As I wrote years ago, there is nothing “progressive” about a Democrat. It is a term they have used, abused and co-opted in an attempt to mask, obscure and hide their true identities, evil intentions and deeds. When I left the U.S. Senate, I went a step farther to conclude that the Democrats are “evil” but smart, while the Republicans are “Neanderthals” and dumb. I have never changed that opinion, and have been an Independent ever since.[2]
I began as a Democrat, but can’t conceive of ever voting for one again. They have moved so far to the Left as to be almost totally unrecognizable. They are un-American fascists, unbridled anarchists, unapologetic racists, blatant anti-Semites and everything else that is evil. Stated bluntly and succinctly, they are the party that Barack Obama created, and they are a mirror image of him. Any doubts, read his book, “Dreams from My Father.”[3]
Their mission has been to destroy the opposition, which is the goal of every fascist, authoritarian regime. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung were masters at it, and killed millions of human beings in the process.[4] The Democrats came after Richard Nixon, and used Sam Giancana and the Chicago mob to fix the elections in Chicago and West Virginia.
When Nixon won the presidency years later, they used Watergate to destroy him. Then, they targeted Ronald Reagan with “Iran Contra,” even though Reagan had survived an assassination attempt, and had brought down the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union without a shot being fired.[5]
Next, their target was Donald Trump, who was a flamboyant businessman and had the audacity to challenge them and the so-called Washington “elite” or “establishment,” and their imbedded bureaucracy at all levels of government that had been carefully nurtured over the decades. Their efforts to destroy him have been brutal and relentless, beginning the day that he and his wife Melania came down the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City and announced his candidacy.
After rigging elections across the country and installing the mentally-challenged Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the presidency—who have been destroying America and putting it at the mercy of our enemies, principally China and Russia—they are hell-bent in stopping Trump from ever challenging them again. The raid on his home at Mar-a-Lago in Florida by rogue, Gestapo-like FBI agents is their latest attempt to destroy him.
Undoubtedly authorized by Biden and his Obama-laden advisors, it was carried out by the Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose quest for a seat on our Supreme Court had been denied. FBI Director Christopher Wray approved the raid, as did a Florida Magistrate Bruce Reinhart who had helped Jeffrey Epstein’s abusers when he was in the private practice of law.
If the Democrats could “kill” Trump, they would. He is hated; and his very presence constitutes a threat to their control of the United States and the American people. Leave aside the fact that our enemies want to destroy us, the Democrats are hell-bent on destroying him and everything he and his supporters stand for. Like Reagan before him, he is the polar opposite of them, which is why he is hated like Abraham Lincoln was[6]. Are there reasonable rank-and-file Democrats who are appalled by what is happening? Sure there are, but they do not control the party—or perhaps even influence it today.
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). See, e.g.,Timothy D. Naegele Resume-21-8-6 and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/accomplishments/ He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/articles/ and https://naegeleknol.wordpress.com/articles/), and studied photography with Ansel Adams. He can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
Some of us have lived through this period of time before. Only the faces change.
We were in Berkeley for the “Free Speech” and anti-Vietnam War riots. We were in Washington, D.C. when the city was set ablaze after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis. We were there when Watergate broke, and we lived through that too. We lived with 9/11, and watched Iraq turn into a graveyard for so many Americans and their dreams, while still others were maimed for life, and trillions of dollars were wasted . . . for nothing.[2]
The title of this article is the rallying cry of Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—who has written:
Sunday morning, President Trump announced that the world’s worst terrorist, the head of the ISIS caliphate who had raped an American woman, had received justice.
About to be captured and carried off in a helicopter by U.S. special forces, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself up with an explosive vest in a compound in northwest Syria. The long search for the sadist and fanatic had ended in triumph. No U.S. troops were lost.
That evening, Trump went out to the fifth game of the World Series between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros. As his face was flashed on the big screen, the stadium erupted with people booing and chanting, “Impeach Trump!” and “Lock him up!”
That Trump is not cheered at a D.C. baseball game is not odd, for the spectators are not working-class Trumpians. Series tickets cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, and the spectators are drawn from a town that gave Donald Trump 4% of its votes in 2016.
The mutual distrust in this city was on display when Trump told the press yesterday morning that he had not alerted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the impending U.S. raid, because he was afraid of leaks.
“I wanted to make sure this kept secret,” said Trump. “I don’t want to have people lost. … We were going to notify them last night, but we decided not to do that because Washington leaks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. … A leak could have cost the death of all of them.”
The Russians, however, were alerted we were coming, as they control the airspace over the compound we were targeting. And Trump thanked the Russians for their cooperation.
Also left out of the loop was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, one of the “Gang of Eight” that is almost always given a heads-up about major military operations. Schiff is conducting secret hearings to drum up support for Trump’s impeachment and removal for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
It is imprecise to say this city is divided over Trump. It is rather almost solidly united behind what millions of Middle Americans believe to be a deep state-media conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election and effect a coup d’etat against a president whom this city detests but fears it cannot defeat in 2020.
A week ago, this writer noted the astonishing number of foreign capitals that were on fire with protests that go beyond marching and demonstrating — to riot, rebellion and even revolution. As with the “yellow vest” protests that shut down Paris on many weekends this past year, and the disorders in Hong Kong, the epidemic had spread to Beirut, Barcelona and Santiago, Chile.
In Iraq, over 200 have been killed and thousands injured in protests this month against the Baghdad regime. In Algeria, now six months after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to step down, rioters still battle the army.
The thread common to these uncivil, often-violent disruptions?
A conviction that the cause the protesters are advancing is so critical, noble and necessary that democratic rules may be dispensed with and law and order suspended in pursuit of the cause.
Saturday’s Washington Post describes the mindset that is taking hold in D.C. among militants, using as an example the Extinction Rebellion group’s dragging of a boat into the street at 16th & K to block traffic for hours to call attention to rising sea levels.
“Blocking traffic may only be the beginning,” wrote Marissa Lang. “As protests in the District continue at a rate of about two a day, activists looking to stand out from crowds that march near the White House or the Mall have resorted to more disruptive measures in recent weeks — a tactic that experts said will probably escalate.”
She cites sociology professor Dana Fisher: “There has been a lot of discussion among people on the left who use protests as a tactic that peaceful, traditional protests may not be enough. … That could mean … more people blocking traffic. … I think we’re going to see a lot more people coming into D.C. to get arrested.”
Fisher continues: “When activists don’t feel like their grievances are being heard or responded to … the natural progression is to get more confrontational and, sometimes, to get more violent. … I’m … surprised it’s taken so long.”
Who wins when leftists go lawless — in liberal citadels like D.C.?
This thinking echoes the famous “bodies upon the gears” speech of Mario Savio at the famous 1964 University of California, Berkeley campus riot: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that … you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”
After Berkeley came civil disobedience; the burning of ROTC buildings; and urban riots marked by looting, shooting and arson. Out of that came Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide, Ronald Reagan, and Republican triumphs in five of six presidential elections starting in 1968.
Bring it on.[3]
To those at the stadium in our nation’s capital who booed the President—and chanted, “Impeach Trump!” and “Lock him up!”—they are the dregs of society, without a purpose in life. Pat Buchanan is right: they are not working-class Americans, but the privileged elite; and they occupy a town that gave Donald Trump only four percent of its votes in 2016. They do not relate to you and me. They are like the Hollywood-do-nothings who prance around spouting meaningless platitudes, and feeling entitled.
Trump is right not to trust any Democrats, or those on the far-Left, or their media lackeys—or the RINOs in the Republican Party such as the despicable Mitt Romney. Yes, lots of us are ashamed that we voted for him and the equally-despicable Paul Ryan and others.[4] And yes too, Russia’s killer and dictator-for-life Vladimir Putin whom I despise is more trustworthy than the un-American racist anti-Semite Barack Obama and his co-conspirators who have engaged in sedition, such as Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and Jerry Nadler.[5]
A rising number of Americans are understanding, finally, that we are in the midst of this great nation’s second Civil War: a fight for the soul of America, which will determine its destiny for years and generations to come. Abraham Lincoln stood at a similar precipice, and stared into the abyss, and he destroyed the enemy. While it took generations to heal, he saved our great Republic. Had he failed, we might not be one nation today.[6] Donald Trump is his worthy successor.
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and https://naegeleblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/timothy-d.-naegele-resume-19-9-27.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
The United States has the purest form of democracy in the world. Does this mean that it is perfect, and without flaws? Certainly not. But we are blessed by our Founders’ inherent wisdom, which has stood the tests of time. Years ago, I wrote:
I believe in this country, and I believe in Americans of all colors, faiths and backgrounds. The United States is the only true melting pot in the world, with its populace representing a United Nations of the world’s peoples. Yes, we fight and we even discriminate, but when times are tough—like after 9/11—we come together as one nation, which makes this country so great and special. Also, all of us or our ancestors came here from somewhere else. Even the American Indians are descended from those who crossed the Bering Strait—or the “Bering land bridge”—according to anthropologists.[2]
Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—has asked the question that is the title of this article:
What happens when democracy fails to deliver? What happens when people give up on democracy?
What happens when a majority or militant minority decide that the constitutional rights of free speech, free elections, peaceful assembly and petition are inadequate and take to the streets to force democracy to submit to their demands?
Our world may be about to find out.
Chile is the most stable and prosperous country in Latin America.
