So, they've gone after Trump again which, in terms of its predictability, is roughly on par with the likelihood of bears pooping in the woods or the Pope turning out to be Catholic. The commentariat is split along the usual lines – Leftists do their very best to not know what's really going on while parroting “No-one's above the law” (as per their crib sheets), the RINO class reprises its non-partisan, morally above the fray performance (“It all looks very serious, but it's only fair that Trump gets his say in court”), the Decepticons – the ones who we still think are on our side, even though they're irredeemably full of piss and wind and no action - keep shtum (“don't want to annoy the donors, do we?”) and MAGA reacts with outrage, but takes aim at the wrong target.
One of the most common refrains on the Right is that an attempt to take out a political opponent makes the regime look like a banana republic dictatorship, as if that is a first. The political class have been trying to take Trump out for seven years; they've also been holding January 6th protesters for two years without trial (almost overwhelmingly on a charge of simple trespassing) and they've been doxing and shadow-banning political rivals since the Obama years. Indicting Trump is simply further confirmation of an already existing reality.
But the regime will simply brush off any accusations of political bias. The individuals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome implicitly believe that anything goes in the ongoing struggle to rid themselves of Orange Man Bad – they won't feel any shame. They believe that they are on the side of the angels (if they believed in them), because Trump is manifestly unfit to be President and we should therefore be genuflecting before them, rather than complaining. Leftists don't have the bandwidth required for self-awareness, fairness and tolerance. They're not like us – at times, they almost seem to be another species.
So, yes. They're trying to take Trump out, but they were always going to indict him, no matter what. And they'll indict again, at least twice more; the current prosecutor and another one in Georgia will charge him with offences concerning 'insurrection' on January 6th and 'interfering with elections' or somesuch. If there's one thing we should have realized by now, it's this – they don't know when to stop and, even if they did, they'd still resist calling a halt because they don't care what the public thinks and at least some of them are so embedded in their echo chamber that they cannot understand the effect of their actions. This was exemplified by Doctor Jill's bewilderment when she found out that Trump's supporters aren't responding as they should:
“They don’t care about the indictment. So that’s a little shocking, I think.”(1)
I suppose it might be were it not the latest in a very long line of weaponized, inchoate lawfare tactics directed at Trump himself and anyone else in his orbit that is deemed dangerous to the existing political order. Any vestige of trust in the organs of state – particularly in the Department of Justice and the FBI – has long since dissipated.
The following is an attempt to provide some context and (eventually, in part three) to unravel the substance of the charges against Trump, which have been much misrepresented across almost all media. It may not surprise you to discover that, like Bragg's indictment in New York, the prosecutor is relying on a 'novel legal theory', otherwise known as prejudicial indictments that have no basis in existing law. First, though, I'm going to zoom out a little and establish some context.
Over the years, it's easy to forget the detail and the range of the attacks that Trump has already been subjected to, but the sheer number of them and either their obvious lack of merit and/or the transparent malfeasance on the part of the plotters speaks to both their desperation and their lack of perspective. Where there should be patience there is, instead, hysteria. To paraphrase Andrew Breitbart, politics is downstream from personality and the progressive Left is pathological.
But, although Trump ran as a Republican, he has only been fully committed to the party since 2012. Prior to that he had two brief spells as a member, but he was also a member of the Reform Party (centrist), the Independence Party (vaguely right of center) and he was a Democrat between 2001 and 2009.(2) He appears to have been politically middle of the road until Obama started the Democrats down the path of radicalism. But manifestly Trump, while of the establishment class, is not an establishment Republican. He ran as a Republican and won the 2016 nomination, but that wasn't the Party plan. He gate-crashed the primary process and dismantled the field. Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz and several others – all deeply embedded party figures – were the anointed ones, not Trump.
From the outset, he has exposed the divide between the party and the voter base. The party didn't seem to know what to do with this outsider. The best outcome would have been a loss in the presidential election; Trump's political ambitions could then have been justifiably consigned to history. That outcome was certainly the expected one at the time, even by Trump himself and the journey that had begun with Obama was supposed to continue under eight years of Hillary – however, in the Uniparty's hubris (of a similar order to Cameron's over Brexit, in June of the same year) they vastly underestimated both Trump's appeal and the degree to which the voting public was already in the mood to shrug off the globalist yoke.
If they cheated in the 2016 election, they didn't do enough of it and, in truth, industrial level ballot fraud was considerably more difficult in pre-pandemic times. The phenomenon of mail-in voting has changed that particular landscape for good, one suspects. In any event, not only did Trump win handily, he carried the down ballot races with him and achieved majorities in both Houses of Congress (241-194 in the lower House and 52-48 in the Senate)(3), while the Republican Party apparatchiks shrugged apologetically. Trump had successfully used the party machinery again the party establishment and they couldn't work out how to stop him.
Democrats were predictably apoplectic. Instead of an uninterrupted waltz on the dark side, they now faced the reality of at least two long years in the shadows, with only traitorous RINOs and the administrative state able to sabotage Trump's agenda. More galling even than that was the fact that this uncouth disruptor, a man who wasn't backwards in coming forwards, had bested them. The prospect of being called out for four straight years by the President of the United States was unappealing in the extreme. And so, they went on offence instead.
They decided that they would hamstring him by engendering a permanent state of political warfare (with the assistance of their chums across the aisle) and systemically undermine Trump's manifesto. Then, in 2018, they would ensure that they captured at least one half of Congress and stymie the rest of his single term. There was absolutely no way they were going to let an eight year roadblock form. And so, the multi-faceted coup d'état was launched, well before he was even inaugurated. In fact, the effort to stop Trump (and boost Hillary) preceded the election itself.
Hillary Clinton, for reasons best known to herself (but which can be surmised if one examines what the result was rather than taking a punt on her intent), decided that using government equipment for her official communications whilst Secretary of State under Obama was not for her. Instead, she used a private server and a private email address. As one might expect, this was contrary to policy:
"It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario—short of nuclear winter—where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business.”(4)
So says a former official at NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration). It's not against the law, per se, provided all the work material is preserved by the relevant agency. Government employees cannot destroy or remove relevant records; private servers can only be used with permission. Classified information was stored on the server, which was (at least initially) not properly encrypted and vulnerable to backing attempts. It is known that a hacker from Serbia scanned the entire server twice or more.(5)
So far, so typically Clintonesque; rules are for thee, not me. She was able to obviate the requirements of FOIA (the Freedom Of Information Act) and shield her official duties from public and government scrutiny, while retaining the ability to delete all or part of any correspondence that may have incriminated her. One must, I think, assume that this was a major part of the reason that she adopted the methodology in the first place.
