trump’s impeachment in the House—nearly the entire coverage in the mainstream press following the debate was devoted to a manufactured spat between Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over “gender politics,” about whether Sanders told her a woman could not be elected President, and whether Warren refused a conciliatory handshake from Sanders after the debate! Sanders denial was rejected by the debate sponsor, CNN, which insured that the story would continue after the insignificant exchange.
This phony flap is more evidence that the Democratic Party has nothing positive to offer voters in the battleground states, which Trump won in 2016, to switch back to vote for them in the upcoming election. What is emerging, instead, is a campaign by anti-Trump forces to defeat him in 2020 based on escalating the anti-Russian narrative, which carries with it a real danger of triggering war between the two countries. It also confirms that the whole anti-Trump focus of the last three years has been a desperate effort to prevent him from forging a close working, cooperative relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as such a relationship would destroy the entire post-World War II geopolitical strategy of the “Military Industrial Complex” (MIC), based on sustaining the view of Russia as the “enemy image.” This strategy did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and, in many ways, has intensified since then, especially under the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
The collapse of the British-concocted story of “Russian meddling/Trump Collusion”, as special counsel Mueller could produce no evidence to substantiate the charges, was followed immediately by another fabricated case, this time with the charge that Trump was illegally pressuring Ukraine to produce “dirt” on one of the leading Democratic candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden. Though the narrative moved from charges of direct Russian interference, to one related to U.S.-Ukraine relations, it was always aimed at Russia, as demonstrated when Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi proclaimed that Trump was trying to shift the blame from Russia to Ukraine for election interference. “All roads lead to Russia,” she said, once the two articles of impeachment had been approved on a purely partisan vote in the House.
She returned to this theme again on January 14, when she finally released the articles for trial in the Senate, after a one month delay, when she tweeted, “American elections should be decided by the American people, not by the Russian government.” For some reason, Pelosi and her gang have not evinced the slightest sign of discomfort over the interference of British intelligence in the 2016 election, through an initial false claim of Russian cyber activity aimed at the U.S. election, made by the head of GCHQ, the UK’s NSA equivalent, and the release of the fraudulent anti-Trump dossier by Christopher Steele, a top “former” operative of MI6, whose work was paid for by the Clinton campaign.
“ENDLESS IMPEACHMENT”
As the Senate trial opened on January 16, with the swearing in of all the Senators to act as “jurors” in the trial, the strategy of continuous impeachment was unmistakable from comments made by leading Democrats. First, the delay in turning over the articles of impeachment to the Senate, described by leading scholars as a violation of constitutional process, showed that the rush to produce articles had been based on a lie. Pelosi and her two leading prosecutors, Reps. Schiff and Nadler, repeatedly insisted that it was urgent that Trump be removed immediately, as every day he is in office is a threat to the security of the nation. Then why withhold the articles for nearly a month? Senator Feinstein, a Democrat who lives in Pelosi’s district in California, acknowledged the illogic of Pelosi’s position, saying “The longer it goes on [holding back the articles], the less urgent it becomes.”
Secondly, the delay was used to push the argument that there should be an allowance for “new evidence” to be released once the trial begins, which would be unprecedented. If the Senate votes against allowing new evidence, then it would be used as the basis for additional articles of impeachment, leading to a second, third, or more trials. Schiff told the press, “There is going to be new evidence coming out all the time. And if this is conducted like a fair trial, then that new evidence should be admitted.”
The “new evidence” Schiff is referring to is more of the same kind of fake stories as those invented in the original Russiagate allegations. Democrats claim that Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, has information directly implicating Trump in Giuliani’s investigation of the Bidens, which is cited as part of Trump’s illegal plan to force Ukraine to turn over “dirt” on the Bidens. However, Parnas, who has been indicted on charges of illegal campaign contributions, is clearly using the claim that he has new evidence as leverage to gain leniency. A former federal prosecutor dismissed his claim, saying it is “an audition to get on the government’s team”, and he has been compared to Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, who made up stories in a vain attempt to avoid jail time. Even Rep. Val Demmings, one of the managers chosen by Pelosi to present the case against Trump in the Senate, acknowledged that there are legitimate questions about Parnas’ credibility. Politico, which has run many ridiculous anti-Trump stories, reported that Parnas “should not be presumed to be trustworthy.”
