To many, the charges and countercharges, subpoenas and congressional hearings, might look like a three-ring circus in which solons up for re-election are vying for airtime to fill their re-election coffers. To me, this is a modern-day replay of the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

If you’ve never seen it or forgotten the plot, here’s a quick take. Through a fluke -- actually a coin toss by a corrupt governor -- an outsider is picked over a known stooge of that era's Deep State crowd, on the grounds that the outsider is a naïf who will be easily manipulated. The Washington press quickly labels the new senator a bumpkin who has no business being in the Senate. Unwise to their machinations and the extent of the rot, the new senator (played by James Stewart) introduces a bill to authorize a loan for a national boys’ camp. (Yes, it’s dated, today the camp would have to accommodate -- what is it now, 72? -- genders.) 

 Unknown to Smith, however, the local political machine has a graft-filled scheme to build a dam on the site and enrich themselves.  The machine produces fake evidence accusing Smith of owning the land and trying to profit from the legislation. To prove his innocence and stop the cabal’s self-enriching Public Works bill from being passed, Smith filibusters. And it’s a real filibuster, not like today’s. He stands alone, talking nonstop while the opposition crushes his constituents’ efforts to rally round him. The local media, under the thumb of the machine, refuse to report what he’s saying and the Boy Rangers who support him are viciously attacked. A senator who was once under the thumb of the machine is conscience stricken and brings to the floor bins of correspondence from Smith’s home state supporting him. Smith collapses from exhaustion, and the stricken home state senator confesses to the plot. 

Washington and the Deep State thought the outsider Trump would be easily manipulated and they could continue their graft-filled ways. The press attacks him mercilessly with charges of wrongdoing that evaporate under countless investigations. Fake evidence is used against him. Last week it was Congressman Schiff’s claim that he had just learned a “whistleblower” had evidence the President wrongfully held up funds to Ukraine to force the government to investigate the certain graft to Joe Biden’s son. It turns out from credible accounts that the “whistleblower” was a mere gossip who had earlier worked with anti-Trump former Ukrainian officials to tar Trump and those around him. Moreover, Schiff was caught out in a lie as the “whistleblower” had had first contact with Schiff’s staff, who doubtless helped draft the complaint. And yet there is more -- the complaint was utter hearsay, contradicted as we show not only by the transcript of the conversation, which purportedly was the basis of the charge, but by overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The Complaint was Utter Bunk

This week in a closed hearing Schiff called U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker, the recently resigned special envoy to Ukraine. Prior to the hearing media stenographers of hot Democrat tips bruited that Volker was going to be the final nail in Trump’s coffin. Schiff has refused to release the transcript of that hearing in which, to Schiff’s certain embarrassment, Volker confirmed what present Ukrainian officials had already said. “The Ukrainians were not pressured, they never raised any issue of quid pro quo, they did not view the President’s call to Zelensky to be inappropriate in any way.”   

The Schiff show is such a flop that even Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who along with her squad forced Pelosi into calling for this ridiculous “impeachment inquiry” said, “I think the whole thing is boring. He should have been impeached a long time ago, I’m over it, and so that’s how I feel because we’ve got work to do.” 

Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who changed the rules governing “whistleblowing” to accommodate this hearsay gossip, will rue the day he did this. He said he was unaware that the “whistleblower,” reportedly a CIA functionary assigned to the White House years ago where he worked with anti-Trump Ukrainians to stop Trump and who has not worked there for two or three years, had first talked to congressional staff. He was unaware of it, perhaps because the whistleblower complaint form asks if he had previously told anyone, including congressional staff, about this and lied about that, subjecting himself to possible felony charges. Moreover, allowing in such unsubstantiated gossip by a liar who had no firsthand knowledge of the substance of the complaint will only unleash a flood of these baseless charges, tying up more government resources on nonsense. 

That the first complaint fell apart is clear from the leak to the New York Times that a second intelligence official is “thinking” about filing a similar complaint.

Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection notes:

Got that? Someone is thinking about filing a whistleblower complaint but has not done so, and may not need to do so since he or she already has been interviewed.