The existence of the server became publicly known on March 2nd, 2015 and a select committee issued a subpoena two days later. Despite this, by the end of the month over 30,000 'personal' emails had been wiped from the server. Clinton claimed that she hadn't sent any classified material (or received any) via her personal email account, an assertion that must surely be transparently false given the nature of her job and the American mania for over-classification. Sure enough, the tardy FBI investigation that finally cranked into gear later in the year established that, of the emails they were able to retrieve, 110 contained information that was classified at the time, 65 contained information marked “Secret” and over 20 were marked “Top Secret”.(6)
Other sources disclosed that emails marked SAP (special access programs), a level of classification above “Top Secret” were also looted from Clinton's server by Russian FSB analysts,(7) not something that the FBI was interested in addressing because it would undermine the agency's justification for its eventual decision on whether to prosecute. So, she stored classified information on an unsecured device without authority, deleted a large tranche of it without oversight and was inevitably hacked (the email address she used included the “clinton” server identity). Above “Top Secret” information was obtained by at least one foreign government. Oh, and Obama knew that she was using her personal email for government business – he emailed her eighteen times.(8)
The smoldering scandal threatened to ignite into a political firestorm when, in the midst of her misfiring primary campaign against Bernie Sanders, Wikileaks published 50,547 pages of documents hacked from her email server from her time as Secretary of State, somewhat undermining any public claim that the network had been secure.(9) Hillary was unimpressed and, sans evidence, blamed Russia, drawing a direct line to Putin's alleged good buddy Trump. Julian Assange says otherwise (he implicates an acquaintance of Clinton, a man who was subsequently murdered) but no matter.(10)(11) And so, the hares were off and running, behind the scenes initially.
Clinton abused protocols, broke federal laws as to the retention of documents and, in an ironic echo of the current indictment against Trump, genuinely committed a breach of the Espionage Act through gross negligence. Her apologists prefer to downplay the negligence aspect:
“...the prevailing legal understanding of “gross negligence” among legal experts is what really matters in terms of determining criminality. And legal experts don’t generally define “gross negligence” simply as being careless or doing something stupid (like sharing classified emails via an unsecured server) that might have caused a national security threat, but didn’t actually do so.”(12)
And the Director of the FBI (James Comey), the place-man responsible for exonerating any distinguished member of the ruling class, preferred to dwell on her alleged lack of intent, despite the fact that firstly, the Act doesn't require intent and, secondly, that intent and gross negligence are polar opposites:
“But while intent might be relevant in terms of punishment, it does not change the fact that as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, then Senator Clinton had clearances for classified information for years before becoming Secretary of State. She knew the rules and yet as Secretary she handled classified information carelessly after a deliberate decision to circumvent normal procedures for its safeguarding, thus making it vulnerable to foreign intelligence, as well as to criminal hackers.”(13)
But, crucially, she was the Democrats presidential candidate and she was standing against that incarnation of fascism, Donald Trump. This fact alone immunized her against prosecution, because justice in America is dependent upon who you are, not what you've done. And so, the FBI stated that while there was no “clear evidence” (an interesting choice of words, which infers that there was evidence – an objective fact – but that it was considered unclear – a subjective opinion) that Clinton intended to violate the law, she was “extremely careless in the handling of very sensitive, highly classified information”. Despite setting out a prima facie case, Comey was of the opinion “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such the case”.(14) Or, loosely translated, “no prosecutor who wanted to continue being a prosecutor would touch it with a barge pole”.
And so, instead of criminal referrals and copious media discussion of her patent unsuitability for the office of President, we were treated to another rendition of Swamp politics, where the anointed get a free pass. The FBI, an agency that was not, at that time, particularly prominent in public life announced itself on the national stage and immediately showed itself to be partisan. But the public didn't know the half of it; in addition to giving Hillary a leg up, Comey and co. were also spying on her rival's campaign, launching undeserved investigations that relied on uncorroborated allegations (which were never corroborated, for the simple reason that they were false) that had been provided by Clinton's campaign. Yes, the infamous Russiagate – the running sore that was the Uniparty's instrument of choice for the best part of three years, that resulted in three separate reports, all of which revealed nothing other than FBI corruption, Leftist hypocrisy and mendacity (not exactly a revelation) and Clinton's sleaziness and amorality (ditto).
One of the ways in which the ruling class seeks to gum up the works if events are not moving in the approved direction is to appoint a Special Counsel. This usually allows the DoJ to prevent disclosure of any and all information that might be within the purview of the relevant Congressional committee on the grounds that it might compromise an ongoing criminal investigation. In recent times, we've had Mueller, Durham, Smith and Hur. Mueller was tasked with investigating the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, Durham was tasked with investigating Mueller, Smith is the latest lawfare hitman attempting to put the former President behind bars and Hur?
Well, not that you'd know it, but the latter is supposed to be investigating Biden's blatant flouting of the law with regard to the classified documents that he liberated from both the Senate and the Vice President's office in the White House from 1974 onwards.(15) Of the four Counsels, the only one to go AWOL is Hur. Nobody knows what he's doing, but it'll almost certainly be nothing. He was only appointed to give the impression that both Trump and Biden were being treated equally before the law, but that was always a transparent ruse that has been duly exposed.(16)
Mueller, an ex Director of the FBI (2001-2013) took nearly two years to come up with diddly squat, to the utter chagrin of Democrats who appeared to believe that the President-elect was not within his rights to liaise with foreign governments. They also placed their faith in a fabricated dossier targeting Trump, financed by Clinton and treated by the FBI as some sort of holy writ (when they knew of its compromised provenance), and then expressed outrage when their guy (which Mueller patently was) couldn't come up with anything substantive. This, despite the fact that, as with the Clinton 'investigation', the degree of latitude that would have been extended to him was huge – anything that might be grounds for a phony impeachment would have done just fine.
In fact, anything vaguely critical could have been spun; but there was nothing to spin. The Left were reduced to claiming that the report didn't exonerate the President, even though that was not its purpose although, generally speaking, if you spend two years and millions of dollars targeting an individual and come up empty, it would not be unreasonable to say that the individual was indeed exonerated. But, to this day (and judging by the farcical Wikipedia page on the topic), they still can't accept that Russiagate is a damp squib (17) and, crucially, Mueller's disinclination to full-throatedly assert Trump's innocence left an opening that would be rapidly exploited.
