The Opus

In a style that is now expected from the most smarmy politician in a generation, congenital liar and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, released the Democrats' indictment of Donald Trump along with the tacit recommendation that he be impeached and removed from office. The editors of the Wall Street Journal (no friends of Donald Trump) derisively call the Schiff report an "Opus" and go on to write:

The report’s summary sentence reveals the weakness of its case with overstatement: “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security.”

Yet every President seeks some political advantage in pursuing foreign policy. That includes Barack Obama when he asked Dmitry Medvedev to tell Mr. Putin to go easy on missile defense until after the 2012 election.

As for undermining election integrity, that was Bill Clinton when he vacuumed foreign campaign contributions from the Riadys and multiple other foreigners in 1996. Or Hillary Clinton in 2016 when her campaign financed Christopher Steele to spread Russian disinformation on Mr. Trump to the media and FBI.

Mr. Trump, in his reckless way, asked President Zelensky for the “favor” of investigating Joe Biden and tried to delay military aid. But as Senator Ron Johnson relates in his recent letter that is a more even-handed account of events, Mr. Trump’s attempts were resisted across Washington and ultimately failed.

None of this undermined elections or “endangered” U.S. national security because there was no investigation and the aid was never withheld. [emphasis mine] Even if aid had been withheld, that would merely have put U.S. policy back to where it was when Mr. Obama denied Ukraine lethal military aid for several years until Mr. Trump provided it.

The Starr report laid out irrefutable evidence that Mr. Clinton lied to a grand jury and tampered with witnesses. Those were criminal offenses. The evidence that Richard Nixon obstructed justice was also clear once the tapes became public. By contrast, Mr. Schiff’s report mentions no specific crime and is full of too many inferences and overbroad assertions to provide a convincing impeachment case.

Of course, none of that matters in the least. As soon as the 2016 election was done, the Dems decided that their mission was to remove Donald Trump from office, not by defeating him at the ballot box, but 'by any means necessary.' Subsequently, they have lied, exaggerated, promulgated hoaxes, become hysterical and now, manufacture a flimsy case that argues that impeachment is the only path forward. I guess Schiff believes that the weight of 300 pages of innuendo and blather gives his partisan report gravitas. It does not.

UPDATE:
--------------
The trained hamsters in the mainstream media are all atwitter, reveling in the "damning" report issued by the Democrats. There's only one problem, like everything that the Dems have attempted to remove Trump from office over the past three years, it's evidence-free and innuendo-laden. The editors of Investor's Business Daily write:

... read into the report, and then look through the Republican response, and you come to realize that the Democrats fail to support either claim. In fact, in some ways, they make Trump’s case for him.

The report never actually accuses Trump of engaging in bribery.

Despite all the foreboding tones and dark insinuation, the impeachment report never actually accuses Trump of bribery. In fact, the word “bribery” appears only four times in the entire 300-page document: once when it quotes the impeachment clause of the Constitution, twice in reference to accusations of bribery against Biden, and once in defending the impeachment inquiry itself.

Trump’s actual crime apparently was not following the “script.”

Despite its attempt to paint a picture of Trump as a corrupt leader, the report actually showcases that at the heart of the impeachment are the hurt feelings of career bureaucrats.

The report says that, in advance of Trump’s call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, “NSC staff had prepared a standard package of talking points for the president based on official U.S. policy. The talking points included recommendations to encourage President Zelensky to continue to promote anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine, a pillar of American foreign policy in the country as far back as its independence in the 1990s when Ukraine first rid itself of Kremlin control.

“This call would deviate significantly from that script.”

Removing a president from office for not sticking to a set of bureaucratic talking points would set an interesting precedent.

And therein lies the problem. The Dems have decided to create a new political precedent that attempts to negate the vote of 63 million people all because the Dems lost to a guy they don't like. What they don't seem to realize is that they're stoking anger. But more on that in a future post.