Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (18 page)

Republicans on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees did their job: they highlighted just how badly Mueller had failed in his most basic mission. The special counsel's job was to look at Russian interference in the 2016 election, but he failed to investigate what the FBI itself strongly suspected: that the Russians interfered in the election by feeding disinformation into Christopher Steele's dossier. In fact, Mueller's team was so intent on protecting the FBI, it refused to investigate the dossier at all. “Can you state with confidence the Steele dossier was not part of Russia's disinformation campaign?” Florida congressman Matt Gaetz asked the special counsel during the hearing. Mueller dodged, saying questions about the dossier “predated” him.
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Another hype-and-cover-up award goes to crazed congressional Democrats. To serve as one of the country's elected congressional representatives is one of the highest honors in the land. Sure, we expect the political parties to engage in spin and politics. But we also expect them to play by the rules of the game, abide by the Constitution, and tell the truth.

Democrats for decades positioned themselves as the party of “civil liberties,” the party that cared the most about intrusive government surveillance. Some of them probably really believed it. But that's
what makes their actions throughout the Russian hoax all the harder to stomach. They were willing to abandon every principle they'd ever claimed—cheering on the FBI's violations of Carter Page's liberties and its manufacturing of process crimes against other wrongly accused Trump aides—in order to hide their party's role in the dossier trick and to try to remove Trump from office.

When Congressman Devin Nunes in March 2017 uncovered evidence that the Obama White House had in its waning days been unmasking the names of Trump transition officials in intelligence reports, he held a press conference. He was convinced his news that an outgoing administration had been surveilling an incoming one would provoke strong bipartisan condemnation. Yet even the seasoned Nunes—who was used to partisan warfare—was shocked by Democrats' response. Instead of joining him to ask for answers, they accused him of mishandling classified information. They were still in a rage about the Trump win and willing to say or do anything to protect the corrupt actions of Obama officials.

Leading the Democratic assault on Nunes was none other than his counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff. I'll have a lot more on Shifty Schiff in the next chapter on impeachment. But suffice it to say the Russian hoax was where Schiff first cemented his reputation as a congenital liar.

After Trump was inaugurated, Schiff spent more than two years distorting and perverting Intel Committee information, misleading the public into believing the dossier hoax. The more Nunes and Republican members of the committee unraveled the truth of the dossier-FBI lies, the more Schiff publicly doubled down, telling Americans he had proof that Trump was a Manchurian candidate. As early as March 2017—before Comey was fired or Mueller hired—Schiff told NBC's Chuck Todd that “there is more than circumstantial evidence” of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia.
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In December 2017, he revealed the supposed details to CNN's Jake Tapper: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the president made
full use of that help.”
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The Mueller report proved every word of this Schiff statement a lie, but the public wouldn't get that truth for another eighteen months. Schiff engaged in the same pattern of deception with his memo on the Carter Page FISA applications, claiming the FBI committed no abuses whatsoever and that the dossier information used in the applications was corroborated. But again, the country had to wait nearly two years for Horowitz to set the record straight.

While Schiff was publicly hoodwinking the nation, behind the scenes he was working to obstruct and hinder Republican efforts to get to the truth. He objected to nearly every element of Nunes's FISA abuse investigation—including the subpoena that eventually revealed that the Democrats had funded the dossier—and his legal staff objected to Republican questions during depositions to help shield witnesses (like Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson) from answering. Schiff's steady stream of falsehoods was designed to undercut Republican facts, to give the media mobsters new, shiny tales to chase.

Most damaging, Schiff acted as chief spokesman for the Democratic campaign to present the entire Republican effort to get to the truth as nothing more than damaging partisan politics. Asked about GOP concerns about bias on the Mueller team, Schiff in that same December Tapper interview said, “The intent here is nothing short of discrediting Mueller, then discrediting the Justice Department, then discrediting the FBI, then discrediting the judiciary… this is an effort to tear at the very idea that there is an objective truth.”
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Schiff's colleague in the Senate, Intelligence Committee vice chairman Mark Warner, was no better. At the center of the Senate's bipartisan Russia investigation, Warner must have known there was never any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. Yet to this day, he insists Trump may have been conspiring with Putin to win the election. They all do. Democrats promised Mueller would be the final word on their conspiracy theory. But now that we have the truth, have any of them accepted that judgment? Have any of them apologized? Not at all. The Russia conspiracy theories go on.