That's not to say that the FBI and Mueller didn't go after as many Trump associates as they could. By my back-of-a fag-packet calculations, the FBI and the DoJ have targeted at least eleven Trump associates and have jailed several of them. This campaign started before the former president took office, continued while he was in office and is active to this day. Many of the alleged offences are technical in nature (known as process crimes, often alleged lying to the FBI about 'crimes' that don't exist) and the investigations are a clear example of partisan prosecution. But they had nothing on Trump himself.
The true extent of what the FBI had been up to was partially revealed by the next report off the assembly line. This was compiled by the Inspector General and is known as the Horowitz Report, which also took the better part of two years to complete, coming out in December 2019. The IG's job is to keep order in the DoJ – the FBI operates under the DoJ's jurisdiction – not to provide an overarching investigation into the whys and wherefores of political bias. The important parts of the report deal with whether the FBI followed its own guidelines and whether it acted within the law of the land in launching as many as four investigations against Trump.
The answer to both those questions is an emphatic “no”. They obtained warrants to spy on members of Trump's campaign from the secretive FISA courts (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts) by lying; on one application relating to Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser, the FBI made 17 “errors”, all of which favoured the Clinton campaign. Significant facts were withheld from the court, others were altered. The Horowitz Report found that there were
“...countless examples of corruption and deceit committed by employees throughout the FBI and DoJ confirming the investigation against Trump was aggressive, politically tainted and bore no fruit.”(18)
And that
“...the FBI, without doubt, corrupted the FISA Court process and obtained warrants to spy on an American it had no right to obtain. It obtained those warrants by using false information supplied by a duplicitous agent of the DNC and the Clinton campaign...The initial FISA warrant was obtained with tainted information and the renewals were obtained with outright doctored and falsified evidence.”(19)
These findings were in addition to other activities that were already public knowledge. The US government, under Obama, wiretapped Trump's campaign manager, both before and after the 2016 election, for instance.(20) The FBI utilised other “top intelligence sources” who actively spied on the Trump campaign.(21) However, we had to wait for the Durham Report before the full extent of the FBI's corruption was set out, with citations to prove it.
Durham managed to outlast the other investigations by a couple of years; his report only landed last month, a full four years in the making and seven years after the fact.(22) That's how long the country had to wait for a halfway credible account of a political witch hunt. On the one hand, it follows a long tradition of 'bombshell' reports that fail to recommend indictments for anyone, despite detailing gross negligence and corruption among both FBI and DoJ personnel. Usually, as in this case, no plausible explanation is given for this judicial reticence. Plus, if a prosecutor enjoys a reputation as a straight shooter (a massive “if” in the current climate), they must be tightly constrained by the scope of the investigation or they might be tempted to go off the reservation and look under the 'wrong' rocks. Something like this, in fact:
“I made it clear that neither President Obama nor Vice President Biden were in Durham’s crosshairs.”(23)
So said Trump's Attorney General, William Barr – ex-CIA, Deep State gatekeeper and firm believer in the unitary executive theory, which holds that the President possesses the power to control the entire federal executive branch. Quite why he would have taken the trouble to exempt a president from scrutiny when, in his view, pretty much everything a President does can be justified, was never explained.
So, Durham was somewhat hamstrung from the outset, able to take a blowtorch to the minions, but forbidden from landing any blows on the chosen ones; par for the course in a corrupt system. He was, therefore, able to describe the conduct of the various officials he caught in his net, but unable to devote any resources to answer the most important question of all – who put them up to it? Nonetheless, the professional conservative class, in their squishy, morally upright way held that:
“Any fair reading of the report itself shows that it is objective, fact-based, and provides not only new facts, but paints a devastating full picture of the degree to which senior leaders in the FBI, private industry, the Clinton campaign, and the media worked to push an utterly false narrative to help elect Clinton and kneecap Trump.”(24)
It was already known that the Clinton campaign had secretly paid Fusion GPS $1,020,000 to produce a dossier framing Trump for colluding with the Russians. Fusion GPS then paid an ex MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, $168,000 to produce it.(25) It was also known that her campaign underwrote the payments to the underlying sources, some of them Russian intelligence personnel.
“So, we have a U.S. presidential candidate, a former Secretary of State, paying an ex- British spy to, in turn, pay top officials in the Kremlin — with campaign money secretly funneled through that former spy — to provide information she can use in her negative campaign —- info that is largely false.”(26)
Which would seem to be an open and shut case of Hillary colluding with the Russians, would it not? Instead, the Durham Report uncovers the fact that an FBI analyst tumbled to the possibility that some of the information the FBI received from Hillary might have been compromised by the Russians (no shit, Sherlock) and that the original opening of the investigation (named Crossfire Hurricane) was also predicated on yet more unreliable and uncorroborated intelligence.
Not only did the FBI seize on whatever scraps they could find to (unjustly) investigate Trump – they also slow-walked and dead-ended investigations into the Clinton Foundation, of which there were several.(27) There was some suggestion that the closeness of the upcoming election played a part. Obviously, this was not a courtesy extended to Trump, who was instead damaged by the public revelation of the investigation into him by a “senior law enforcement” official. In addition, when the FBI thought that Hillary's campaign might unknowingly be compromised by foreign influences, they briefed and advised her. No such briefing was even contemplated for Trump or his campaign.
When US intelligence services, during the monitoring of their Russian counterparts, picked up on information that Hillary had approved a plan to vilify Trump by planting false information claiming interference by the Russians (on a specific date, July 26th), the FBI ignored it, despite knowing that, on face value, it completely undermined the premise of their investigation. Durham states that the FBI
“...failed to act on what should have been—when combined with other, incontrovertible facts—a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election.”(28)
But not because other top leadership in the intelligence 'community' didn't see it for what it was; the CIA Director immediately briefed Obama, Biden, Comey and others. Comey and his leadership team then deliberately withheld this exculpatory information from most of the members of the Crossfire Hurricane team. As previously noted, they didn't feel that they needed to trouble the FISA court with it either. Instead, they reported the contents of the Steele Dossier as corroborated facts, despite knowing that to be untrue. The bias against Trump and for Hillary (who most seem to have believed would win the Presidency) was overwhelming.(29)
It takes Durham 306 pages to detail the FBI's “errors”. While he took two conspirators to trial, he lost both in DC courtrooms. In addition, the disciplinary offences that are enumerated in his report, going back seven years, have been largely unaddressed and will surely continue to be. No doubt he is able to say that investigating the effect that the FBI's conduct had on the result of the 2016 election was beyond his remit; likewise, the catastrophic consequences of FBI malfeasance on the lives of innocents in the Trump milieu.