Yet when its capital, Santiago, recently raised subway fares by 5%, thousands poured into the streets. Rioting, looting, arson followed. The Metro system was utterly trashed. Police were assaulted. People died. The rioting spread to six other cities. Troops were called out.
President a Sebastian Pinera repealed the fare hike and declared a national emergency, stating, “Chile is at war against a powerful, implacable enemy who does not respect anything or anyone and is willing to use violence and crime without any limits.”
How does a democracy that has spawned within itself a powerful and implacable enemy deal with it?
Last week, tens of thousands of Lebanese of all faiths and political associations rioted in Beirut and Tripoli to demand the overthrow of the regime and the ouster of its president, speaker of parliament and Prime Minister Saad Hariri. All must go, the masses demand.
In Barcelona, Friday, half a million people surged into the streets in protest after the sentencing in Madrid of the secessionists who sought to bring about the independence of Catalonia from Spain in 2017.
In all of China, few enjoy the freedoms of the 7 million in Hong Kong. Yet, for five months, these fortunate and free Chinese, to protest a proposal that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be extradited to China, stormed into the streets to defy the regime and denounce the conditions under which they live.
These protests have been marked by riots, vandalism, arson and clashes with police. “Hong Kong streets descended into chaos following an unauthorized pro-democracy rally Sunday,” writes the Associated Press. Protesters “set up roadblocks and torched businesses, and police responded with tear gas and a water cannon. Protesters tossed firebombs and took their anger out on shops with mainland Chinese ties.”
What are the Hong Kong residents denouncing and demanding?
They are protesting both present and future limitations on their freedom. The appearance of American flags in the protests suggests that what they seek is what the agitators behind the Boston Tea Party and the boys and men at Concord Bridge sought — independence, liberty and a severing of the ties to the mother country.
Yet, because the Communist regime of Xi Jinping could not survive such an amputation, the liberation of Hong Kong is not in the cards. The end to these months of protest will likely be frustration, futility and failure.
Perhaps it is that realization that explains the vehemence and violence. But the rage is also what kills the support they initially received.
In 1960s America, the first civil rights demonstrations attracted widespread sympathy. But the outburst of urban riots that followed in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and 100 cities after Martin Luther King’s assassination sent millions streaming to the banners of Gov. George Wallace in the campaigns of 1968 and 1972.
When the “yellow vest” protests broke out in 2018 in Paris, over a fuel tax, the demonstrators had the support of millions of Frenchmen.
But that support dissipated when protesters began smashing windows of boutique shops on the Champs-Elysee, assaulting police and desecrating monuments and memorials.
This reversion to violence, ransacking of stores and showering of police with bricks, bottles and debris, is costing the protesters much of the backing they enjoyed. In the trade-off between freedom and order, people will ultimately opt for order.
Yet, one wonders: Why are these outbursts of violent protests and rioting taking place in stable, free and prosperous societies?
Chile is the most stable and wealthy country in South America. Catalonia is the most prosperous part of Spain. Paris is hardly a hellhole of repression. And Hong Kong is the freest city of China.
If the beneficiaries of freedoms and democratic rights come to regard them as insufficient to produce the political, economic and social results they demand, what does that portend for democracy’s future?
For, despite the looting, arson and attacks on cops in Hong Kong, Xi Jinping is not going to order his satraps to yield to popular demands for autonomy or independence. Nor is Madrid going to accept the loss of Barcelona and secession of Catalonia. Nor is the conservative Chilean government going to yield to the street rebels and revolutionaries. Nor is Paris going to back down to the “yellow vests.”
Yet, one wonders: If the “end of history” and worldwide triumph of democratic capitalism thesis has, as most agree, been disproven, is it possible that the Age of Democracy is itself a passing phase in the history of the West and the world?[3]
Americans have not given up on democracy at all. While many are at odds with their fellow citizens about the direction that our great nation should take, they are exercising their rights of free speech dramatically, for an often-troubled world to see. Is it a pretty sight? Is democracy in action an edifying experience? Not always, but it is a sign that our great democracy is functioning.
The rifts in our body politic cut across lots of fracture lines: Donald Trump or no Trump[4]; abortions or no abortions[5]; foreign wars or no foreign wars[6]; the admission of illegal immigrants or none[7]; man-made “global warming,” or one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated on Mankind by the “eco-Nazis”[8]; — . . . and the list goes on and on.
If one person could be said to have been at the very heart of the cleavages in our society today it is the racist and anti-Semite Barack Obama, who did more than any other president to resew the seeds of racism in America today, and to divide this country along fault lines that are “fragile” in the best of times.[9] By leading the treasonous efforts to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump, there is no doubt that Obama engaged in sedition, which is consistent with his character.[10]
Pat Buchanan was correct when he observed that “the rage is . . . what kills the support they initially received”—and we have seen all of this before (e.g., during the Vietnam War era), and survived. George Orwell warned about it in his prescient Animal Farm, where all of the animals were considered equal until the Pigs accreted power and control, and subjugated the other animals (or “disbelievers”) until they reigned supreme.[11]
Abraham Lincoln and his trusted generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, dealt with the harsh realities of divisions within our great nation that might have torn it asunder—and they prevailed.[12] At times, the forces of division (and of evil and darkness) must be destroyed, not simply defeated. Nothing less will suffice. This was certainly true of Adolph Hitler and his “Thousand-Year Reich.”
Lastly, Pat Buchanan was mistaken in the conclusion of his article above. In the United States, the Left is being given enough rope to hang itself, like its alter egos did before. And most Americans are myopic: they are focused on their own lives, and do not really care what goes on in the world outside—as long as it does not affect them—which is understandable.
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and https://naegeleblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/timothy-d.-naegele-resume-19-9-27.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
God love him, Ronald Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union’s Evil Empire, and brought down Communism, and made the world safer for democracy—and the United States into the world’s preeminent and only superpower that it is today, with no peers. Yet, he was maligned and hated from Day One; and the same forces that are seeking to destroy Donald Trump tried desperately to destroy Reagan’s presidency too. Their appetites, and perpetual and insatiable thirst for blood, were whetted by having destroyed one conservative president, Richard Nixon. Reagan was their next target; and Iran Contra was their preferred means of taking him down. However, they failed. Much to their everlasting contempt, disgust and dismay, Reagan is lionized today.
The script is repeating itself with Trump. And there are RINOs in the GOP (or Republicans In Name Only), such as the despicable Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan—two losers, with respect to whom lots of us are ashamed of having voted for them—who are aligned with the Democrats’ efforts, and with those of other radical far-Leftists and their “fellow travelers” in the media.[2] Clearly, this is a war, every bit as sinister as the prospects for war that Abraham Lincoln faced. Yet he stood tall and faced down our enemies, foreign[3] and domestic[4], and it changed the course of America forever.[5]
There are reasons to believe that Donald Trump will follow Lincoln’s path, and prevail. The “Pigs” of George Orwell’s Animal Farm are trying to take over, and subjugate all of the others animals—which are us—and they must be stopped . . . and yes, destroyed.[6] They are a threat to our great Republic, and to our way of life. Gregg Re and John Roberts have written at Fox News:
The White House outlined in a defiant eight-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democrats on Tuesday why it will not participate in their “illegitimate and unconstitutional” impeachment inquiry, charging that the proceedings have run roughshod over congressional norms and the president’s due-process rights.
Trump administration officials called the letter, which was written by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and obtained by Fox News, perhaps the most historic letter the White House has sent. The document tees up a head-on collision with Democrats in Congress, who have fired off a slew of subpoenas in recent days concerning the president’s alleged effort to get Ukraine to investigate political foe Joe Biden during a July phone call with Ukraine’s leader.
“President Trump and his administration reject your baseless, unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process,” the letter stated. “Your unprecedented actions have left the president with no choice. In order to fulfill his duties to the American people, the Constitution, the Executive Branch, and all future occupants of the Office of the Presidency, President Trump and his administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances.”
The document concluded: “The president has a country to lead. The American people elected him to do this job, and he remains focused on fulfilling his promises to the American people.”
Responding to the letter, Pelosi accused Trump of “trying to make lawlessness a virtue” and added, “The American people have already heard the President’s own words – ‘do us a favor, though.’” (That line, from a transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s leader, in reality referred to Trump’s request for Ukraine to assist in an investigation into 2016 election interference, and did not relate to Biden.)
Pelosi continued: “This letter is manifestly wrong, and is simply another unlawful attempt to hide the facts of the Trump Administration’s brazen efforts to pressure foreign powers to intervene in the 2020 elections. … The White House should be warned that continued efforts to hide the truth of the President’s abuse of power from the American people will be regarded as further evidence of obstruction. Mr. President, you are not above the law. You will be held accountable.”
Substantively, the White House first noted in its letter that there has not been a formal vote in the House to open an impeachment inquiry — and that the news conference held by Pelosi last month was insufficient to commence the proceedings.
“In the history of our nation, the House of Representatives has never attempted to launch an impeachment inquiry against the president without a majority of the House taking political accountability for that decision by voting to authorize such a dramatic constitutional step,” the letter stated.
It continued: “Without waiting to see what was actually said on the call, a press conference was held announcing an ‘impeachment inquiry’ based on falsehoods and misinformation about the call.”
Despite Pelosi’s claim that there was no “House precedent that the whole House vote before proceeding with an impeachment inquiry,” several previous impeachment inquiries have been launched only by a full vote of the House — including the impeachment proceedings concerning former Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
White House officials told Fox News the vote opening the proceedings was a small ask, considering the implications of potentially overturning a national election.
