Why Impeachment Now ?

The intention to impeach Donald Trump actually followed his election by a day or two. The idea that “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” have been committed is ludicrous. So, why go to this risky strategy now ?

Well, the Mueller/Weissmann investigation was a dud. Even the left recognized that it did them no good.

President Trump’s job approval rating has rebounded since the release of a summary of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to a new poll.

A Gallup survey released Friday finds that 45 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, up from 39 percent in March …

[T]he latest approval figure matches two previous highs in Gallup polling.

Trump’s earlier 45 percent readings came during his first week in office in January 2017 and in June 2018 after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

And when it turned out the report itself contained very damaging evidence of presidential obstruction of justice, Democrats began to think that perhaps public opinion would turn even further against the 45th president, and there was some evidence of that, too:

The last sentence is wishing.

At FiveThirtyEight, which maintains the most comprehensive database of polls, Trump’s average approval rating was at 42.1 percent on March 24, the day Barr released his “summary of principal findings.” A week later it was exactly the same. On April 18, when the redacted Mueller report was released, Trump’s average approval rating was 42 percent. FiveThirtyEight reported 14 polls taken (partially or fully) on or after that date. Trump’s average is now at 41.3 percent.

In simpler terms, it was a flop. So why keep at it ?

The Democrat Party has a radical wing that is very noisy. A radical leftist site explains.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mi) was widely castigated for saying, virtually as soon as she was elected, that it was necessary to impeach Trump (she used a colorful epithet in doing so, which some observers said made a bad impression, even though rich old white guys speak like that all the time and it is dismissed as locker-room talk).

The Trump Ukraine scandal should be the straw that broke the camel’s back (on top of all the other scandals, including trying to obstruct justice by ordering aides to fire special counsel Bob Mueller; it is irrelevant that the aides declined).

In other words, Tlaib, for all the vilification she has faced, was right. Impeachment talk is back. She is one of four young women of color in Congress elected in 2018, collectively known as “the squad.” And the squad knows they were right about impeachment and Nancy Pelosi is wrong. Nancy Pelosi could well end up with a second Trump term, and she is more interested in keeping a House Democratic majority than in seeing that Trump does not destroy the Republic.

But they are a small, if noisy, minority of that party.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker, announced an impeachment “inquiry.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation’s security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain.
Ms. Pelosi’s declaration, after months of reticence by Democrats who had feared the political consequences of impeaching a president many of them long ago concluded was unfit for office, was a stunning turn that set the stage for a history-making and exceedingly bitter confrontation between the Democrat-led House and a defiant president who has thumbed his nose at institutional norms.

What is an “inquiry ?” Well, not exactly what the Constitution requires.

Impeachment is the subject of several other provisions of the Constitution. Article I, Sec. 2, cl. 5, gives to the House of Representatives ”the sole power of impeachment.” Article I, Sec. 3, cl. 6, gives to the Senate ”the sole power to try all impeachments,” requires that Senators be under oath or affirmation when sitting for that purpose, stipulates that the Chief Justice of the United States is to preside when the President of the United States is tried, and provides for conviction on the vote of two-thirds of the members present.

Notice that it is the House of Representatives that has “the sole power of impeachment.”

That strongly suggests it is a power of the entire House. Therefore the House must take a vote of all the members.

House Democrats plan to bring up a resolution on Wednesday condemning Mr. Trump’s reported behavior toward Ukraine and the whistle-blower, and demanding his administration release the whistle-blower complaint — daring Republicans to vote against it.

But that did not happen.

The House brings impeachment charges against federal officials as part of its oversight and investigatory responsibilities. Individual Members of the House can introduce impeachment resolutions like ordinary bills, or the House could initiate proceedings by passing a resolution authorizing an inquiry. The Committee on the Judiciary ordinarily has jurisdiction over impeachments, but special committees investigated charges before the Judiciary Committee was created in 1813. The committee then chooses whether to pursue articles of impeachment against the accused official and report them to the full House.

No Senate trial until the full House votes. The Judiciary Committee now seems to be excluded from the plan.

Corey Lewendowski testified under subpoena and made them look like fools

After that hearing, Judiciary seems to be excluded. Possibly because it is populated with fools like Shirley Jackson Lee and Hank “Guam” Johnson.

Then the Intelligence Chair, Schiff, began with a lie purported to be the transcript of Trump’s call to the Ukraine president.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., made up his own version of a transcript between President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart to fit the false narrative being peddled by Democrats and many in the media to frame the president for a crime that never happened.

In his opening statement at a congressional hearing featuring acting Department of National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire, Schiff gave a fictional retelling of the conversation between the two leaders.

He later said this was “parody” but it has discredited him from the start.

Anyway, why now? One sentence in that call might have triggered the Democrats.

Trump asked for help in recovering The DNC server that was supposedly hacked by Russians Why is this an issue? First, it was never examined by the FBI. The DNC refused the FBI access. Instead they hired a company called Crowdstrike.

The cyber security firm hired to inspect the DNC hack and determine who was responsible is a firm called Crowdstrike. Its conclusion that Russia was responsible was released last year, but several people began to call its analysis into question upon further inspection.

Jeffrey Carr was one of the most prominent cynics, and as he noted in his December post, FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report: A Fatally Flawed Effort:

The FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report (JAR) “Grizzly Steppe” was released yesterday as part of the White House’s response to alleged Russian government interference in the 2016 election process. It adds nothing to the call for evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the DNC, the DCCC, the email accounts of Democratic party officials, or for delivering the content of those hacks to Wikileaks.