Crossfire Hurricane served a political purpose, even if the big fish could not be landed. To be clear - the FBI and the DoJ interfered in an election process and, when they discovered that their thumb on that particular scale had applied insufficient pressure, they pivoted to a campaign that undermined a democratically elected President. This campaign tied the Trump administration up for the best part of three years. Durham could neither locate the instigators (no doubt handicapped by his remit) nor adequately punish the downstream malefactors, due to his own restrictive interpretation of his already compromised mandate.
But back in the autumn of 2016, it was still dirty business as usual; Hillary was the nailed-on victor in the November election and the FBI was doing what it clearly does – run routine interference for the elites. There was no hint of the maelstrom to come. At least, it doesn't appear that there was any trepidation on the part of the DC insiders. An establishment candidate had always inherited the presidency since Bush the Elder's time (by virtue of both candidates in successive elections being part of the Uniparty team), a span of twenty eight years and, as late as a fortnight prior to the big day, all the polls had Hillary ahead by between 2 to 12 points.(30) Even Trump's data team reckoned they only had a 15% chance of winning.(31) All seemed well with the elite world.
Figure 1
At this point, the ever media shy Comey re-inserted himself into the narrative. Having washed his hands of Hillary's manifest misconduct in Servergate, he now maintained that the FBI had found emails in another case that appeared pertinent to the mothballed Clinton investigation, so he felt it was his duty to immediately inform Congress (and, inevitably, the voting public).(32) It seems likely that Comey was engaged in both an ass-covering exercise and an attempt to legitimise the 'inevitable' Clinton victory – nobody could subsequently claim that Hillary's election was illegitimate, when she'd won despite his disclosure. The Left likes to pretend that this miscalculation was the event that torpedoed Hillary's campaign, but this seems highly unlikely. The Clintons' reputation for grifting and sharp practice was already well established; the exposure of yet one more example, which had already been unconvincingly whitewashed, wasn't going to hole the campaign beneath the waterline.
The polling tends to support this latter interpretation, but to acknowledge as much would be to give other, more credible reasons oxygen; such as the fact that Hillary is an unlikable character, or the possibility that Trump, divisive as he is, was what voters felt they needed (rather than another Swamp creature) and that this was the first chance they had had to make such a choice in more than a generation. And so, to the Democrats, it was all Comey's fault.
Figure 2
I get the distinct feeling that the political class only started taking Trump seriously when he won the election. That includes Republicans, as well as Democrats; neither of the parties top leadership expected or desired a Trump victory although, as the President-elect had also inspired down-ballot Republican majorities in Congress, the GOP could at least look forward to being able to reward their donors – hopefully. For the Democrats, shock swiftly metastasized into the type of amoral, no-holds-barred behavior with which we are now all too familiar. They just could not understand how a man they despise had, nonetheless, been elected. There was no moratorium, no self reflection, no inquest into how their obvious disconnect with the voters. Just anger at being thwarted by the Deplorables.
This absence of humility leads to them make statements that clearly make sense to them, but not to anybody else. Their feelings always matter more than the voter and the democratic process. So, they first targeted the Electoral College. According to Rep Himes, they had a duty to prevent the Russians staging a soft coup through Trump, Putin's proxy:
“This man is not only unqualified to be president, he’s a danger to the republic. I do think the Electoral College should choose someone other than Donald Trump to be president. That will lead to a fascinating legal issue, but I would rather have a legal issue, a complicated legal problem, than to find out the White House was now the Kremlin’s chief ally.”(33)
Trump had won 306 electors, Clinton 232. The Leftist activists attempted to unite 135 Republicans and 135 Democrats behind a compromise candidate (the execrable Mitt Romney was a possibility) – they failed, despite the inevitable support of Hollywood.(34) A handful of electors beclowned themselves by voting for random people who hadn't even been on the ballot, but the final tally was 304-227 in Trump's favor.
The resistance campaign was now the responsibility of House Democrats. Eleven separate members objected eleven times, citing complaints for which there was no evidence whatsoever - “Russian interference” and “massive voter suppression” (the latter a favorite Leftist trope which, loosely translated, means “we weren't allowed to insert fake ballots into the count”) were commonly cited - but, without the additional support of a senator all were doomed to failure.(35) Interestingly, four years later, nearly all the objectors had experienced some kind of Damascene conversion. This time around, despite clear evidence of massive voter fraud, objecting was apparently wholly illegitimate:
"Trump and Congressional Republicans continue to display their disdain for the Constitution by challenging the Electoral College vote count while the world watches in horror...Today, some Republicans in the House and Senate will make a mockery of our democracy in their attempts to undo the will of the people."(36)
Trump was inaugurated on January 20th 2017. Crossfire Hurricane was still being propped up by the FBI and in May, it was taken over by Mueller who, as already noted, managed to keep it on life support until 2019; not by investigating the Russian connection, but by expending investigative resources on a criminal “obstruction of justice” witch hunt against the President who had had the temerity to fire Comey on 9th May. Prior to that event, he had asked the FBI Director whether one of Comey's targets (Michael Flynn) ought to be investigated at all. In a normal world, there is nothing controversial about either of these matters as
“...the president is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States...Thus, the ultimate authority to decide whether to conduct an investigation and prosecution under federal law rests with the president.”(34) And “...The president’s dismissal of subordinate executive officials (such as the FBI director), and his exercise of prosecutorial discretion (by merely weighing in on whether a person—here, Flynn—deserves to be investigated), are constitutional acts that are not judicially reviewable.”(37)
But, as we shall again see later, the office of the President is considered subordinate to the administrative state – by the administrative state. Especially in Trump's case. I imagine that previous conflict between the two entities had been of the skirmishing variety, as presidents from both sides of the aisle were largely in lock-step with the federal bureaucracy. Now, however, there was a disturbance in the force and, rather than backing off and acknowledging the natural order of things, the Feds were flexing and doubling down. Unsuccessfully, once more - even Mueller couldn't fashion an indictment.