The letter went on to note that “information has recently come to light that the whistleblower” who first flagged Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president “had contact with [House Intelligence Committee] Chairman [Adam] Schiff’s office before filing the complaint.”
And Schiff’s “initial denial of such contact caused The Washington Post to conclude that Chairman Schiff “clearly made a statement that was false,” the letter observed.
Multiple reports surfaced this week that the whistleblower had a prior “professional relationship” with one of the 2020 Democratic candidates for president. On Friday, lawyers for the whistleblower did not respond to questions from Fox News about the whistleblower’s possible previous relationship with any currently prominent Democrat.
The letter added: “In any event, the American people understand that Chairman Schiff cannot covertly assist with the submission of a complaint, mislead the public about his involvement, read a counterfeit version of the call to the American people, and then pretend to sit in judgment as a neutral ‘investigator.'”
The White House was dinging Schiff for reciting a fictional version of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s leader during a congressional hearing. Schiff later called his statements a “parody.”
“Perhaps the best evidence that there was no wrongdoing on the call is the fact that, after the actual record of the call was released, Chairman Schiff chose to concoct a false version of the call and to read his made-up transcript to the American people at a public hearing,” the letter stated. “The chairman’s action only further undermines the public’s confidence in the fairness of any inquiry before his committee.”
Ukraine’s president has said he felt Trump did nothing improper in their July call, and DOJ lawyers who reviewed the call said they found no laws had been broken. The White House released a transcript of the conversation last month, as well as the whistleblower’s complaint, which seemingly relied entirely on second-hand information.
Separately, the letter asserted multiple alleged violations of the president’s due-process rights. It noted that under current impeachment inquiry proceedings, Democrats were not allowing presidential or State Department counsel to be present.
Democrats’ procedures did not provide for the “disclosure of all evidence favorable to the president and all evidence bearing on the credibility of witnesses called to testify in the inquiry,” the letter noted, nor did the procedures afford the president “the right to see all evidence, to present evidence, to call witnesses, to have counsel present at all hearings, to cross-examine all witnesses, to make objections relating to the examination of witnesses or the admissibility of testimony and evidence, and to respond to evidence and testimony.”
Democrats also have not permitted Republicans in the minority to issue subpoenas, contradicting the “standard, bipartisan practice in all recent resolutions authorizing presidential impeachment inquiries.”
The letter claimed that House committees have “resorted to threats and intimidation against potential Executive Branch witnesses,” by raising the specter of obstruction of justice when administration employees seek to assert “long-established Executive Branch confidentiality interests and privileges in response to a request for a deposition.”
“Current and former State Department officials are duty bound to protect the confidentiality interests of the Executive Branch, and the Office of Legal Counsel has also recognized that it is unconstitutional to exclude agency counsel from participating in congressional depositions,” the letter stated.
Additionally, the letter noted that Democrats reportedly were planning to interview the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment inquiry at an undisclosed location — contrary, the White House said, to the constitutional notion of being able to confront one’s accuser.
According to a White House official, the bottom line was: “We are not participating in your illegitimate exercise. … If you are legitimately conducting oversight, let us know. But all indications are this is about impeachment.”
The document came as the White House aggressively has parried Democrats’ inquiry efforts. One of the administration’s first moves: the State Department on Tuesday barred Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, from appearing before a House panel conducting the probe into Trump.
“I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify, but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away, and true facts are not allowed out for the public to see,” Trump tweeted.
The strategy risked further provoking Democrats in the impeachment probe, setting up court challenges and the potential for lawmakers to draw up an article of impeachment accusing Trump of obstructing their investigations. Schiff said Sondland’s no-show would be grounds for obstruction of justice and could give a preview of what some of the articles of impeachment against Trump would entail.
But, as lawmakers sought to amass ammunition to be used in an impeachment trial, the White House increasingly has signaled that all-out warfare was its best course of action.
“What they did to this country is unthinkable. It’s lucky that I’m the president. A lot of people said very few people could handle it. I sort of thrive on it,” Trump said Monday at the White House. “You can’t impeach a president for doing a great job. This is a scam.”
House Democrats, for their part, issued a new round of subpoenas on Monday, this time to Defense Secretary Mark Esper and acting White House budget director Russell Vought. Pelosi’s office also released an open letter signed by 90 former national security officials who served in administrations from both parties, voicing support for the whistleblower who raised concerns about Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to look into Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.
“A responsible whistleblower makes all Americans safer by ensuring that serious wrongdoing can be investigated and addressed, thus advancing the cause of national security to which we have devoted our careers,” they wrote. “Whatever one’s view of the matters discussed in the whistleblower’s complaint, all Americans should be united in demanding that all branches of our government and all outlets of our media protect this whistleblower and his or her identity. Simply put, he or she has done what our law demands; now he or she deserves our protection.”
The House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees were investigating Trump’s actions alleging he pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son, potentially interfering in the 2020 election. The former vice president, for his part, has accused Trump of “frantically pushing flat-out lies, debunked conspiracy theories and smears against me.” And, Biden’s campaign has sought to have Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has accused Biden of possible corruption, removed from the airwaves.
Biden has acknowledged on camera that in spring 2016, when he was vice president and spearheading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire top prosecutor Viktor Shokin. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings — where Hunter had a lucrative role on the board despite limited relevant expertise. Critics have suggested Hunter Biden’s salary bought access to Biden.
The vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in critical U.S. aid if Shokin, who was widely accused of corruption, was not fired.
“Well, son of a b—h, he got fired,” Biden joked at a panel two years after leaving office.[7]
Bravo. Never has an American president stood taller, to fight off the efforts of barbarians and to protect our great Republic, for future generations of Americans. Lincoln did this. Reagan did too. And now Trump. All were besieged from almost every quarter; and ultimately the great Lincoln paid with his life. But the United States survived; and it will this time too. The barbarians at our gates must be spurned and, yes, destroyed. They have not left any other choices.
And the instigator of all of this—the un-American traitor, racist and anti-Semite, Barack Obama—should pay with his life for his sedition.[8]
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and https://naegeleblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/timothy-d.-naegele-resume-19-9-27.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
Like it or not, this is what the far-Left Democrats and their kindred spirits in America’s so-called “mainstream media” have wrought. They are the party that gave us the senseless and tragic Vietnam War during which more than 55,000 Americans died—and many more were maimed, and to this day are “walking wounded”—and the party that gave us Watergate. And yes, lots of us began as Democrats, but will never vote for one again.
Today, they have a blood thirst for destroying the presidency of Donald Trump; and the father and progenitor of this is the un-American traitor, racist and anti-Semite, Barack Obama. Instead of healing racial divisions in this great nation, he exacerbated them and fed them. Few Americans took time to read his book before his election as our president in 2008, “Dreams from My Father.”[2] If they had, they would have realized fully his un-American and racist views.
Having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia, he never lived on the U.S. mainland until he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, and later Columbia University in New York City, during which time he admitted to being a “druggie.” A direct quote:
Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.[3]
He attended the church of the racist Jeremiah Wright for many years[4]; and he openly embraced the notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.[5] Because Obama smiled, and seemingly supported American values, many in the United States were fooled by who he was and really is. Deceit may be the hallmark of his life.
Perhaps the once-respected New York Times has put these issues in their starkest form, in the following article by Alexander Burns and Nick Corasaniti, albeit not intending to do so:
After the 2016 election, Democratic leaders reached an all but unanimous conclusion: To defeat President Trump in 2020, they would have to do more than condemn his offensive behavior and far-right ideology, as Hillary Clinton had done. They would need, above all, to promote a clear and exciting agenda of their own.
They took that lesson to heart in the midterm elections and afterward, capturing the House of Representatives with a focus on health care and then attempting to impress the electorate by passing legislation on matters like campaign finance reform and the minimum wage. As Democratic presidential contenders pushed campaigns built on big ideas, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi resisted a chorus of calls for impeachment, even from some of her party’s leading 2020 candidates.
Yet 13 months before the next election, Democratic leaders are now steering into a protracted, head-on clash with Mr. Trump. By seeking the Ukrainian government’s help in tarring former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump left them no choice, they say, but to pursue an impeachment inquiry that could consume the country’s attention for months.
Ms. Pelosi has indicated she aims to move the process along with haste, in part to avoid an election-year conflagration, but the exact course of the inquiry is impossible to foresee.
All 19 Democratic presidential candidates now support the impeachment inquiry, and many Democrats are optimistic that voters will as well, because Mr. Trump is so unpopular and the allegations against him are grave and easily grasped. For now, Republicans are the party on the defensive, flummoxed by the cascading disclosures about Mr. Trump that have threatened to upend his re-election campaign.
But there is also a general recognition, at every level of the Democratic Party, that impeachment could complicate their candidates’ efforts to explain their policy ideas to the country and persuade voters they have a vision beyond ousting Mr. Trump. The party has been disappointed too many times, its leaders say, by betting that Mr. Trump’s violations of political and cultural norms would bring about his downfall.
On Friday evening, Ms. Pelosi declared at a conference of New Jersey Democrats in Atlantic City that she would not allow the 2020 election to become a campaign about impeachment. Insisting the inquiry “has nothing to do with the election,” she said the campaign would be fought on other terms.