Aided, of course, by the final, fraudulent players in this scandal: the media. The press continues to pretend to be arbiters of truth and facts. But the Russia hoax showed them to be nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. They spent three years peddling baseless conspiracy theories simply because they fit a vengeful, psychotic, anti-Trump narrative.

For more than a thousand days, it was Russia, Russia, Russia, with minute-by-minute headlines. Americans were told Trump campaign members had engaged in repeated interactions with Russian intelligence; that Trump Jr. and Michael Cohen and Carter Page and Roger Stone were all Russian cutouts; that the Russians had a server in Trump Tower; that Manafort secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; that the National Rifle Association laundered Russian money for the Trump campaign. All complete lies. And all from supposedly legitimate “news” outfits: the
New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian
, McClatchy, CNN, MSNBC, and many others.

And when the press isn't lying, it's busy spinning its narrative—again, all to undermine Trump. They promised us that Steele was a brilliant spymaster and that the FBI was motivated by nothing but good intentions. They assured that the government had fail-proof safeguards to protect against surveillance abuse and that anybody who suggested otherwise was spinning a “conspiracy theory.”

We at the Hannity TV and radio shows were among the people most frequently accused by this preening press corps of floating those conspiracies. And again, that's why the Horowitz report was so valuable. We never went out with a story until we had corroboration; we crossed every “t” and dotted every “i.” We told the country the truth.

It was the swamp that perpetrated a massive fraud on the nation.

For all we learned from the Horowitz report, there's still much we don't know. Horowitz couldn't issue subpoenas or empanel a grand jury. He was entitled to speak only to currently employed members of the DOJ and FBI, which meant he had to rely on the cooperation of
former employees. Some weren't very helpful. Horowitz reported, for instance, that “loyal” Jim Comey refused to have his security clearance renewed as part of his interview—a clear attempt to evade tough questions related to classified information.
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Horowitz also couldn't interview witnesses in other intel agencies or private or political actors.

But current U.S. attorney John Durham has no such constraints. Attorney General William Barr in May 2019 assigned the Connecticut prosecutor the job of investigating the origins of the Trump investigation. Durham's reputation is that of a crack investigator, with a history of probing government malfeasance. His past jobs included looking into accusations of CIA abuse of detainees and the FBI's ties to mob figures in Boston. He's widely respected as tough and no-nonsense.

There are already indications Durham is digging into the spring of 2016, the crucial months prior to the FBI opening up its “official” counterintelligence investigation. Indeed, when Horowitz issued his report, Durham took the rare step of issuing a public statement that took issue with the IG's claim of sufficient “predicate.” While he had “utmost respect” for the work Horowitz put into his report, Durham's team did “not agree with some of the report's conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”
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Durham will hopefully get to the truth about whether the United States was outsourcing intelligence gathering to friendly countries like Italy, Great Britain, and Australia in order to circumvent laws against spying on Americans. He needs to look into the political side of this equation, and what role Fusion GPS, Democrats, and Obama officials had from the start, and what they knew as it went along. What were the roles of Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and former attorney general Loretta Lynch? What, for that matter, did Barack Obama know? We now know that Brennan, Clapper, Biden, former ambassador Samantha Power, former Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough, and dozens of other Obama officials unmasked Flynn's name in intelligence reports. We need to know
which other Trump associates were unmasked and who criminally leaked information on them.

By October 2019 Durham had transitioned his probe into a full-fledged criminal investigation, giving him subpoena power and the ability to empanel a grand jury and file charges. That announcement is excellent news, because it finally holds out the potential for equal justice.

The Russia hoaxers did great damage to the country. They weaponized our most powerful intelligence tools, committed a fraud on an intelligence court, killed faith in our institutions, destroyed the reputations and lives of American citizens, and attempted to remove a duly elected president. But the great casualty has been equal justice.