But, ultimately, spectacularly successful in other ways. It became clear to Trump, as time passed, that the FBI/Mueller probe had morphed into a fishing expedition, persecuting himself and those around him; not for anything to do with Russiagate, but for unrelated ancillary matters. The bureaucratic blob was resisting in other ways, also. Leaks of classified material increased exponentially and, by August 2017, it was endemic.(38) It became so bad that the Attorney General felt compelled to establish a separate unit tasked with investigating them.(39)
Trump had also been placed in the stranglehold that always accompanies a Special Counsel investigation and which is clearly a feature, rather than a bug. Mueller could leak all he wanted to the media, but the President was prevented from declassifying documents that would have revealed the extent of the false narratives being propagated by the Fourth Estate, at the Special Counsel's bidding. In September 2018, just before the mid-terms, the administrative state once again stamped its foot and insisted that it was first among equals.
Essentially, the overall scheme works like this; an uncorroborated smear job, paid for by Trump's political opponent, is eagerly seized upon by the FBI who start an investigation, contrary to their own guidelines. The DoJ takes the investigation on, allegedly seeking to establish whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, despite the aforementioned lack of evidence for same.
The Department then appoints a Special Prosecutor, whose investigation leaks copiously to the media, constructing a false narrative (we know this from the Horowitz and Durham reports). When the President seeks to counter the narrative, the Attorney General informs him that the President can't declassify documents under the purview of the Special Prosecutor's investigation of himself, because he would be guilty of “obstruction”. This was the DoJ's September Surprise for Trump. So much for the unitary executive theory favored by Barr.
“In essence the DOJ and FBI, along with white house counsel and a collaborating senate and media, kept President Trump from declassifying and releasing documents by threatening him with impeachment and/or prosecution if he defied their authority. The threats created a useful Sword of Damocles, and blocked Trump from acting to make documents public.”(40)
Had Trump defied this advice and insisted on declassification, he would still have faced an uphill battle. While the President can declassify anything, he doesn't actually do it himself. He asks for a document to enter the declassification process and officials within that process (from the intelligence apparatus) can refuse to sign off. Given that the majority of the documentation that Trump wished to declassify would have revealed the ongoing scheming that was plaguing his administration, there would have been extensive pushback. If he wished to remove the blockage, he would have had to fire the blocker and keep firing subsequent blockers until he found an individual who would comply.(41)
Politically, this course of action is untenable. The media narrative would be that Trump was an out of control tyrant trying to sabotage the investigation into him. He had to wait for Mueller to finish, which he did in April 2019. Barr had become the new Attorney General in February 2019 and in May he approached Trump and suggested a way around the impasse. If Trump delegated his declassification power to the AG, Barr could expedite the release of documents relating to the targetting of Trump and the involvement of the Clinton campaign. After all, Barr had his very own Special Council (Durham) looking into that matter, now. Trump agreed, on May 23rd.(42) The President was trusting the highest law enforcement officer in the country to do the right thing and expose the injustice to which he had been subjected for the best part of three years.
Instead, Barr did Trump's legs. He used Durham's “ongoing criminal investigation” as a justification of non-release. And then, with the threat of impeachment looming over the President, he administered the coup de grâce; he gave Durham carte blanche to broaden the investigation hugely and directed that any report that resulted was not to be revealed to Congress until after the 2020 presidential election. Et voila! First, he betrayed Trump – then he ensured that the President couldn't defend himself in the court of public opinion before the next election.(43) A double whammy administered by the blob. Trump still managed to take some of the relevant documents with him upon his ouster in 2021.(44) His possession of those documents is a factor that will loom large in the denouement to this account.
Other parts of the plan were implemented simultaneously. The border wall, a key element in Trump's mandate, was sabotaged by Democrat and Republican alike. Discretionary spending budgets were routinely held hostage and partially gutted and the Democrats made plans to wrest control of at least one part of Congress and with it the ability to transform the last two years of Trump's term into, effectively, an extended lame duck presidency.
The 2018 mid-terms have been largely forgotten and were not widely analysed, even at the time. However, the discovery of blatant fraud and irregular voting patterns in subsequent elections in 2020 (particularly) and 2022 gives pause, notwithstanding the fact that most systemic alterations to election infrastructure occurred during the 'pandemic'. Given the lengths to which the blob had already gone, is it not reasonable to surmise that the mid-terms themselves might be vulnerable to its machinations?
Control of the House was the big prize, because that meant control of the House committees and the ability to launch all-out warfare on Trump' administration. It was already widely known that they were going to attempt to impeach the President, in the event that they took the House and simultaneously try and throw as much sand in the administration's gears as they possibly could.
Although less than five years ago, the mid-terms took place in different times. The constant drumbeat of fake news about anything and everything that could hurt Trump's favorability (especially the Russia collusion hoax) combined with the President's inability to defend himself adequately, resulted in a Democrat lead of ten points in polling – allegedly.(45) Other, less partisan organisations, had the parties neck and neck.(46) Even the Democrats weren't predicting a “blue wave”.(47)
But, looking back at the commentary in the run-up to the election – and even in the aftermath – there was very little expectation that the election would be (or was) crooked. And the public seemed to be more accepting of the mainstream narrative on Trump; after the 2020 abomination, that is no longer the case.
But Leftists are not adherents to the 'let nature takes its course' mentality and, after the debacle in November 2016, it's hard to believe that they would sit idly by and trust the will of the people. So, are there any anomalies worthy of note? Of course there are and, taken together, they point to circumstantial evidence of election fraud – it's not possible to be any more definitive than that, because the investigative work hasn't been done. However, since the 1950s, turnout at mid-term elections has hovered around 40%; in 2018, that number was 13% higher, the highest for 45 years.(48) It seems like a lot of Millenials and members of Generation Z were galvanized by the glamour of the mid-terms. Or, just possibly, this group didn't suddenly nearly double in size, at all. Older people tend to vote in person, so the younger cohort's mail-in ballots (which were not going to be used by the actual voter) were more reliably capable of manipulation.
Figure 3
Some of the biggest turnouts came from swing states, including four that would become notorious two years later (Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and two-thirds of the states that would subsequently 'vote' for Biden registered above average turnout.(49) The gain of 40 House seats, to give them control with 235 was the Democrats largest gain since the mid seventies.(50) This, while losing two Senate seats to consolidate Republican control of the upper chamber. The last time the incumbent president's party lost seats in the House while gaining seats in the Senate was 1970 and Nixon only lost twelve seats, not forty. So, a few anomalies already.