“That’s about facts and the Constitution,” Ms. Pelosi said of the impeachment process. “The election is about all of the issues and policies that we have a difference of opinion with the Republicans on, and they are very drastic — and they have nothing to do with impeachment.”
Ms. Pelosi has already advised the newest members of her caucus — the ones who secured the majority last year — that they will have to execute a careful balancing act in the coming weeks, to show voters in their districts that they can continue to pass important legislation. She is said to be particularly focused on a proposal to lower prescription drug prices that she unveiled last week, before the Ukraine saga began.
But even before impeachment, House Democrats were gaining little traction with policy bills that withered in the Republican-controlled Senate. Polls have shown their proposals to be popular, but they have been routinely overshadowed in the news by Mr. Trump.
There is little doubt that impeachment will become a singular obsession in the political world and dominate news coverage for as long as the inquiry is underway. A few early polls on impeachment suggest that public support for the inquiry is somewhat stronger than opposition to it, but those numbers could easily change in either direction as the process unfolds.
Diane Feldman, a Democratic pollster, said it would be difficult for the party to communicate with voters on issues besides impeachment for the duration of the process. But candidates up and down the ballot had to try to drive a message about policy all the same, she said.
“I think it’s worth the effort, but it’s a long shot,” Ms. Feldman said. “That we not put all of our eggs in the impeachment basket seems to me extremely wise.”
However, Ms. Feldman said, the impeachment process could also “add some clarity to risks that Trump presents to our national security and foreign policy” and sharpen the overall Democratic case against his re-election.
The task of balancing impeachment against policy priorities will be especially delicate for lawmakers elected last year, including dozens who won narrow victories in historically Republican districts. Democrats are defending a sizable number of seats that Mr. Trump carried in 2016, in parts of the country like upstate New York, Oklahoma City and northern Maine, where the impeachment issue is likely to stir backlash.
Congressional Republicans are likely to struggle in a different way, as they face pressure from their party’s conservative base to defend Mr. Trump even as he behaves in erratic or legally questionable ways.
Democratic presidential candidates are attempting their own juggling act, mixing denunciations of Mr. Trump’s actions on Ukraine with detailed policy promises. Mr. Biden, the candidate most directly connected to the impeachment uproar, has repeatedly denounced Mr. Trump but has declined to reorient his activities around responding to the president. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Mr. Biden’s leading competitor in the primary, has reminded voters this week that she was the first major Democratic candidate to demand Mr. Trump’s impeachment. But she, too, has not dwelled on the subject in her speeches, and she has indicated she would prefer to avoid a sprawling, open-ended process.
And at the same Democratic gathering in New Jersey where Ms. Pelosi spoke on Friday, Senator Cory Booker urged his party to avoid “partisan glee” about the prospect of impeaching Mr. Trump. Talking to reporters outside the event, he said Democrats should keep campaign considerations separate from impeachment: “It’s just something that I need to deal with in a very sober way,” he said, “away from politics.”
But Mr. Biden and Ms. Warren may be among the only Democratic candidates who can count on breaking through the din of impeachment with regularity, along with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and perhaps Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind. For the rest of the Democratic field, strategists say, the next stage of the primary race may have less to do with delivering high-minded policy arguments on the national level than courting voters in the early primary and caucus states with personal appeals — as an impeachment battle rages in the foreground.
Meredith Kelly, a Democratic strategist, said the experience of the last presidential race had not faded in the party’s thinking. A veteran of the 2018 campaign to seize the House, Ms. Kelly said Democratic candidates would have to both build a “methodical” case against Mr. Trump during the impeachment inquiry and also keep detailing “a proactive vision of what you stand for.”
“It was a lesson from 2016: You couldn’t only call out Donald Trump without your own positive vision for the country,” said Ms. Kelly, who advised Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign. “You cannot stop talking about kitchen-table issues and your vision for the country.”
Democratic voters this week expressed a combination of enthusiasm for impeachment and anxiety about potential political complications — and, at times, a desire to stay focused on policy.
At Mr. Biden’s campaign stop in Las Vegas on Friday, Rick Carter, 74, a voter from Henderson, Nev., said he had been highly skeptical of impeaching Mr. Trump until the recent revelations about Ukraine. The newest allegations, he said, were “pretty clear, to the point.”
Still, Mr. Carter said he hoped candidates would continue training their attention on subjects like the cost of prescription drugs.
“I want to start focusing on what the American people need,” he said.
Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, said that even in the tumult of impeachment there were opportunities for Democrats to emphasize policy. He pointed to Ms. Warren’s campaign as one that was plainly “breaking through on policy” even amid Mr. Trump’s constant provocations.
“The House has passed a lot of bills that have gotten very little news coverage,” he noted. “But when members go home and have interactions with their constituents, they’re going to spend a lot of time talking about their legislation to have Medicare negotiate for lower prices and give all people the benefit of lower drug prices.”
And while the impeachment process unfolds, Mr. Garin added, Democrats could likely count on Mr. Trump not to deliver a broad, policy-based message of his own.
“Trump’s not really making any effort to do anything but rally his base on this,” Mr. Garin said. “And in doing that, I think he’s probably aggravating his situation with voters in the center.”[6]
If anyone is dazzled by or believes the current crop of far-Left Democrats, one need only hark back to the words and tragic deeds of Germany’s Adolf Hitler, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Tse-tung, who killed millions.[7] Or read (or reread) the words of George Orwell in his prescient “Animal Farm,” where all of the animals were equal until the “Pigs” reigned supreme and were masters over—and subjugated—the other animals.[8]
The Pigs of today have taken over and reside in the Democratic Party; and to mask their evil intentions, they coined the title “progressives,” which is the farthest thing from who and what they really are. The Times‘ article is correct: “[T]he exact course of the [impeachment] inquiry is impossible to foresee.” Having lived through the Watergate saga and tragedy, which was unfolding just as I was leaving the U.S. Senate, I know that impeachment assumes a life of its own, and consumes and sucks out the air from everything else.
The Times‘ writers add:
All 19 Democratic presidential candidates now support the impeachment inquiry, and many Democrats are optimistic that voters will as well, because Mr. Trump is so unpopular and the allegations against him are grave and easily grasped.
President Trump is loved by vast numbers of dedicated American supporters; and his poll numbers exceed those of Obama at this point in their respective presidencies. And the allegations against the President with respect to Ukraine do not remotely compare with the corruption of Joe Biden and his son Hunter vis-à-vis that country.[9]
For Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to assert that “she would not allow the 2020 election to become a campaign about impeachment”—and “[i]nsisting the inquiry ‘has nothing to do with the election,'” and that “the campaign would be fought on other terms”—is laughable, absurd and pathetic. She was first elected to Congress in 1987, while Watergate was breaking wide-open fifteen years before, in late 1972 and early 1973, just as I was leaving the Senate. At best, she is naïve or duplicitous, but more likely she is engaged in outright lying.[10] All other issues are buried and consumed by impeachment, period . . . unless, God forbid, there is a direct attack on the United States or some other national tragedy.
The Times’ writers are correct:
There is little doubt that impeachment will become a singular obsession in the political world and dominate news coverage for as long as the inquiry is underway.
And the Democratic pollster, Diane Feldman, was correct when she said it would be difficult for the party to communicate with voters on issues besides impeachment for the duration of the process. Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, was mistaken when he said that Democrats could likely count on President Trump not to deliver a broad, policy-based message of his own. The President will tout his accomplishments far and wide, to the long-neglected—and taken for granted by the Democratic Party—African-Americans, and others who have benefited.
Again, my sense today is that what we will witness in the months to come may be very similar to the Vietnam War and Watergate eras. The fabric of our great nation will be ripped wide-open, pitting friends and loved ones against each other. I love this country, and no other. I want to see it flourish, and all Americans benefit. However, I am very concerned about the months to come, and the effects they will have on America—and how our enemies abroad view us and our vulnerabilities, which they may seek to exploit.
Political pundit Dick Morris believes that many Democrats in Congress are fearful of attacks from their Left, and losing in their primaries; and hence, Nancy Pelosi has embarked on impeachment to give them cover. He may be correct. However, the larger issue—which they seem blind to see—is that the country may be ripped apart to a much greater extent than even during the Vietnam War and Watergate. The Democrats and their captive far-Left media and the “Deep State” are determined to end the presidency of Donald Trump.
However, they do not realize, much less fully, how strongly other Americans feel about him and his presidency. Abraham Lincoln was hated by a large segment of America, yet he persevered and saved the nation. The United States today may be approaching a similar juncture, pitting brothers against brothers and sisters against sisters. The Trump faithful have watched Obama and his fellow co-conspirators attempt to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump—which is an attempted coup, and treasonous and seditious. Yet, no one has been indicted, convicted and gone to prison.
The rule of law in America has been turned on its head; and vast numbers of Americans are very angry. Some are angry that Trump was ever elected in the first place, while others—in vast numbers—are angry that the Left has tried to destroy the Trump presidency and nullify their votes. I am deeply concerned that the United States is heading toward its second Civil War. Also, I do not see anything on the horizon that will bring us together again as one nation. If we are moving toward a new Civil War, will it become a shooting war? Quite possibly. I do not discount that outcome at all.