Additional bogus “new evidence” emerged in a New York Times story, presenting new fake claims about the Russian security agency GRU hacking Burisma, the Ukrainian firm which hired Biden’s son in an obvious influence-buying scheme, when Biden was Vice President. This story relies on evidence from a firm, Area 1, headed by a former NSA official, and a former employee of CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm which was used by the FBI, CIA and Mueller’s team to make the case that the Russians hacked the DNC computers to aid Trump’s campaign—a story definitively debunked by former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and a team of former intelligence officials and whistleblowers.
NEOCONS COLLABORATE TO “BOX” TRUMP IN
The phony impeachment charges are one part of a larger effort to defeat Trump in 2020. While the anti-Russian hysteria has been fanned by the anti-Trumpers through the three-year impeachment campaign, the neocons inside and outside the Trump administration are engaging in a effort to bring the U.S. into a new war. As Trump moved to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the “endless wars”, by announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and announcing his intent to do the same in Afghanistan, a trap was set to begin a war with Iran, using Trump’s anti-Iran profile to do so. Secretary of State Pompeo, Defense Secretary Esper and others within the administration used an escalation of confrontation, including the killing of an American contractor in Iraq and a storming of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a Casus Belli, to justify the killing of top Iranian military leader Soleimani. His killing led to a retaliatory strike by Iran, and for several days, the U.S. and Iran were on the brink of war.
The elimination of the government of Iran has been a goal of British-linked neocons for years. Many greeted Soleimani’s killing as a step toward overthrowing the government, typified by fired Trump adviser John Bolton, whose congratulatory message included his belief that now is the time for regime change in Teheran. For his part, President Trump sustained tough rhetoric against the government, but insisted that he is “not for a war, not for regime change.”
This is a huge disappointment for those hoping that the impeachment would give the war hawk faction in the Republican Party leverage over Trump, as he needs them to vote with him in the Senate trial. Pro-war extremists such as Senators Rubio and Cruz, who were defeated by Trump in the race for the Republican nomination in 2016, as he eviscerated the Bush Republicans by campaigning against their “endless wars”, have continued to push for more aggressive action on his part against not only Iran, but against Russia and China. The neocon Republicans joined with pro-war Democrats in a 340-64 vote in the House against his order to withdraw troops from Syria, and many expressed disappointment when Trump reversed his decision to attack Iran, on June 21 of last year, after a U.S. drone was shot down by Iran’s military.
For his opponents, in both parties, inducing Trump to move U.S. forces into a new war would serve two purposes: first, it would demolish the prospect for peaceful collaboration with Russia, which the war hawks run by the MIC see as an existential threat to their global order, which requires permanent war for both geopolitical and financial reasons; second, it would break the trust of many voters in Trump, who backed him because he pledged to end the destructive results of U.S. involvement in wars launched by his predecessors. Despite the millions spent by the Mueller team in investigating Russiagate, and the billions of dollars of publicity provided by “mainstream”, i.e., “Fake News” media, to back the fake charges against him, and to paint him as a reckless, irresponsible bully, Trump’s actions against war have sustained that trust.
Lacking a compelling vision to bring voters to support their weak candidates, those running the Democratic Party intend to use an ongoing impeachment process to smear Trump, while the neocon swamp pushes for a new war, or wars, to discredit him. They are betting that this strategy will effectively box Trump in, to prevent from following through with his intent to break definitively with the old paradigm of war and globalization. If they succeed, through manipulating uninformed American voters, a world war will become inevitable.