With the benefit of hindsight, there are other obvious tells that indicate foul play. One of them is the delayed count. In 2008 Obama beat McCain and only two states were uncalled by midnight on the night polls closed. In 2012, when Obama beat Romney, only three states were similarly unaccounted for on the night. Even in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary, the result was known during election night. In 2018, one Senate race and eleven House races were still uncalled days later. The Independent said it best, albeit unironically, in its headline of 13th November:
Midterms: Late results reveal Democrats 'blue wave' as party secures best election performance since 1974 (51)
For context, 1974's mid-terms were held just after Watergate and the downfall of a Republican president. Nobody was keen to look too closely into why the races in California and Washington (in particular) took so long to decide. If they had, they'd have noticed that those states were trial-running no-excuse mail-in voting, a practice that is illegal in 70% of the world's democracies (due to its vulnerability to fraud), but one that was to have a decisive effect in the next two elections.
If one drills down into individual Congressional races, the oddities multiply. Across all races, the average swing to the Democrats (in races that they won) was around 7%, not counting the extremes – and there were some extremes. Of the 43 seats they flipped, 27 of them recorded a 15% swing in favour of the Left. Two of them, NJ-11 and NJ-02 were 30% plus. The majority of these seats had been solidly Republican; eight of them by 20 points or more and a further eighteen by between 10 to 20 points. Thirteen of these 'victories' are very difficult to quantify.
Seat 2018 Swing 2012 2014 2016
NJ-03 50.0 – 48.7 D+22 R+9 R+10 R+20
NM-02 50.9 – 49.1 D+27 R+18 R+29 R+25
SC-01 50.7 – 49.3 D+25 R+28 - R+25
VA-02 51.1 – 48.9 D+25 R+8 R+18 R+23
VA-07 50.4 – 48.4 D+17 R+17 R+24 R+15
CA-21 50.4 – 49.6 D+14 R+16 R+16 R+13
CA-39 51.6 – 48.4 D+17 R+16 R+37 R+14
CA-45 52.1 – 47.9 D+21 R+17 R+30 R+17
GA-06 50.5 – 49.5 D+24 R+29 R+32 R+23
OK-05 50.7 – 49.3 D+21 R+21 R+24 R+20
IA-03 49.3 – 47.2 D+15 R+9 R+11 R+14
MI-08 50.6 – 46.8 D+20 R+21 R+13 R+17
Table 1
There were a number of other near misses, when vast swings in the Democrats' favor didn't quite carry the day, and five seats where the swing flipped the seat to the Democrats the seat by over 20%. If the majority of the seats gained had been races that had historically been near toss-ups, the results would have had a more organic quality. As it is, they reek of preconceived manipulation; of a cadre of seats that were targeted, with nothing left to chance. Late calls, tight races and extravagant swings are all indicators of fraud, particularly when a combination of those factors in present in a single race. There is no similar trail with the Republican slate.
My supposition is that, generally speaking, fraud in House seats may be a little easier to pull off. The number of extra ballots that must be manufactured is smaller than in a state wide election and there may only be a need for a single 'Fraud HQ'. Certainly, of the twelve races in the above table that were contested in both 2014 and 2018, the numbers tell the story. Across the country, voter turnout in 2014 was 36.7%, 13.3% lower than in 2018. The Republicans in these dozen races did pretty well; in 2018, their vote was up 22% on average. Not that it did them any good, because the turnout was up a whopping 51% overall, nearly four times the nationwide average.
The Democrats therefore snuck through in every race and the Republicans did diddly squat – even after the fact - apart from timorously racing their hand in California, where the late counts (all of which went against the Party) couldn't be ignored. Even then, the rhetoric was predictably pathetic. The House Majority Leader, Paul Ryan, said:
“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”(52)
Not an admission that the man running a national campaign for 435 seats ought to be making, especially as it was legal in California where more than 10% of those campaigns took place. Mail-in voting and delayed counts worked a treat in the Golden State – the Republicans were down six by the time the smoke cleared and the Democrats had a brand new strategy that worked. Now all they had to do was get it implemented nationwide. More on that shortly.
The assumption, among those who have not yet realized how the game is played, is that the Republican Party must have been disappointed to lose the lower House. If they were, they hid it well. Tactically, it was a good outcome, not a poor one. It allowed the Democrats to take up the slack and mount a direct assault on the President, while the Republicans could take the weight off for a while and pretend to resist the onslaught. Four years of internecine guerrilla warfare is a lot harder to disguise than two; if the Democrats could somehow get rid of Trump, it could benefit the establishments of both parties.
If the inferences I have so far drawn are correct, the lengths to which the blob will go to remove a challenge to its authority are extreme. If the mid-terms were destined to be a foregone conclusion, the likelihood was that the Democrats in the House would hit the ground running. Control of the relevant committees – the ones with subpoena power – passed to them in January 2019 and they wasted no time in pursuing their only real objective of the next two years; the impeachment of the President.
The Mueller Report dropped three months later, on April 18th. To the Democrats, who may well have had advance notice as to its contents, the headline finding of non-collusion between the Trump team and the Russians mattered not. What mattered was the following sentence from Volume II:
“The evidence we obtained by the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”(53)
This is not a form of words that had ever been used in any previous DoJ Special Counsel investigation, but Trump is subject to a different standard than others. Mueller himself admitted as much whilst being questioned under oath in Congress; apparently, this was “a unique situation”.(54) Which was true, as far as it went, but the uniqueness of the situation was of another order entirely. Instead of being presumed innocent , an outcome that everyone else would have enjoyed (given the lack of evidence to the contrary), the gratuitous insertion of those phrases weaponized the report.
Volume II, an evidence-free op ed on Trump's alleged “obstruction of justice”, handed off the baton to House Democrats and gave them the excuse to go after Trump instead and, given the one-off nature of Mueller's declaration, one can only assume that this outcome was fully intended. Especially as there is copious evidence of collusion between Democrats and the Mueller team prior to the Congressional hearings.(55)
But they couldn't specifically target the Russiagate construct – they could refuse to accept that Trump was innocent and trumpet their opinions to the mockingbird media, but they needed another manufactured cause célèbre if they were to keep the administration off balance and Trump himself continually under the pump. In preparation for the inevitable impeachment, they had changed House rules in January 2019.(56) In due course, House impeachment rules and committee rules were also changed in ways that facilitated Democrat plans.(57)(58)
Despite that, when the moment came, they still couldn't get it done because, being Democrats, their eyes are perpetually too big for their bellies; they want their preferred (unjust) outcome so badly that they simply push ahead and violate their own rules in ways that become too obvious to ignore, thus forcing the reliably supine Republicans to defend the President they loath, or risk their place at the trough at their next election, where they stand a good chance of being skewered by their base.