It merely listed every threat group ever reported on by a commercial cybersecurity company that is suspected of being Russian-made and lumped them under the heading of Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists.

Furthermore:

First, VIPS concluded that the DNC data were not hacked by the Russians or anyone else accessing the server over the internet. Instead, the data were downloaded by means of a thumb drive or similar portable storage device physically attached to the DNC server.

How was this determined? The time stamps contained in the released computer files’ metadata establish that, at 6:45 p.m. July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes (not megabits) of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. This took 87 seconds, which means the transfer rate was 22.7 megabytes per second, a speed, according to VIPS, that “is much faster than what is physically possible with a hack.” Such a speed could be accomplished only by direct connection of a portable storage device to the server. Accordingly, VIPS concluded that the DNC data theft was an inside job by someone with physical access to the server.

VIPS also found that, if there had been a hack, the NSA would have a record of it that could quickly be retrieved and produced. But no such evidence has been forthcoming. Can this be because no hack occurred?

VIPS is an association of retired intelligence professional. Really non-partisan, unlike Crowdstrike.

Maybe the DNC server is still in Ukraine and could still be examined. The company, Crowdstrike, was founded by and is owned by a Ukrainian.

The challenges to CrowdStrike’s credibility are significant because the firm was the first to link last year’s hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors, and because CrowdStrike co-founder Dimiti Alperovitch has trumpeted its Ukraine report as more evidence of Russian election tampering.

Yaroslav Sherstyuk, maker of the Ukrainian military app in question, called the company’s report “delusional” in a Facebook post. CrowdStrike never contacted him before or after its report was published, he told VOA.

VOA first contacted IISS in February to verify the alleged artillery losses. Officials there initially were unaware of the CrowdStrike assertions. After investigating, they determined that CrowdStrike misinterpreted their data and hadn’t reached out beforehand for comment or clarification.

CrowdStrike declined to answer VOA’s written questions about the Ukraine report, and Alperovitch canceled a March 15 interview on the topic. In a December statement to VOA’s Ukrainian Service, spokeswoman Ilina Dimitrova defended the company’s conclusions.

Ukraine is particularly significant because lots of Democrats have Ukraine connections. Not just Joe Biden and his son, who has a checkered history. Even left wing Politifact doesn’t believe them.

• Hunter Biden did hold a directorship for a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president. Experts agree that Hunter Biden’s acceptance of the position created a conflict of interest for his father.

• Vice President Joe Biden did urge Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, with the threat of withholding U.S. aid. But that was the position of the wider U.S. government, as well as other international institutions.

• We found no evidence to support the idea that Joe Biden advocated with his son’s interests in mind, as the message suggests. It’s not even clear that the company was actively under investigation or that a change in prosecutors benefited it.
The last point is disputed by the prosecutor in Ukraine.

Why Ukraine? It has been in turmoil and plagued with corruption since 2014. It is also mineral rich.

Back to why the impeachment now? Biden has been a frontrunner in Democrat primary politics. He seems weak and forgetful, plus his history of gaffes, however the rest of the field are pretty far left. In spite of his weaknesses, he may appeal to more mainline Democrat voters who aren not as radical as the base. Maybe this kerfuffle began with a Warren attempt to take down her rival and get a hit on Trump at the same time. Elizabeth Warren has settled into second place as Bernie fails, especially with his health woes. She has taken extreme positions, like these.

1. Warren has rolled out a staggering policy proposal that would cancel nearly all outstanding student-loan debt.
2. Warren also proposed universally free public higher education, so that we don’t find ourselves in another student-debt crisis. This component of her plan entails free tuition and zero fees for Americans attending two-year and four-year public colleges.
3. Warren also proposed a bold new plan to make high-quality child care affordable in the United States. In another Medium post, she proposed $700 billion universal child-care policy,
4. she has proposed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax, which applies only to households with a net worth of $50 million or more. The tax includes paying an annual 2 percent tax on every dollar over $50 million, and a 3 percent tax on every dollar over $1 billion.
5. she wants companies that report more than $100 million in profits to pay a 7 percent tax on every dollar of profit over $100 million. The tax will apparently bring in $1 trillion over the next ten years, according to economists she cited.
6. she intends to sign an executive order on her first day in office to protect public lands. The order, she has written, would place a “total moratorium” on drilling
7. She has also recently promised to “end fracking the day I am inaugurated.

The result has been a revolt among large donors to Democrats.

In recent weeks, CNBC spoke to several high-dollar Democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community and found that this opinion was becoming widely shared as Warren, an outspoken critic of big banks and corporations, gains momentum against Joe Biden in the 2020 race.

“You’re in a box because, you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to hurt me, so I’m going to help President Trump,’” said a senior private equity executive who declined to be named.

Even Texas Congressman Al Green has said, if Trump is not impeached, he may be re-elected.

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, one of the first lawmakers who called for President Trump’s impeachment, expressed his fears on Saturday that if Democrats don’t pursue his ousting, Trump “will get reelected.”

Green was asked on MSNBC about how unpopular impeachment was among voters. MSNBC correspondent Phillip Mena pressed him with recent polling numbers from Quinnipiac showing 66 percent of voters were against impeachment — including 38 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents.

So, my conclusions are as follows.
1. The Democrats fear Trump will be re-elected.
2. Biden is fatally wounded by the Ukraine corruption. Plus, of course, China.
3. Warren is too extreme for the Democrat donors.
5 The others are midgets.
6. I have a strong suspicion that Hillary will resurface as a “fusion candidate” to try to save the down ballot races.

Obama cost them over 1,000 local and state offices. That should be their farm team but it was wiped out