Lastly, this is not like a football game or other sporting event, where if our favored team loses we are disappointed or even “heartbroken,” but we move on to another day. This is about the future and survival of our great nation, and of the American people. Get it wrong, and our offspring’s future may be dark beyond comprehension. We have enemies who would like to destroy us, in an instant.[11] Perhaps all of this is what Obama meant when he envisioned a “fundamental transformation” of America[12]—to be completed in 2020—because the Trump presidency is a repudiation of the un-American traitor, racist and anti-Semite, and his presidency.[13]
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and https://naegeleblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/timothy-d.-naegele-resume-19-9-27.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
When I left Capitol Hill after working there for three and a half years, there was one four-letter word that stood out in my mind, and it still does today: “S-I-C-K.” I vowed that neither of my kids would ever work there. I had seen raving narcissists and demagogues who were not nice people—and equaled or surpassed those in Hollywood where I had grown up.
I saw senators and congressmen chasing and bedding female staffers between the ages of about 22-26, and wrecking their lives in the process. When the women reached about 28, they were considered “over the hill,” and a new batch of fresh young faces would replace them. I saw attractive young female staffers flock to the politicians like groupies are attracted to rock stars and other celebrities. I saw lobbyists providing women for sex to important committee chairmen.
I saw power trips that were way out of proportion to the actual power wielded. I saw senators and members of Congress pontificate on empty chamber floors, and pass legislation that often did not help anyone, but merely “congested” and “polluted” government for both the regulators and public alike. Laws were put on the books almost ceremoniously to display motion and activity, even if they were truly bad laws that made little or no good sense—and none were ever taken off the books. Programs were still being funded even though they had outlived their usefulness years if not decades before.
I saw lobbyists literally run Washington, because they had the skills and knowledge that the politicians did not have. House staffs were small unless the member had seniority. Hence, the input of lobbyists was essential to the passage of legislation. They wrote it; and they got it passed and their clients benefited; and somehow—by hook or by crook—the politicians benefited financially or in other ways. It was dirty, but those participating simply looked the other way.
In short, the American people, God love them, are waking up bigtime to the mess that is Washington, D.C.—a corrupt, politically-polarized toxic city.[3]
This is the “Deep State” at its worst, except for treachery that aids our enemies. Today, Washington is plunging into impeachment investigations[4], and the circus is continuing. The Democrats lost the last presidential election to Donald Trump; and ever since then, they have been trying to destroy his presidency. Their efforts began well before the 2016 elections, when Barack Obama and his co-conspirators launched their efforts to destroy the Trump candidacy, and then his presidency—which is treasonous and seditious, and continues to this day. Each of them should be prison, at the very least, but so far they are not. No American should believe in or respect the rule of law until this happens.[5]
The Republicans in Washington are weak and spineless; and the Democrats routinely roll over them and outsmart them. Former presidential contender, Massachusetts governor and now senator from Utah, the carpetbagging RINO Mitt Romney, is a perfect example of this.[6] And yes, lots of us began as Democrats, but will never vote for one again. As the party veered farther and farther to the Left, they lost us. And the Republican Party has not earned our respect or votes either, which is why more and more Americans may be Independents today, or vote as if they were. Donald Trump may be America’s first Independent president, beholden to neither party and attacked by elements in both—as well as by far-Left vestiges of the United States’ once-respected media. As I have written: “His very presence has been and continues to be a threat to Washington’s ‘establishment’ and power structure, and to the goals of globalists in the United States and abroad.”[7]
Ukraine-gate, as Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—has dubbed it, may end the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden. He is knee deep with his son Hunter in corruption.[8] And it is simply the latest attempt by America’s Left to divert attention from their presidential candidates, who consist of misfits, freaks, racists and anti-Semites. Conrad Black—the Canadian-born, British former newspaper publisher, author and life peer—has described the situation as follows in The New York Sun:
In the United States as in Great Britain, the political system has been so strained by issues of such immense controversy that they cross party lines, immobilize the system, and can only be settled by the voters as a whole. There will be no other determination of whether President Trump gets to finish his task of grinding to powder and replacing the ruling bipartisan elite that he believes grievously mis-governed the country in the post-Reagan years.
In 2016, Mr. Trump neither won a mandate for revolution nor incurred a cause to be denied or removed from office. Almost half the voters substantially agreed with the president in 2016, and this remains the principal issue: that the previous four presidents and their Congresses mis-governed the country.
This view holds that the elder President Bush allowed the Republican Party to be split by a charlatan (Ross Perot), bringing in the Clintons, who brought on, with George W. Bush, the subprime mortgage debacle and the world’s greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression; and that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama produced a series of Middle East-related foreign policy disasters.
There was a faulty intelligence response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a completely misconceived war in Iraq, an immense humanitarian disaster generating as many as 10 million refugees, the premature departure from Iraq which helped produce ISIS, and the abandonment of nuclear non-proliferation with respect to Iran and North Korea (where all four presidents were swindled).
According to this view, the Bushes allowed the Republican Party to be shamed and jostled into insane notions of self-impoverishment over completely speculative notions of climate management, and President Obama was allowed to get away with a defeatist and corrupt economic policy that provided slightly more survivable welfare arrangements and a flat-lined “new normal” of 2% economic growth despite immense deficits and a shrinking workforce, though the Obamas’ rich chums on Wall Street, in Hollywood, and in the Silicon Valley were well taken care of fiscally.
And all four previous presidents are accused of pursuing trade policies that imported unemployment into the United States and doing nothing while up to 20 million illiterate peasants poured into the country illegally or while oil imports increased and the manufacturing sector was farmed out to other countries by companies that repatriated unemployment but not profits.
It is a powerful indictment of bipartisan policy and while sometimes overstated, as often happens in politics, it cannot easily be refuted. Instead, the president’s opponents in both parties have described him as a boorish mythmaker, a crook, and a pathologically dishonest egomaniac who is tarnishing the whole constitutional process by abuses of office.
The thunderbolt of the Trump assault on the whole system is an unprecedented victory by a disruptive political outsider. Some have tried to invoke Andrew Jackson as a precedent, but he had been a drummer-boy in the Revolutionary War, a famous citizen-general, briefly a United States senator, and was deprived of apparent victory in his first charge for the presidency in 1824 by the House of Representatives, though he led the popular and electoral vote in the election (but lacked an Electoral College majority).
No one has seriously tried to defend the presidents and Congresses in the seven preceding terms since Ronald Reagan. No one defends the endless Mideast wars or the bad trade deals or the legislative and executive imposition of commercially unsound mortgages (the political free lunch of expanding family home ownership at no cost to the taxpayers, that reduced almost the entire world banking system, except Canada’s, to insolvency).
The climate terror is now supported by confected waves of child-demonstrators and the same tired academics who are the leaders or the chief useful idiots of the international climate-activist Left. They were defeated in the Cold War, beat their swords into thermometers, and assaulted capitalism from a new angle, militarizing the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and the birdwatchers and butterfly collectors, all in the name of saving the planet. It has been a formidable improvisation, but is a long way from Al Gore’s “settled science,” much less the Prince of Wales’ somewhat tedious assertions that the end is nigh.
The Democrats, apart from a ritual defense of the Obama era in general, have just moved farther leftward, recommitting themselves to sharply higher taxes on middle- and upper-incomes, more open borders, the green terror, socialized medicine, and an ardent flirtation with vast reparations for African and native Americans.
And they have united with their press echo chamber to greet each new unfledged anti-Trump allegation as an impeachable presidential offense, chanting as if in hypnosis the confected group-faith that the president is an evil man awaiting from one week to the next the proof of his criminality.
The New York Times spurred most of the Democratic presidential candidates with any measurable support to demand the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Yet the Times knew there was no truth to the allegation of sexual abuse 35 years before.
The Washington Post took its turn last week with hearsay from a “whistleblower” about a conversation the president had, overheard by dozens of listeners, with the president of Ukraine. The spavined fire-horses charged out of the station again: Maureen Dowd hoping this would be the “Big One,” and Nicholas Kristof saying “It stinks,” (both in the Times).
It is almost inconceivable that any such conversation could produce a serious legal problem for President Trump. It cannot be ruled out that the Trump entourage has generated this round to discredit the Democratic press mobs again, and to get the murky business of the Biden family’s collateral profits from the vice presidency into the public square.
The president has substantially succeeded with respect to the economy, the southern border, trade, and energy production, and he will strive on to “drain the swamp.” His enemies are so envenomed, only the election next year can resolve the question whether the political establishment Mr. Trump attacked survives in recognizable form or he creates a new policy orthodoxy, as FDR did in the 1930s, when he entered office at the bottom of the Great Depression with a mandate to rebuild the country.
The system is substantially gridlocked between two alternatives that cannot be bridged; the people must choose the way forward. But they will, and that is why democracy works; the people ultimately decide and that is the one incontestable political legitimacy.
The United Kingdom has suffered a comparable drought of good government since the departure of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1990. Debt has increased, taxes have risen, and the country has wobbled between the attractions of plunging headlong into the supranational European Union or revitalizing itself as an important sovereign nation, close, as always, with kindred European spirits, but also close to its Commonwealth relatives in Canada and Australasia, and the United States.
The Euro-integration option would mean largely emasculating institutions that the British have worked out gradually over 800 years with relatively little civil strife, and practically none (apart from the former province of Ireland) since 1685, a third of a millennium, in favor of government from Brussels by commissioners very tenuously responsive to the constituent governments and to the talking shop of the European Parliament.
The impasse has become so sharp that parties are divided and a bare parliamentary majority of Remainers, drawn from seven parties, is trying to dictate to a government that no longer has the confidence of the House of Commons and wishes a general election. The Remainers are trying to direct government by legislation, in defiance of the public’s vote three years ago to leave the European Union, and to deny the government an election.