Before that failure, Rep Green – a Democrat from Texas – introduced impeachment articles three times, the last in August of 2019, all of which alleged that Trump was “"unfit to represent" American values of "decency and morality" and "respectability and civility."”(59) The ninety five members who voted “aye” represented the intellectually challenged wing of the House, given that civility is not synonymous with “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanours” - the standard required for impeachment. It's entirely conceivable, however, that Green was allowed to humiliate himself as a way of normalizing the process with voters.
And so, by the time the real effort was underway, impeachment of a sitting president was no longer an alien concept, notwithstanding the fact that only two former presidents had ever suffered that indignity, neither of whom was removed from office. The process itself is straightforward and not overly taxing. It starts in the lower House, with a formal impeachment inquiry. If the Judiciary Committee finds there are sufficient grounds, its members write and pass articles of impeachment which are then voted on by the House. A simple majority formally impeaches the President, but it takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove him. The prize, for the Democrats, was too tempting by half – no prison term, unfortunately, but the automatic removal from office and, by virtue of a simple majority vote, a life ban from an future government position.(60)
There was never any doubt in conservative circles that the Democrats would impeach Trump. This certitude preceded the identification of any specific pretext, because the actual conduct that would eventually be the subject of the complaint was always going to be secondary; the Democrats were working from the end backwards and, in typical fashion, they weren't prepared to wait for a halfway suitable excuse. They wanted to control the entire process, to keep it in house. And so it came to pass.
On July 25th 2019, President Trump had a telephone conversation with someone who is now very familiar to us, President Zelensky of Ukraine. Listening in on the call was the White House Ukraine expert, Lt. Col Vindman, a member of the National Security Council. A subsequent transcript of the call, which was courteous in nature, reveals that Trump asked for Zelensky's help in two matters; firstly, in the retrieval of a computer server that the Democratic National Congress alleged had been hacked prior to the 2016 election and which was now in Ukraine (Trump seemed to think that the Russiagate fiction had had its genesis in Ukraine) and, secondly, in finding out why a Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden's role at Burisma had been kiboshed - Hunter had been gifted a directorship for no apparent treason, giving the appearance of trading on the family name.
That was it – importantly, come the impeachment, neither the alleged quid pro quo, nor any other form of coercion by Trump could be proven. Others listening live testified that there were only favors requested.(61) This was in marked contrast to the current leader of the free world who, in January 2018, bragged about threatening to withhold $1 billion of aid from Ukraine unless they fired the very same prosecutor. Biden made this admission on tape:
"I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and Yanukovych that they would take action against the state prosecutor and they didn't. So they were walking out of the press conference, and I said we were not going to give them the $1 billion....well, son of a b**** ... he got fired."(62)
That would be the very definition of a quid pro quo, would it not? But that juicy morsel never got further than alternative media; Trump was to be the target, not Biden. To that end, Vindman took it upon himself to provide a record of the call that was false, which wasn't the first time he had erred – he had also misrepresented an earlier call between the two presidents.(63) However, this time around, things were different. This time around, Vindman went rogue and decided that his version of foreign policy was superior to the President's.
Two weeks after the July 'phone call he was, by his own admission, countermanding Trump's orders and telling his Ukrainian counterpart to ignore policy.(64) He was also blabbing to other contacts in the government, one of whom (Eric Ciaramella of the CIA) wrote a nine page whistle-blower complaint to Democrats on the House Select Committee on Intelligence (not through his own chain of command), alleging that the President was “pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President's main domestic political rivals”.(65)
It may not surprise you to learn, by way of a sidebar, that Ciaramella was also opposed to Trump's foreign policy, particularly as it pertained to Ukraine. He had previously been Biden's Ukraine foreign policy advisor in 2015/16 and had worked under other Obama era officials and with a Democrat operative in 2016 to advance the anti-Trump effort.(66) He had left the Trump White House under a cloud in 2017, suspected of having leaked to the media.
It didn't take long for the political world inside the beltway to become aware of the identities involved, although the wider world was none the wiser for several months. Vindman provided a deposition in which he admitted that he was intentionally usurping the chain of command in pursuit of his own political agenda.(67) He attended it in full uniform, admitted insubordination, left and escaped any form of censure from the Joint Chiefs. He even returned to his job within the White House and remained on the National Security Council.
The military should have disciplined him and removed him from his post, but they didn't. Ciaramella wasn't sanctioned for bypassing his supervisors, either. Both were central to Trump's subsequent impeachment, the object of which is to remove a President from office. The implication is very clear – by refusing to rebuke Vindman, in particular, for self-confessed insubordination, the CIA and the military were collaborating in an attempt at a soft coup. Trump and his administration were caught between a rock and a hard place, as to fire Vindman would have been to invite an avalanche of opprobrium from his opponents.
The Democrats now had their pretext. Next, they tried to game the system to get their way. They had to, because they faced a seemingly insurmountable problem from within. Three Democrat led committees started 'impeachment inquiries', but the authority that was vested in them was circumscribed. House rules (the ones the Democrats had tailored for their purposes) required them to table a vote to authorize the inquiry. They didn't; they held off, because they had no choice.
“The move came amid opposition from key chairmen and members of leadership, as well as a number of centrist Democrats facing tough reelection bids.”(68)
In fact, it appears that the Democratic leadership wouldn't have had anywhere near the votes required. This is a very unusual circumstance for House Democrats, who are usually an obediently monolithic voting bloc. Those in safe seats seemed prepared to risk potential voter angst by putting themselves n the record, but many others did not. Democratic leadership pressed on with the inquiry regardless (in private hearings), claiming that they weren't obliged to hold a vote. On past precedent, they were and not doing so robbed them of a tool that would have been integral to their efforts; subpoena power. House committees could pretend to issue them to witnesses, requiring them to attend or provide documentation, but they lacked an enforcement mechanism (a judicial penalty) without a House vote.
Instead, the entire 'inquiry' process was conducted behind closed doors and cherry-picked information (and outright lies) were fed to the press, who duly reported them without question. The purpose of the unauthorized impeachment inquiry was to propagandize the public into an acceptance of the President's guilt - at which point, the Democrats who were chary of a House vote would feel emboldened enough to come down off the fence - all the while ensuring that legal protections and Republican subpoena power were moot.