I like to use the WWHTH standard. What Would Happen To Hannity? If an inspector general determined I was a liar and leaker, I'd go to jail. If I deliberately deceived a court, presenting it with “verified” information that I knew wasn't true, I'd be behind bars. Or imagine if Trump had a private server containing classified material and chose to delete 33,000 subpoenaed emails and destroy the evidence? The media mob would be howling for his removal.

But Hillary Clinton never faced any charges for mishandling top secret material and acid-washing her hard drives. Mueller went after Manafort and Papadopoulos and Cohen and Flynn for lying. Some may spend years in jail. But James Comey cashes in on a book, and McCabe lands a cushy job at CNN. We have laws against leaking classified information. We have laws against spying on Americans. And so far, not one person has yet been held to account.

If we don't have equal application of our laws, we might as well shred the Constitution. We cannot have dual justice in this country. We cannot have one system that applies to corrupt actors in the upper echelons of government, and one that applies to the rest of us. The Durham investigation will not only provide us information, but, hopefully, will answer the crucial question of whether we can still have faith in our system of government.

On December 18, 2019, Democrats did to Donald J. Trump what they'd promised from the moment he was elected: they impeached him.

That vote had nothing to do with telephone calls to the Ukrainian president, or quid pro quos, or obstruction of Congress. It had nothing to do with high crimes or misdemeanors—or even impropriety. It was not about “protecting national security,” or “upholding the Constitution,” or any of the dishonest arguments Democrats gave for their vote.

Impeachment was instead the foreordained outcome of the left's psychotic rage against President Trump. They were unable to accept that he won the 2016 election. This president, as a result, lives rent-free in their heads, every second of every day. It's become a sickness.

The Ukraine allegations were actually just a subset of the much bigger trap the left was laying—what would become the Russia witch hunt. Even as Trump prepared to take office, Comey was doubling down on the Clinton dossier, Obama officials were unmasking transition team members, and the Obama DOJ was pursuing its crazy Logan Act claims. The Obama and Washington-bureaucrat and media machines were out to destroy Trump from the very beginning.

The radical left spent nearly three years on the Russia hoax, betting, as I explained earlier, that Robert Mueller would give them
the goods to undo the 2016 election. Democrats were so convinced of their win that in early March 2019—before Mueller finished his work—Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler laid the groundwork for impeachment by opening an investigation of “alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption, and other abuses of power by President Trump” and his associates.
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And even after the special counsel proved an utter dud, Nadler and his comrades kept it up. They held more hearings, issued more subpoenas. They expanded their impeachment “proceedings” into Trump's finances, pardons, inaugural committee, and Stormy Daniels. It wasn't just rage fueling this gutter politics, it was escalating Democratic worry that they might lose to Trump again. Here's how Al Green, a Texas congressman, put it in May 2019: “I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”
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And that's how Russia, Russia, Russia became Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. On August 12, a Deep State Democrat working in the intelligence bureaucracy filed a “whistle-blower” complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election.” By mid-September, Democrats had leaked the outlines of the Ukraine story and the media mob was spinning it 24/7. So it went for nearly five more hysterical months.

The Trump impeachment was actually two stories. The hate-Trump press wanted America to hear only one of these—the fantasy claim that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden. But it's the other story that matters, since it puts everything into context.

That's the story of Ukrainian corruption. The media never covered this reality because it vindicated Trump. That story also centered on
the front-runner for the Democratic nomination: former vice president Joe Biden. It particularly spotlighted Biden's second son Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist. Hunter was acutely aware of the sway of the Biden name, and Ukraine gave him the opportunity to cash in on it.

Ukraine had a revolution in 2014, which led to the ouster of its pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Obama in early 2014 dispatched Joe Biden to lead the administration's work with that new government. Sleepy Joe became a regular visitor to Ukraine, traveling there frequently from 2014 to 2016, getting to know all the major players. This position also gave Biden a say over how to direct Western aid dollars to the country.