It is the worst shambles of British government since Oliver Cromwell dismissed the legislators, had the king decapitated, and made himself Lord Protector, an arrangement that only survived him by a few months and was followed by the return of the son of the late king.
Instead of any such extremities, in the U.K. as in the United States, the people will decide. Prime Minister Boris Johnson presumably will concede a request for an extension of Britain’s departure from the European Union from Halloween to New Year’s Eve in exchange for an immediate election. Only the people can decide, and they will, in the one country as in the other, almost certainly in favor of the incumbent. Any alternative now visible is completely implausible.[9]
Time will tell. But surely our enemies around the globe are salivating over the latest machinations in America’s “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-19-4-29). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
[8] See id.; see alsohttps://buchanan.org/blog/joe-biden-impeachments-first-casualty-137542 (“Joe Biden: Impeachment’s First Casualty”-“[Nancy Pelosi] has just put her own and her party’s fate and future on the line. . . . By making Ukraine the focus of the impeachment drive in the House, Pelosi has also assured that the questionable conduct of Biden and son Hunter Biden will be front and center for the next four months before Iowa votes. . . . This is bad news for the Biden campaign. And the principal beneficiary of Pelosi’s decision that put Joe and Hunter Biden at the center of an impeachment inquiry is [Elizabeth] Warren [who] . . . steadily emerges as the probable nominee”)
The title of this article is a “loaded question,” which we hope and pray never happens. However, the Democrats have launched impeachment against our President, which moves us one step closer to a bloody internal war.[2] And yes, Trump supporters—including law enforcement and our military—are armed to the teeth, like they were when Abraham Lincoln was the president and our last Civil War began.
Acts of sedition have been underway since before our national elections in 2016. Barack Obama and his fellow treasonous co-conspirators embarked on a concerted effort to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump, which continues to this day. When will they be held accountable, and imprisoned at the very least? Until this happens, no American should believe in our system of justice, because it does not exist. It is a fable and a fantasy, and a tragedy of epic proportions.[3]
On two other occasions in my lifetime, similar events have happened, when our great nation was torn asunder. One involved the Vietnam War and the hatred leveled at former President Lyndon Johnson. There were bumper stickers on cars in the District of Columbia that asked: “Where is Lee Harvey Oswald now that we really need him?—referring to John F. Kennedy’s assassin, and suggesting that Johnson should be killed too. The second event involved Richard Nixon and Watergate, where the hatred of him reached a fever pitch.
Today, the country is polarized in a manner approaching that of our last Civil War, when America was torn apart and barely survived. If Abraham Lincoln had not been our president, it likely that the United States would not exist as a nation today, but might be two or more countries, occupying North America. Lincoln and his generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman[4], turned the tide and won the war, at an enormous cost in human lives. For decades after that. America’s South functioned as a defeated nation within the United States, much like East Germany—or the DDR—existed in a united Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union.
From the moment that Donald Trump began his presidential campaign, he has been attacked by the Left and despicable RINOs like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on the right[5], and by the Left-leaning American media. The attacks have been relentless, without ceasing. In a very real sense, Trump is America’s first truly Independent president, who is beholden to neither political party, and attacked by elements in both. His very presence has been and continues to be a threat to Washington’s “establishment” and power structure, and to the goals of globalists in the United States and abroad. As I have written, the Democrats are “evil” but smart, while the Republicans are “Neanderthals” and dumb. This was my conclusion when I left the U.S. Senate, and it has never changed and continues to this day.
I began as a Democrat in a devoutly-Republican household, where my parents “idolized” Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. However, working on and with Capitol Hill for most of my adult life led me to the conclusion that I did not want to be a member of either political party. I have been an Independent ever since. Lots of Americans in our great nation’s “Flyover States” have felt disenfranchised; and Donald Trump has captured their beliefs and been their leader since his presidential campaign began. Is the man perfect? No one is, but he embodies the hopes and dreams of vast numbers of Americans who elected him in 2016 and may reelect him in 2020. Will his enemies, domestic and foreign, accept that result; or will his presidency be besieged until it runs its course?
The latest attacks on the President have been discussed by Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—in an article entitled “Will ‘Ukraine-Gate’ Imperil Biden’s Bid?”:
With the revelation by an intel community “whistleblower” that President Donald Trump, in a congratulatory call to the new president of Ukraine, pushed him repeatedly to investigate the Joe Biden family connection to Ukrainian corruption, the cry “Impeach!” is being heard anew in the land.
But revisiting how this latest scandal came about, and how it has begun to unfold, it is a good bet that the principal casualty could be the former vice president. Consider:
In May 2016, Joe Biden, as Barack Obama’s designated point man on Ukraine, flew to Kiev to inform President Petro Poroshenko that a billion-dollar U.S. loan guarantee had been approved to enable Kiev to continue to service its mammoth debt.
But, said Biden, the aid was conditional. There was a quid pro quo.
If Poroshenko’s regime did not fire its chief prosecutor in six hours, Biden would fly home and Ukraine would get no loan guarantee. Ukraine capitulated instantly, said Joe, reveling in his pro-consul role.
Yet, left out of Biden’s drama about how he dropped the hammer on a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor was this detail.
The prosecutor had been investigating Burisma Holdings, the biggest gas company in Ukraine. And right after the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the pro-Russian government in Kiev, and after Joe Biden had been given the lead on foreign aid for Ukraine, Burisma had installed on its board, at $50,000 a month, Hunter Biden, the son of the vice president.
Joe Biden claims that, though he was point man in the battle on corruption in Ukraine, he was unaware his son was raking in hundreds of thousands from one of the companies being investigated.
Said Joe on Saturday, “I have never spoken to my son about his various business dealings.”
Trump and Rudy Giuliani suspect not, and in that July 25 phone call, Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen the investigation of Hunter Biden and Burisma.
The media insist there is no story here and the real scandal is that Trump pressed Zelensky to reopen the investigation to target his strongest 2020 rival. Worse, say Trump’s accusers, would be if the president conditioned the transfer of $250 million in approved military aid to Kiev on the new regime’s acceding to his demands.
The questions raised are several:
Is it wrong to make military aid to a friendly nation conditional on that nation’s compliance with legitimate requests or demands of the United States? Is it illegitimate to ask a friendly government to look into what may be corrupt conduct by the son of a U.S. vice president?
Joe Biden has an even bigger problem: This issue has begun to dominate the news at an especially vulnerable moment for his campaign.
Biden’s stumbles and gaffes have already raised alarms among his followers and been seized upon by rivals such as Cory Booker, who has publicly suggested that the 76-year-old former vice president is losing it.
Biden’s lead in the polls also appears shakier with each month. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has just taken a narrow lead in a Des Moines Register poll and crusading against Beltway corruption is central to her campaign.
“Too many politicians in both parties have convinced themselves that playing the money-for-influence game is the only way to get things done,” Warren told her massive rally in New York City: “No more business as usual. Let’s attack the corruption head on.”
Soon, it will not only be Trump and Giuliani asking Biden questions ab[o]ut Ukraine, Burisma and Hunter, but Democrats, too. Calls are rising for Biden’s son to be called to testify before congressional committees.
With Trump airing new charges daily, Biden will be asked to respond by his traveling press. The charges and the countercharges will become what the presidential campaign is all about. Bad news for Joe Biden.
Can he afford to spend weeks, perhaps months, answering for his son’s past schemes to enrich himself through connections to foreign regimes that seem less related to Hunter’s talents than his being the son of a former vice president and possible future president?
“Ukraine-gate” is the latest battle in the death struggle between the “deep state” and a president empowered by Middle America to go to Washington and break that deep state’s grip on the national destiny.
Another issue is raised here — the matter of whistleblowers listening in to or receiving readouts of presidential conversations with foreign leaders and having the power to decide for themselves whether the president is violating his oath and needs to be reported to Congress.
Eisenhower discussed coups in Iran and Guatemala and the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and the Taiwan Strait. JFK, through brother Bobby, cut a secret deal with Khrushchev to move U.S. missiles out of Turkey six months after the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba.
Who deputized bureaucratic whistleblowers to pass judgment on such conversations and tattle to Congress if they were offended?[6]
Next, award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon has written an article for The Hill, which is entitled “Let’s get real: Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections”:
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
“I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President’s campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them,” Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine’s leader.
The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats’ support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.
The Murphy anecdote is a powerful reminder that, since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections.
And that activity long preceded Giuliani’s discussions with Ukrainian officials and Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in July, seeking to have Ukraine formally investigate whether then-Vice President Joe Biden used a threat of canceling foreign aid to shut down an investigation into $3 million routed to the U.S. firm run by Biden’s son.
As I have reported, the pressure began at least as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country.
The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.
U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, the former political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington who organized and attended the meetings.
Nazar Kholodnytsky, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That’s when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort.
The release of the evidence forced Manafort to step down as Trump’s top campaign adviser. A Ukrainian court concluded last December that the release of the evidence amounted to an unlawful intervention in the U.S. election by Kiev’s government, although that ruling has since been overturned on a technicality.
Shortly after the Ukrainian prosecutors returned from their Washington meeting, a new round of Democratic pressure was exerted on Ukraine — this time via its embassy in Washington.
Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States at the time, confirmed to me in a statement issued by his office that, in March 2016, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pressed his embassy to try to find any Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort that might reside in Ukraine’s intelligence files.
The DNC contractor also asked Chaly’s team to try to persuade Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to make a statement disparaging Manafort when the Ukrainian leader visited the United States during the 2016 election.
Chaly said his embassy rebuffed both requests because it recognized they were improper efforts to get a foreign government to try to influence the election against Trump and for Hillary Clinton.
The political pressure continued. Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in crucial U.S. aid to Kiev if Poroshenko did not fire the country’s chief prosecutor. Ukraine would have been bankrupted without the aid, so Poroshenko obliged on March 29, 2016, and fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
At the time, Biden was aware that Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma, the firm employing Hunter Biden, after a December 2015 New York Times article.
What wasn’t known at the time, Shokin told me recently, was that Ukrainian prosecutors were preparing a request to interview Hunter Biden about his activities and the monies he was receiving from Ukraine. If such an interview became public during the middle of the 2016 election, it could have had enormous negative implications for Democrats.
Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election, my reporting shows.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the same Hillary Clinton–funded opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who wrote the now-debunked dossier linking Trump to Russia collusion.
Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband — another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.
Politics. Pressure. Opposition research. All were part of the Democrats’ playbook on Ukraine long before Trump ever called Zelensky this summer. And as Sen. Murphy’s foray earlier this month shows, it hasn’t stopped.
The evidence is so expansive as to strain the credulity of the Democrats’ current outrage at Trump’s behavior with Ukraine.
Which raises a question: Could it be the Ukraine tale currently being weaved by Democrats and their allies in the media is nothing more than a smoke screen designed to distract us from the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report into abuses during the Democratic-inspired Russia collusion probe?
It’s a question worth asking.[7]
“Ukraine-gate” and impeachment are simply the latest attempts by America’s Left to divert attention from their presidential candidates, who consist of misfits, freaks, racists and anti-Semites.
As these attacks on President Trump continue unabated and get even worse before next year’s elections, the country may be ripped apart and become more polarized than ever. When will the actual shooting begin, and open warfare commence like our last Civl War? Is it merely a matter of time? Can our great nation heal and survive from such trauma? If the past is any indicator of the future, the answer is “yes,” a resounding “yes,” but it will take time, perhaps lots of it—and there may be bloodshed aplenty.
And what are America’s enemies abroad thinking and doing? Like our last Civil War, they would be wise not to get involved, or to take any actions that would be adverse to those of the United States. This is true of China and North Korea; and it is especially true of Russia’s brutal dictator-for-life Vladimir Putin’s designs for all of Ukraine: “a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia,” to quote John Solomon.[8]
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-19-4-29). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
In an article entitled “Russiagate Is No Watergate,” Pat Buchanan—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, and a former GOP presidential aspirant himself—has written:
“History is repeating itself, and with a vengeance,” John Dean told the judiciary committee, drawing a parallel between Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon, and “Russiagate” which has bedeviled Donald Trump.
But what strikes this veteran of Nixon’s White House is not the similarities but the stark differences.
Watergate began with an actual crime, a midnight break-in at the offices of the DNC in June 1972 to wiretap phones and filch files, followed by a cover-up that spread into the inner circles of the White House.
Three years after FBI Director James Comey began the investigation of Trump, however, the final report of his successor, Robert Mueller, found there had been no conspiracy, no collusion and no underlying crime.
How can Trump be guilty of covering up a crime the special counsel says he did not commit?
And the balance of power today in D.C. is not as lopsided as it was in 1973-1974.
During Watergate, Nixon had little support in a city where the elites, the press, the Democratic Congress and the liberal bureaucracy labored in earnest to destroy him. Nixon had few of what Pat Moynihan called “second and third echelons of advocacy.”
Contrast this with Trump, a massive presence on social media, whose tweets, daily interactions with the national press and rallies keep his enemies constantly responding to his attacks rather than making their case.
Trump interrupts their storytelling. And behind Trump is a host of defenders at Fox News and some of the top radio talk show hosts in America.
There are pro-Trump websites that did not exist in Nixon’s time, home to populist and conservative columnists and commentators full of fight.
Leftists may still dominate mainstream media. But their unconcealed hatred of Trump and the one-sided character of their coverage has cost them much of the credibility they had half a century ago.
The media are seen as militant partisans masquerading as journalists.
Consider the respective calendars.
Two years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon was near the end, about to be impeached by the House with conviction possible in the Senate.
Three years into Russiagate, 3 in 4 House Democrats do not want their caucus to take up impeachment. Many of these Democrats, especially moderates from swing districts, do not want to cast a vote to either bring down or exonerate the president.
Assume the House did take up impeachment. Would all the Democrats vote aye? Does anyone think a Republican Senate would deliver the needed 20 votes to provide a two-thirds majority to convict and remove him?
For a Republican Senate to split asunder and vote to expel its own Republican president who is supported by the vast majority of the party would be suicidal. It could cost the GOP both houses of Congress and the White House in 2020. Why would Republicans not prefer to unite and fight to the end, just as Senate Democrats did during the Clinton impeachment?
Trump’s support in the Republican caucus in the Senate today is rock solid. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is herself opposed to impeachment hearings in the House, considering them ruinous to her party’s hopes of maintaining control in 2020.
When Dean went before the Watergate committee of Sen. Sam Ervin in 1973, all five days of his testimony were carried live on ABC, CBS and NBC.
When Dean appeared Monday, the three cable news networks swiftly dropped coverage of the judiciary committee hearings to report on a helicopter crash in mid-Manhattan. Dean’s testimony could be seen on C-SPAN3.
Much of America is bored by the repetitive, nonstop media attacks on Trump, and look on the back-and-forth between left and right not as a “constitutional crisis” but as a savage battle between parties and partisans.
The impeachers who seek to bring down Trump face other problems.
Now that Mueller has spent two years and found no evidence of a Trump-Putin conspiracy to hack the emails of the DNC and Clinton campaign, questions have arisen as to what the evidence was that caused the FBI to launch its unprecedented investigation of a presidential campaign and a newly elected president.
Did an anti-Trump cabal at the apex of the FBI and U.S. security agencies work with foreign intelligence, including former British spy Christopher Steele, to destroy Trump?
The political dynamic of Trump’s taunts and defiance of the demands of committee chairs in a Democratic House, and the clamor for impeachment from the Democratic and media left are certain to produce more calls for hearings.
But if the impeachment hearings come, they will be seen for what they are: An attempted coup to overthrow a president by the losers of 2016 who are fearful they could lose again in 2020 and be out of power for four more years.
Russiagate is not Watergate, but there is this similarity:
Nixon and Trump are both the objects of a truly great hatred.[2]
Some of us lived through Watergate, as Pat Buchanan did. He was working in the Nixon White House, while I was leaving Capitol Hill and the U.S. Senate for the private practice of law in downtown Washington, D.C. Today, as in the case of Nixon, the chicken-hearted Neanderthals in the GOP may be Donald Trump’s Achilles’ heel.[3]
The un-American, traitorous, racist, anti-Semite Barack Obama was and is hated by vast swaths of the American people; and he should be in prison today—at the very least—for trying to destroy the Trump candidacy and then presidency.[4] But none of his true haters tried to destroy either Obama or his presidency.
Indeed, he beat the now-Massachusetts-to-Utah carpetbagger Mitt Romney and his running mate, the RINO Paul Ryan, fair and square. This may among the reasons why both have opposed President Trump at essentially every juncture. He did what neither of these historical losers could ever do: WIN. They will be ciphers in American history, if that much. Like Abraham Lincoln before him, Trump will not be.[5]
Will the future yield “Watergate II,” and will the Trump presidency be destroyed just like the Nixon presidency was? Traitors like John Dean are being given the time of day; the so-called “mainstream media” is on the warpath again, bent on bringing down this presidency too. And the spineless, feckless GOP may not support Donald Trump in the final analysis.
But unlike Nixon, Trump has an “army” of true believers, which spans this great nation, except for the bastions of Leftists on our East Coast and “Left coast.” And as long as our President’s health remains excellent, it is likely that he and his presidency will survive and truly flourish through his second term in office—which will end in January of 2025.
Lots of us certainly hope and pray that this is so. And yes, many of us began as Democrats, but will never vote for one again—especially in light of the mental midgets of the far-Left who are running against our President.[6]
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-19-4-29). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
Lou Dobbs—an American television personality, author, radio host, and anchor of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on the Fox Business Network—has described the multiplicity of crimes committed by the presidential administration of Barack Obama, or “Obamagate,” as the “biggest political scandal in American history.” There is every reason to believe that this is true.
They involve massive crimes by former Secretary of State and defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, including but not limited to the payment of approximately $145 million to former President Bill Clinton and her and their foundation, in exchange for the sale of 20 percent of America’s critical Uranium assets to Russia’s despotic killer, Vladimir Putin.[2]
Also, they include efforts by Obama officials to defeat the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump; and once he was elected, efforts to undermine and ultimately destroy his presidency. Those involved include former Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch; Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and former Deputy AG Sally Yates; former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey; former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; former CIA Director John Brennan; former National Security Advisor Susan Rice; former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe; and Senior Advisor to Obama, Valerie Jarrett.[3]
The assertion of treason is a very serious charge, which must not be thrown around lightly or irresponsibly, much less involving at least one former president, Barack Obama—and possibly two, if Bill Clinton’s crimes are included. Indeed, Clinton is only the second American president to be impeached, after Andrew Johnson in 1868.[4]
As I have written with respect to Mueller, after discussing the legal bases for treason:
Mueller and his co-conspirators have given aid and comfort to our enemies by trying to bring down the duly-elected presidency of Donald Trump.
