Hours after the Trump administration blocked one of the witnesses in the "impeachment" probe from testifying to the House, White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and various committee chairs, dotting the i's and crossing the t's.
"I write on behalf of President Donald J. Trump in response to your numerous, legally unsupported demands made as part of what you have labelled, contrary to the Constitution of the United States and all past bipartisan precedent, as an 'impeachment inquiry'," the letter says. "As you know, you have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally-mandated due process."
.@SpeakerPelosi's office confirms she's received letter from WH outlining why the administration won't be cooperating with impeachment inquiry. Below is the link to the 8-pg letter from WH Counsel Pat Cipollone. https://t.co/23V5TSeHBl
— Ramsey Touchberry (@ramsberry1) 8 октября 2019 г.
Assessing the White House's move in an interview with Fox News, Trump's attorney Rudi Giuliani and American lawyer Joseph diGenova unanimously confirmed that if House Dems try to challenge the Trump administration's move in court, they would lose. According to the lawyers, Pelosi's decision to skip the floor impeachment vote made the process devoid of any legitimacy.
"If they [Democrats] go to Court they are going to lose, because the president and the secretary of state and others are invoking executive privilege, confidentiality privilege, absolute immunity privilege. And they are doing that because they have a right to when there is not a formal impeachment proceeding underway," diGenova explained.
On the other hand, if Speaker Pelosi held an impeachment vote, that would have given the House minority the authority to subpoena and cross-examine the witnesses brought by the Dems, something that she probably did not want, as Jason E. Chaffetz, a former chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (2015-2017) told Fox News on 1 October.
There's No Evidence of Any Impeachable Offence by Trump
According to Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, an American economist and author of more than a dozen books who served as the United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan, "the Democrats’ impeachment push has no legitimacy because there is no evidence of any impeachable offence" by Donald Trump in the first place.
Pelosi’s impeachment inquiry based on hearsay, secrecy and no regard for due process is a partisan sham to overturn the 2016 election. Instead, Democrats should pass USMCA. @realDonaldTrump is right to refuse to participate in this unfair, unprecedented, and illegitimate process.
— Senator Mike Braun (@SenatorBraun) 9 октября 2019 г.
He notes that one of the reasons why the House Democrats refuse to hold a vote to establish an impeachment proceeding is that once it is launched, it depends on actual evidence, of which the Democrats have none. The minute the Democrats vote to actually kick off the impeachment process, they have to abide by the legal rules or the process is null and void, the author highlights.
Currently, "the never-before-known 'impeachment inquiry'" permits the Democrats "to continue to tell lies and make false allegations without allowing the President to confront his accusers on the basis of fact and evidence," he elaborates.
The question then arises as to why the US mainstream media and prominent political figures have so easily bought into the impeachment narrative spearheaded by Chairman Adam Schiff and some other House Democrats led by Speaker Pelosi.
Instead of releasing the Volker transcript, House Dems are leaking cherry picked info & keeping the public in the dark on the rest. Why hasn't @RepAdamSchiff released the full transcript & why aren't so many in the media demanding it? Because it's FULL of inconvenient facts! pic.twitter.com/RFVqfaMOgD
— Lee Zeldin (@RepLeeZeldin) 8 октября 2019 г.
"The Republicans in the House have pointed out over and over that there is no evidence whatsoever of any offence by Trump, much less an impeachable one, but the media does not serve the Republicans", Dr Roberts says. "It only reports the lies from the Democrats".
As for the apparent neglect of the US Constitution by some Democratic lawmakers, the problem is that it "slowly eroded over time, beginning with the so-called 'Civil War' in 1860", and was "completely abandoned by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes", the former administration official emphasises, referring to the fact that "privacy, once a Constitutional right, no longer exists in the US" after the implementation of the 2001 Patriot Act.
On the other hand, the legislative branch, Congress, "is bought and paid for", Dr. Roberts remarks, stressing that the body does not actually represent voters but "the interest groups that provide the campaign money to get representatives and senators elected".
"The House Democrats in their orchestration of 'an impeachment' crisis, and the whore media are hoping for two things," the economist says. "One is that some of all the mud and false news that they are perpetuating against Trump will stick and cost him the reelection. The other is that it will wear down some of the weaker Republicans in the Senate who might be convinced by the donors to their campaign funds to vote for impeachment and thus leave themselves in office but out of power.
The former administration official expresses concerns over the Republicans' hesitancy to complete the inquiry and indict the CIA and Obama Justice Department officials "who orchestrated the fake 'Russiagate' investigation", while "the bought-and-paid-for servant of the ruling oligarchs, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, speeds the 'impeachment inquiry' forward".
"By the time the report comes out from the Justice Department’s investigation of who was responsible for the falsehoods of 'Russiagate', the US presstitute media will dismiss the report as an illegitimate effort of Trump to distract the public’s attention from his 'impeachable offences'," he warns.
Fake 'Whistleblower Complaint' is Null and Void to Begin With
The House Dems' impeachment effort has triggered controversy from day one. The economist, who has kept the finger on the pulse of the development, raised a red flag on 30 September over the "whistleblower complaint" – the trigger for Pelosi's inquiry.
Dr. Roberts pointed out in his blog that the so-called "whistleblower complaint" clearly violated the statute 50 US Code sec. 3033: a) the whistleblower's activity had nothing to do with "intelligence activity", as legally required by the statute; b) the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) does not have the authority to supervise the president's phone calls, which means that the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (ICIG), a subordinate official of the DNI, does not have this authority either; c) "the acceptance of this complaint by the IG was improper under the clear language of the statute".
Thus, according to the economist, the document was "improperly filed, improperly accepted, and the filer was not even a whistleblower as defined in the statute".
"The fake 'whistleblower complaint' is null and void", he says. "The House Democrats can do whatever they want. If the rules get in their way, and they care about rules, which they do not, they can change the rules."
Yet another wake-up call came the same day, 30 September, when the ICIG statement concerning the supposed changes in "Disclosure of Urgent Concern" form was submitted. It said that IG Michael Atkinson had decided that "there were reasonable grounds to believe" that the complaint "appeared credible", although the "whistleblower" was not a direct witness to most of events described.
By that time, however, both the whistleblower complaint and the transcript of a Trump-Zelensky phone talk had already been out, and the discrepancies between the complainant's description of the conversation and the actual call were obvious.
While the Republicans are calling for Speaker Pelosi to hold the impeachment vote, the House Dems have announced that they have a whistleblower with first-hand knowledge of the matter who has claimed that he\she would testify remotely with face and voice obscured.
Trump already released the transcripts of the Ukraine call. What is even the point of the second whistleblower?
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) 6 октября 2019 г.
"What comes out of this remains to be seen. But it will not be political stability in the Empire," Dr. Roberts concludes.
