Victor Davis Hanson on the impeachment inquiry/coup
(2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing…He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship…3) First-term impeachment. The Clinton and Nixon inquiries were directed at second-term presidencies, when there were no more electoral remedies for alleged wrongdoing. By contrast, Trump is up for election in less than a year. Impeachment, then, seems a partisan exercise in either circumventing a referendum election or in damaging a president seeking re-election.4) No special-counsel finding. In the past, special counsels have found felonious presidential behavior, such as cited in Leon Jaworski’s and Ken Starr’s investigations. By contrast, special counsel Robert Mueller spent 22 months and $35 million, and yet his largely partisan law and investigative team found no “collusion” and no actionable presidential obstruction of that non-crime…7) Thought crimes? Even if there were ever a quid, there is no quo: Unlike the case of the Obama administration, the Trump administration did supply arms to Ukraine, and the Ukrainians apparently did not reinvestigate the Bidens.
That last one, number 7, is especially troubling. It’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit, and it seems to have become common when Trump’s opposition talks about him. Mind-reading has substituted for evidence, and not just during the impeachment inquiry. Courts have now institutionalized it, most obviously in a decision I wrote about here as well as here. From the latter:
In other related news, the legal reasoning several judges used to invalidate Trump’s immigration EOs – that his campaign statements were extremely relevant and indicated his supposedly discriminatory intent in issuing the orders as president – leads inevitably to preposterous conclusions such as these:“ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order ‘could be constitutional’ if it had been written by Hillary Clinton…“The last part of the audio is rather funny. Jadwat, asked whether the order on its face is valid, says No. Why? ‘I don’t think so, Your Honor, because the order is completely unprecedented’ To which one of the Fourth Circuit judges replies, with astonishment that seems mostly genuine: ‘So the first order on anything is invalid?'”In his post, John Hinderaker calls that kind of legal argument “lawless nonsense.” But such lawless nonsense follows directly from the judicial decisions handed down against Trump’s EO. As the rulings were issued it became clear – because of the liberal judges’ reliance on Trump’s supposed thoughtcrime, as evidenced in some of his campaign statements – that no subsequent EO of Trump’s on immigration that involved any majority Muslim country would ever be held constitutional by these judges, no matter how carefully and fairly drafted. Trump had committed the original sin during the campaign, and all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten that little hand.
Now we have an entire impeachment drive predicated on the idea that Trump committed another thoughtcrime. He didn’t tie the withholding of financial aid to the investigation of Hunter Biden, Ukrainian officials didn’t even know aid was being withheld at the time, and in fact the aid was given without the investigation occurring. But the Democrats get around the obvious flaws there but saying what they think Trump meant to do or wanted to do whether he actually did it or not.
Dangerous, dangerous high-stakes game the Democrats are playing.
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