. . .
The DOJ and FBI corrupted an American election, and the wrongdoers must be brought to justice. To make certain that it never happens again, an example must be made of Mueller, not dissimilar to that of Benito Mussolini in Italy during World War II. He must be prosecuted for treason and other crimes, convicted, and executed—to send the message of “Never Again” far and wide.[5]
It is doubtful that any of the last administration’s treasonous actions would have taken place without Barack Obama knowing about them, and approving them. Indeed, evidence is emerging that he knew and approved of such treasonous acts against Donald Trump, both before and after the election of 2016. If so, what should his punishment be? Should it be any less severe than that applied to Mueller, who was one of his operatives and co-conspirators?
It is probably fair to conclude that Obama may wish that he had never met the Clintons, much less “crawled into bed” with them, in terms of their criminal behavior stretching back over decades (e.g., Bill Clinton’s rape of women).[6] But Obama had a choice. And when he unleashed and/or blessed actions to undermine and destroy the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, he became complicit. And if our Constitution, republic and democracy are to have lasting value, he too must pay the ultimate price.
For those Americans who believed in the candidacy and presidency of Obama—and certainly those who voted for him not once but twice—any assertions of his culpability are met with animus, which is understandable. Yet, most Americans have never read his book, “Dreams from My Father,” which sets out his anger, racial beliefs, and impressions of the United States and its future in great detail:
Because of his looks and not his parentage or lineage, he made a conscious decision to be black. Once he made it, he seemed to put the white world behind him and to identify with the “victimization” of blacks. For example, he writes: “[T]o admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred—for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.”
The transformation seems to have started when young “Barry” Obama returned to Hawaii from Indonesia, where he had been living with his mother and her second husband, to live with her parents and enroll at Honolulu’s elite, ethnically and culturally diverse Punahou School—where his sense that he “didn’t belong continued to grow.”
. . .
Still at Punahou, he would recall: “[T]he only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”
. . .
Is that the anger he “inherited” from his Kenyan father with multiple wives, who was a stern disciplinarian and loved him so much that the father spent only one month of his life with young Barry when he was 10 years old, and effectively abandoned him the rest of the time?
. . .
Leaving a theater in New York with his mother and half-sister Maya, he observed: “The emotions between the races could never be pure. . . . Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.” Later, in writing about his times in Chicago and the stories he had heard from the black leadership, Obama says: “They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people—some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”
. . .
In discussing the difficulties facing black businesses, he mentions “the leg up that your [white] competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for over three hundred years”—again, the issue of black victimization.
. . .
[T]he book evidences few significant accomplishments as a “community organizer.” Indeed, he writes: “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt.”
. . .
Former Senator Edward W. Brooke, the first black U.S. Senator since Reconstruction, . . . did not try to change America because of any deep-seated hatred of whites or our capitalist system. After reading “Dreams from My Father,” most Americans will have few if any doubts why Obama associated with and befriended Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Their radical views seem consistent with his.
. . .
Also, he came face to face with the realities of his father as a man: “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself. . . . Now, . . . that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by . . . what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! . . . Whatever I do, it seems, I won’t do much worse than he did.”
. . .
En route to Kenya, he referred to himself as “a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.” He grew up in Hawaii, Indonesia and then Hawaii again, which are hardly the “heartland” of America, so his experiences were different than those of most Americans.
. . .
In Kenya, his alienation is reflected once again when he characterizes other tourists as expressing “a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.” Also, throughout the book, he expresses his intense dislike for “colonialism,” which is perhaps summarized by his thoughts as he rides a train and imagines how a British officer might have felt on its maiden voyage: “Would he have felt a sense of triumph, a confidence that the guiding light of Western civilization had finally penetrated the African darkness? Or did he feel a sense of foreboding, a sudden realization that the entire enterprise was an act of folly, that this land and its people would outlast imperial dreams?”[7]
To say that the United States elected an un-American black racist as its president is not to miss the mark. Most Americans knew little or nothing about him when he was elected.
In my article, I asked:
In the final analysis, will he be viewed as a fad and a feckless naïf, and a tragic Shakespearean figure who is forgotten and consigned to the dustheap of history? Will his naïveté have been matched by his overarching narcissism, and will he be considered more starry-eyed and “dangerous” than Jimmy Carter? Will his presidency be considered a sad watershed in history? Or will he succeed and prove his detractors wrong, and be viewed as the “anointed one” and a true political “messiah”? Even Abraham Lincoln was never accorded such accolades, much less during his lifetime. And Barack Obama’s core beliefs are light years away from those of Ronald Reagan.
Obama’s legacy is that of unprecedented and unbridled racism and, yes, hatred for America; and a willingness to ignore and scoff at our laws including the Constitution, and to far surpass the worst that Richard Nixon was ever accused of doing by his detractors during the Watergate scandal. Obama learned how to manipulate the powers of the presidency, and to abuse them beyond all recognition. He is a tragic Shakespearean figure who must be remembered for his treasonous conduct above all else. His presidency was and is a sad watershed in American history. He was far more dangerous and damaging to our great nation than any other U.S. leader—or traitor.[8]
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and http://www.naegele.com/documents/TimothyD.NaegeleResume.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
[7] Seehttps://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/is-barack-obama-a-racist/ (“Is Barack Obama A Racist?”); but seehttps://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/edward-w-brooke-is-dead/ (“Edward W. Brooke Is Dead”—”[B]ecause he was the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction after the Civil War—with Barack Obama being the third—he was afforded a certain amount of respect and responsibility. He had been Massachusetts’ Attorney General, and he was smart and charming; and his colleagues in the Senate seemed to genuinely like him”—”Brooke did not try to change America because of any hatred of whites or our capitalist system. After reading Obama’s ‘Dreams from My Father,’ most Americans will have few if any doubts why he associated with and befriended Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Their radical views seemed consistent with his. Ed Brooke was not a radical, or even close. He grew up on the American mainland; whereas, Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and never set foot on the American mainland until he attended Occidental College in Southern California. Brooke was an American, and proud to be one. He did not engage in class warfare like Obama has. He did not have deep-seated racial anger, nor exacerbate racial tensions and violence. And he was not a Narcissistic demagogue like Obama is. Brooke grew up with a stable family life; Obama did not. I have zero doubts that both men faced unbelievable discrimination because of their skin color, especially Brooke—because of the times when he grew up. However, I never experienced any racism on his part. Because he was a U.S. Army officer in Italy during World War II, where he saw combat, there was no anti-military hostility or prejudice like Obama has”—”He was an American leader before Barack Obama was even born; and he was a conciliator, not a rabble-rouser or racist”)
[8] Not discussed here are his decisions with respect to the Iraq War, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and plunging the Middle East into even greater chaos—including massive deaths and the exodus of innocents to Europe and other parts of the world; and Obamacare, which was and is a disaster unto itself.
A massive national security crisis has been exposed involving the payment of approximately $145 million to Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and their foundation, in exchange for the sale of 20 percent of America’s critical Uranium assets to Russia’s despotic killer, Vladimir Putin.[2]
Americans ask: How could something so stupid and treasonous have happened? It defies imagination. After all, Putin is our enemy, and the enemy of free people everywhere. He began as a KGB agent in East Germany, or the DDR—as it was known before the collapse of Erich Honecker’s government, which was one of the most repressive regimes in the Soviet Union’s orbit, or the Evil Empire.
Following the USSR’s implosion, Putin and his thugs and cronies hijacked Russia’s incipient democracy; and they have been exploiting it ever since. He has killed and killed again, and he is ruthless. He must be viewed in this context, not as some Westernized Russian democrat, which he is not.[3]
Those Americans involved in this pay-to-play “Uranium One” scandal of epic proportions—possibly dwarfing Watergate—include Barack Obama, the Clintons, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Robert Mueller, James Comey and Rod Rosenstein of the FBI and the Department of “Injustice.”[4] Each of them has been shielded by America’s corrupt Leftist media, which is complicit.
Anyone who has followed the careers of Barack Obama and the Clintons realizes fully that they are some of the most corrupt politicians who have ever risen to the top of our great nation. They are a disgrace, and un-American.[5]
Obama is black racist through and through. If anyone doubts this conclusion, please read his book, “Dreams from My Father.” It is all there, in his own words and beliefs, which undergirded eight years of his failed presidency that tore apart race relations in America.[6]
The Clintons are corrupt beyond belief. Among other things, Bill Clinton has raped and defiled women, who in turn have been attacked by Hillary Clinton. He is America’s sexual predator personified, just as the disgraced Harvey Weinstein symbolizes Hollywood’s multi-decade depravity.[7]
The full extent of the “Uranium One” scandal is just unfolding. It is likely to get far worse, and explosive.
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (seewww.naegele.com and http://www.naegele.com/documents/TimothyD.NaegeleResume.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., http://www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
Like Joe Biden, Buttigieg and others, this total incompetent should be forced to resign and prosecuted:
"Defense S… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…1 day ago
A Russian economy that survived 2022 faces a long-term deep freeze:
“There will be no money next year.”
wsj.com/articles/russi…1 day ago
By Timothy D. Naegele[1]
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