Coup’s next

Today the House Intelligence Committee holds its first public hearings in the Schiff show. The Schiff show is a sort of preface to the impeachment article(s) that the House will send over to the Senate before the end of the year. Something’s happening here. Why is the House Intelligence Committee holding impeachment hearings in search of a high crime or misdemeanor?

The structure of the production has struck me from the beginning as a variation of the Russia hoax that consumed the first two-plus years of the Trump administration. The Ukraine matter is to usher in the end of the Trump era by hook or by crook.

In his most recent column, this is the case that Victor Davis Hanson makes. Here is how he puts it in the opening of his column:

There are at least 10 reasons why the Dem impeachment “inquiry” is really a coup.

1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.

Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti–Stormy Daniels–Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.

You may want to read the whole thing, but I want to pause here on point 1.

One can observe the repetition in the appearance of David Ignatius in the adjacent post by Paul Mirengoff. Paul observes that Ignatius instructs us to remember that “while Trump was playing politics on Ukraine, people who depended on U.S. military aid were getting killed and wounded.” What a load.

The appearance of David Ignatius is a dead giveaway of the dirty game that is afoot. Recall that it was Ignatius who served as the chosen cutout of the Obama Department of Justice or intelligence community to frame General Flynn. On January 12, 2017, Ignatius published the leak from an unidentified “senior government official” describing Flynn’s communications with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak after Obama announced his ludicrous anti-Russia sanctions. “Naturally,” Andrew McCarthy observes in Ball of Collusion (page 317), “the classified leak was not the crime that interested the journalist; Ignatius instead focused on an imaginary crime–one that just happens to have been under consideration by at that very time in the top tier of the Obama Justice Department: Flynn’s flouting the Logan Act.”

Lee Smith picks up the story from here in The Plot Against the President (pages 139-141). Lee quotes then House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, the hero of his book: “If we’d had a real press on the job, the story would have been about who leaked the intercept and Flynn’s name. Not the fact that he talked to the Russian ambassador; that was his job. A normal media would have pointed out that a crime had been committed and then looked for the criminal who leaked to the press.”

Sharyl Attkisson makes the same point in her own way in the Hill column “The curious timeline for taking down Trump.”

What’s past was prologue.

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