By October, Republicans – who made it their business to sit in on the closed sessions, because they had become aware of the fraud that was being perpetrated – already had plentiful evidence that detonated the entire narrative. Adam Schiff, Democrat liar-in-chief, had told the media that Trump had held US aid up and made it contingent upon the inquiry into Burisma. However, the US Ambassador to Ukraine testified that there was no hold-up, that aid was being sent and that Zelensky had never formed the impression that there his acquiescence was a prerequisite. Not only that - there never had been a new inquiry. The grounds for impeachment were a sham.(69)
But, in an all too familiar sequence unconnected to the actual facts, the House voted 230-195 (almost exactly along party lines) to pass two articles of impeachment on 18th December. Article One alleged abuse of power, stating that Trump had “exercised the powers of his public office to obtain an improper personal benefit, while ignoring or injuring the national interest.” The second, ludicrously, accused the President of engaging “in unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of the impeachment inquiry” for refusing to collude in his own political demise by challenging subpoenas that weren't subpoenas.(70)
Even in the asylum that is congressional politics, there must have been an awareness that, with a Republican controlled Senate next at bat, the likelihood that twenty opposition senators would join the loony Left and overthrow their own elected leader on the basis of the thin gruel contained in the Articles was vanishingly small (the Senate voted on party lines and the impeachment failed on February 5th 2020). So what was it really all about?
It seems to have been about several things. Firstly, it created more legal jeopardy for Trump and yet more disruption to his political agenda. The Democrats were so focused on impeachment, that hardly any other business was accomplished in the last several months of 2019 and January 2020; it was a mechanism designed to keep the pressure on. Secondly, even though the impeachment was frivolous and overwhelmingly partisan (and was increasingly seen as such by the voters), they must have felt that it still damaged the President politically. Perhaps, they had tumbled to the fact that the voters just wanted some peace, rather than a background of constant feuding and that removing Trump would provide respite. Perhaps they thought that Trump could be goaded into unseemly retaliation.
There was one other potential motivation, which largely escaped scrutiny. It may very well be that the entire charade was simply a means to an end. As part of their lawfare operations in connection with the irregularly constituted investigation, the Democrats attempted to compel former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify before the Judiciary Committee, presumably in the expectation of eliciting information that they could then fashion into another attack on Trump. Additionally, and much more consequentially, they attempted to gain access to Mueller Grand Jury material,(71) which had not been included in the addenda of the report, but which was likely to be a treasure trove of opposition research. Mueller had spent two years mounting a counter-intelligence investigation of the President;
“...which means all things Trump – including his family and business interests – were subject to unbridled surveillance for two years; and a host of intelligence gathering going back in time indefinitely...”(72)
The opportunities for guerrilla resistance in the Democrat controlled House would have been extensive. Selective leaking of material that could be curated to inflict maximum political damage to the President would have been a near constant feature of 2020. However, despite victories in DC courts, both fishing trips came unstuck. The Appeals Court threw out the House case against McGahn and the Supreme Court took on the Mueller case and kicked it down the road until after the 2020 election,(73) at which point the House Judiciary Committee postponed its petition until after Biden's administration had taken office. Interestingly, that committee was still somehow investigating Trump in 2020, despite their impeachment going south nine months earlier.
One wouldn't expect members of Congress to knowingly abuse the impeachment process – at least, not in days of yore. But the current crop of Democrats seem to have no such compunction. They will whatever is required to achieve their ends and they don't seem to care whether voters notice them doing it. This is a strange state of affairs; alienating one's base is usually ill advised, although they eventually did so with their sham impeachment. There are two likely explanations; either they just can't help themselves, or they don't fear the ballot box because they are confident that they can cheat their way to victory, no matter what. Or a combination of both, with the latter a necessity, given the former.
In February 2020, their next date with destiny was a mere nine months away and they were in debit with the voters. They also lacked a reliable nationwide mechanism for manufacturing the millions of votes that they were likely to need. Plus, the strategy called for more chaos, the better to keep Trump off balance and, ideally, to further sabotage his mission to Make America Great Again. But matters were already in hand.
Citations
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_career_of_Donald_Trump
(3) https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/
(4) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-finds-hillary-clinton-used-private-server-official-email
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy#Server_security_and_hacking_attempts
(6) Ditto
(8) https://impiousdigest.com/btw-felony-email-scandal-a-big-deal-because-as-it-disqualifies-hillary/
(9) https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/?q=&mto=Cheryl%20Mills
(10) https://news.erau.edu/videos/speaker-series-ellen-ratner-john-leboutillier
(12) https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/08/hillarys-email-scandal-the-teachable-moment-that-wasnt/
(13) https://impiousdigest.com/btw-felony-email-scandal-a-big-deal-because-as-it-disqualifies-hillary/
(14) https://time.com/4393372/james-comey-fbi-hillary-clinton-email-speech-transcript/
(15) https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/matt-gaetz-jack-smith-witch-hunt-its-obviously/
(17) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
(18) https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o1902.pdf
(20) https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/the_truth_about_the_horowitz_report.html
(22) https://www.justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf
(26) Ditto
(29) Ditto
(30) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-leading-polls_n_58112308e4b064e1b4b05ce5
(31) https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/12-days-stunned-nation-how-hillary-clinton-lost-n794131
(32) Ditto
(33) https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/17/how-democrats-attempted-a-2016-electoral-college-coup/
(34) Ditto
(38) https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/robert-mueller-questions-trump-decline-interview/
(42) Ditto
(43) Ditto
(48) https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/06/what-to-expect-on-tuesday/
(49) https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/2022-midterm-election-turnout-map-data-rcna82477
(50) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_elections
(53) https://www.justice.gov/storage/report_volume2.pdf
(54)
(56) https://www.scribd.com/document/396700100/Pelosi-House-Rules-for-New-Congressional-Session-2019
(57) https://www.scribd.com/document/429229553/Pelosi-116th-Congress-Impeachment-Rules
(59) https://www.heritage.org/political-process/commentary/abusing-the-impeachment-process
(60) https://www.history.com/news/how-many-presidents-impeached
(64) https://twitter.com/RoscoeBDavis1/status/1192918037864861698
(68) https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/15/house-democratic-leaders-impeachment-vote-047136
Figure 1 https://realclearpolitics.com
Figure 2 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/12-days-stunned-nation-how-hillary-clinton-lost-n794131