Such a person would not, under any circumstances, be a real whistleblower -- the person is not revealing anything new and is merely a witness to someone else’s complaint. It’s a media hoax to assign the term “whistleblower” to such a person, but it creates a new news cycle.

Yet within minutes of the 8:38 p.m. publication of the report by the NY Times tonight, this supposed second whistleblower was being hailed as the end of Trump. 

 The “End of Trump” Keeps Boomeranging and Hitting the Democrats

Not only did this ill-conceived hearing based on a fake predicate fail to advance their goal, it has seriously harmed the party’s frontrunner, Joe Biden. Voters might get bleary-eyed trying to remember the names of Ukrainian officials then and now, but graft they understand especially such blatant graft. (I predict a great deal more of Democrat graft with the former corrupt Ukraine officials will be forthcoming.) Biden’s fundraising and poll standings are sinking while Trump’s are rising. 

And Obama is not likely to be in the clear any more than Hillary Clinton is. (The largest contributions to the Clinton Foundation, while she was Secretary of State vacuuming up foreign dollars, for example, came from wealthy Ukrainians.) 

Here’s a detailed, well-documented article by John Solomon on how the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to promote the fake Russian Collusion story. Read it all. Here’s a short summary.

1.   January 2016 Obama summons Ukraine’s top prosecutors and investigators to meet with members of his National Security Council, FBI, Departments of State and Justice.

2.   At the meeting the U.S. attendees focused on getting dirt on Paul Manafort

3.   Ukrainian officials soon after began meddling in the election, releasing a document damaging to Manafort. (Nellie Ohr reported in May 2016 to her husband Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr and federal prosecutors this release)

4.  The Americans were not interested in similar evidence against others like former white House Counsel Gregory Craig.

5.  U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer they drop the probe of Burisma (the Ukrainian energy company on which board Hunter Biden sat and was richly rewarded). 

6.   On September 2016 the FBI “asked a Russian “oligarch” Oleg Deripaska  “if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia,” a notion Deripaska “laughed off as preposterous.”

As I say, there will be likely much more to come beyond this credible account of Obama pressure on Ukraine to help build the Russian collusion fantasy to stop Trump from beating Hillary.

The Democrats’ Sandbagging Playbook is Well-Worn 

The Schiff sneak attacks and lies follow a pattern, the NY Sun reminds us.  

Senator Dianne Feinstein sat on Blasey Ford’s accusation on July 30, 2018. She sat on it all through the entire confirmation hearing. She did not report it to fellow Democrats until Sept 12 and to the FBI until September 13. Adam Schiff knew about the “whistleblower's” complaint dated August 12 even before that date, when the complainant interacted with his staff. He knew about if for over a month before the public did. Kimberly Strassel reported, notes the Sun:

Mr. Schiff knew about the topic of the complaint for more than a month -- while the public did not.” During that period he developed what Ms. Strassel calls “an interest in all things Ukrainian” and “began aggressively previewing his impeachment mantra. The aim was to be able to “take full advantage of the whistleblower ‘news.’”

Even after “news broke of the complaint,” Ms. Strassel writes, “Mr. Schiff played dumb” -- falsely telling MSNBC that “we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower” and later suggesting that without the intelligence inspector general “we might not have even known there was a whistleblower complaint.” In fact, Ms. Strassel notes, “the process was working and Mr. Schiff knew all about it.

The final feature of the m.o., demonstrated by Ms. Feinstein in the Kavanaugh confirmation, was to keep the other party in the dark -- even more shocking in Mr. Schiff’s case in that he is the committee chairman. Ms. Strassel notes that he had “multiple opportunities to acknowledge his awareness of the coming complaint, but kept mum about his side’s early involvement.”

For years the Democrats have manipulated voters into thinking they were working for them. Instead they were in significant measure working for themselves, in search of graft and power. Like the opponents of the mythical Mr. Smith, the Democratic efforts, baseless as they are, to keep Trump from disrupting their sweet deal, only result in self-exposing their corruption and disdain for due process.

Excuse me now, please, I heard some gossip on the subway this morning from someone who heard something from someone about Elizabeth Warren and I need to beat a path to Mr. Atkinson’s office before he changes the rules back to require firsthand knowledge of the charges made.