Impeachment basis: Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend you’ve been messing around

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.” ― Harry S. Truman

Let’s say the U.S. Government is a corporation.  Let’s say that the shareholders (voters) of that corporation are unhappy with the previous CEO and want the company to go in a new direction. Let’s say that the shareholders decide not to renew the contract of the previous regime and hire someone to take the company in a new direction.

Now let’s say that the middle managers that served under the previous CEO don’t want to go in a new direction and do everything possible to stymie the new CEO and do everything to have the new CEO removed and go back to the previous policies.  Let’s say the middle managers have been embezzling funds from the company for years and those funds were laundered through a third party “shell company” and if the books are ever opened they could all go to jail.

Let’s say the new CEO looks at the contracts that were made with the shell company by the previous CEO and sees that those contracts are bleeding the corporation dry and are of no benefit to the corporation, but in fact threaten to bankrupt the corporation.

Let’s say those middle managers conspire to go to the shareholders and claim they heard that the new CEO is conspiring to destroy the corporation by cancelling the contracts with the shell company.  Even though none of them heard the new CEO say this, they heard it by the water cooler and want that CEO charged with criminal sabotage and removed.   

In other words the basis for the removal of the new CEO is, “I heard if from a friend, who heard it from a friend, who heard it from a friend you’ve been messing around.”  From RT:

Excerpt:

Transcript of US ambassador to Ukraine reveals leaked ‘smoking gun’ testimony based on hearsay & ‘fake news’ media

Impeachment testimony from former US ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor reveals the fatal ’quid pro quo’ at the center of the probe rests on mere hearsay, even as Taylor’s words are held up as a smoking gun by Trump’s enemies.

In the course of his October 22 deposition, made public on Wednesday, Taylor explains it was his “clear understanding” that “security assistance money would not come” until Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “committed to pursue the investigation” of natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden’s son was a director.

That understanding, however, came from being told by Trump adviser Tim Morrison that another ambassador – US envoy to the EU Gordon Sondland – had informed a Zelensky aide of the condition.

That fateful conversation appears to be the closest Taylor got to the alleged quid pro quo. It’s not clear exactly what was said between them, as Sondland hurriedly revised his own testimony on Tuesday to better match Taylor’s.

“What I know for sure,” Taylor testified, “is what Mr. Morrison told me that he must have heard Ambassador Sondland tell [Zelensky aide] Mr. Yermak. And as I said, this was the first time I’d heard [security assistance and corruption investigations] put together.” (p.189)

Taylor also admitted he was not listening in on the July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, and that he did not see the transcript until it was released in late September. He acknowledged he had never spoken to Trump, and when pressed by Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey), pinned the entire “drug deal” (the words of former national security adviser John Bolton, apparently) on Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani (p.260) – even though Taylor had never spoken to him either.

Giuliani, Taylor said, dominated an “irregular” policy channel alongside the wholesome, bipartisan way of doing things, a channel that ran “contrary to the goals of longstanding US policy” – or at least that was what Taylor “began to sense” (p.28) when the aid was held up.

At one point, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-New York) attempted to pin down exactly what Taylor’s relationship was to the events in question.

“This isn’t firsthand. It’s not secondhand. It’s not thirdhand. But if I understand this correctly, you’re telling us that Tim Morrison told you that Ambassador Sondland told him that the president told Ambassador Sondland that Zelensky would have to open an investigation into Biden?” Zeldin asks incredulously. (p. 298)

The New York congressman also got Taylor to admit that his sole source for his belief that Trump wanted Biden investigated in order to influence the 2020 election was an article in the New York Times – not exactly known for its accurate or sympathetic portrayals of the president.

The Ukraine affair is damning, all right – just not in the way you’re being told to think

Critically,  Taylor admitted that no one in the Ukrainian government knew military aid had been suspended until over a month after the Trump-Zelensky phone call, which was the source of the anonymous whistleblower’s complaint.

The ambassador’s opening statement was “leaked” before the House voted to make transcripts public, and has been held up by intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff (D-California) and other pro-impeachment Democrats as ‘proof’ that military aid was withheld “through a shadow foreign policy channel” until Ukraine agreed to follow through with the Biden investigation.

An examination of the transcript, however, reveals nothing of the sort. Taylor’s political convictions – that Russia must be kicked out of Ukraine, lest it blossom into a malevolent empire – appear to motivate his testimony more than any firsthand knowledge of what transpired between the American and Ukrainian heads of state.

That is what this whole impeachment inquiry is about, the establishment doesn’t like the direction that the new CEO wants to take the corporation.  They have all been embezzling funds for so long and if the books were ever scrutinized, they could all go to jail.  While it is not in the interest of the people of the United States to use Ukraine as a spring board to war with Russia, the Deep State agents are making a financial killing in Ukraine.  From Moon of Alabama:

Deep State wants War in Ukraine at all costs

Excerpt:

Trump And Zelensky Want Peace With Russia. The Fascists Oppose That.

NBC News is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats’ impeachment circus. But it fails to note what the conflict is really about:

It was substantive, but it wasn’t dramatic.  In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.

“It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression,” Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why Trump’s decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of Russian expansionism didn’t align with U.S. policy…

“In direct contravention of U.S. interests” says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares “it is clearly in our national interest” to give weapons to Ukraine.

But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?

President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama’s decision against U.S. national interest? Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?

Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. WHO DEFINES WHAT IS IN THE “NATIONAL INTEREST” WITH REGARDS TO FOREIGN POLICY? Here is a point where for once I agree with the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes:

[O]n the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions. But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.

And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay.

We have made the very same point:

The U.S. constitution “empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries.”

The constitution does not empower the “U.S. government policy community”, nor “the administration”, nor the “consensus view of the interagency” and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that.

The president does not like how the ‘American policy’ on Russia was built. He rightly believes that he was elected to change it. HE HAD STATED HIS OPINION ON RUSSIA DURING HIS CAMPAIGN AND WON THE ELECTION. It is not ‘malign influence’ that makes him try to have good relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.

 [I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve “at his pleasure” are there to implement them.

There is another point that has to be made about the NBC’s assertions. It is not in the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in his recent NYT interview:

Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine’s most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia.  ‘They’re stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations,” he said, comparing Russia’s power to that of Ukraine. “People want peace, a good life, they don’t want to be at war. And you” — America — “are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it.”

Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.

Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. “War against Russia,” he said, “to the last Ukrainian.” Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine’s economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass.

Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to divulge details because the Americans “will mess it up and get in the way.”  Kolomoisky’s interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes.

Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday’s clown show would certainly “mess it up and get in the way” if Zelensky would openly pursue the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they had used to arrange the Maidan coup:

Zelenskiy’s decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in light of this domestic opposition.

The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in western Ukraine…  Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports.

During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%.  By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.

Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate peace with Russia. (He should also investigate Biden’s undue influence.) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.

It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.

Hmm, yes that is what the testimony by Vindman, Kent and Yovanovitch was about, “the deep state of the United States wants to ignore the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate.”  If Ukraine ever normalizes relations with Russia the books will be flung open and all will see the massive corruption, theft, murder and graft perpetrated against Ukraine by the Deep State operatives who are now desperate to remove Trump from office and reinstate the status quo. 

The impeachment circus will resume next week.  What can we look forward to?  More, heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend you’ve been messing around.