So imagine the coincidence when in spring 2014—just a few months after Joe got his Ukraine job—Hunter Biden scored a lucrative position on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company. Hunter had zero experience in the energy industry. Zero experience in the oil and gas sector. Zero experience with the country of Ukraine. And yet according to reports, Burisma started paying Hunter up to $50,000 a month for his non-expertise.
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Hunter's business partner, Devon Archer, was also named to the board. According to one report, Burisma paid a total of $3.4 million to a Biden-Archer firm over eighteen months.
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What exactly did Hunter bring to the company? At the time it hired him, Burisma was swamped by corruption allegations. Investigators in Ukraine, the United States, and Great Britain were all looking at its operations. Its owner, a Ukrainian oligarch, had been accused of embezzling public funds and steering government contracts to his companies.
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Nice time to have a Biden on your side, right?

The press downplays it now, but the Hunter appointment was immediately news in Washington and caused a stink. John Kerry was secretary of state at the time, and his stepson, Christopher Heinz, was invested in the Biden-Archer firm. When Hunter's board position was made public in May 2014, Heinz wrote an email to Kerry's top aides distancing himself from the decision.
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A Heinz spokesman later
admitted that “the lack of judgment in this matter was a major catalyst for Mr. Heinz ending his business relationships with Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden.”
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Aides within Vice President Biden's office discussed whether “Hunter's position on the board would be perceived as a conflict of interest.”
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The
Washington Post
admitted that “one former adviser was concerned enough to mention it to the vice president… but the conversation was brief.”
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And the concerns didn't die. George Kent, a career State Department official, testified that in early 2015 he raised Hunter's position with the vice president's staff, saying it was a potential “conflict of interest” given Joe Biden's Ukrainian portfolio. “The message that I recall hearing back was that the Vice President's son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time,” Kent testified.
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Amos Hochstein, the Obama energy czar, also raised the issue directly to Joe Biden.
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Ol' Joe now claims he knew nothing about his son's business dealings. We know that's not true. Discussing Hunter's position with Burisma, “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what are doing,' ” Hunter told the
New Yorker
in a story written before the impeachment drama.
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There is also a public picture of Joe Biden golfing with Devon Archer in 2014. And on December 8, 2015, the
New York Times
wrote a story blowing the whole issue into the open. It noted Hunter Biden's appointment and Burisma's corruption problems, and questioned whether they “undermined” Joe Biden's “anticorruption message” in Ukraine. The story explained that “Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Hunter Biden's business dealings had no impact on his father's policy positions in connection with Ukraine.”
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Joe knew all about his son's work and that Burisma was under investigation by Ukrainian authorities. Yet also in December 2015, Biden traveled to Ukraine and demanded the government fire the very prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine unless that firing
happened. Joe even bragged about the moment at a Council on Foreign Relations event in January 2018: “I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. [Audience laughter]. He got fired.”
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This is the kind of despicable nepotism and influence-peddling that is all too common in Washington and that Trump promised to stop. Joe Biden was leveraging his role in the White House—and your tax dollars—for a get-rich-quick scheme for his family. Hunter Biden and his Burisma buddies were facing a major corruption investigation by Ukraine's top prosecutors. Who came to the rescue? Daddy, the vice president, ensuring his son would continue to benefit from his get-rich scheme.

Let's also call this for what it was: a quid pro quo. Biden was giving Ukrainian officials the message: you will not get over a billion dollars' worth of American aid unless you get rid of a prosecutor who is investigating the company my son is profiting from. This was Quid Pro Quo Joe exploiting his position to keep his son in the cash.

And the Biden corruption doesn't stop at Ukraine. Even before the Burisma scandal, Hunter Biden in December 2013 jumped on Air Force Two, making a trip with his father to Asia. They stopped in China, where Joe had talks with the Chinese president. Hunter ran off to a few business appointments. Around the same time, a Hunter Biden–connected firm landed a private-equity deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China, owned by the Chinese government.

As Peter Schweizer, author of
Secret Empires
, has pointed out, this was a deal unlike others given to Western firms. Why would it go to Hunter Biden? As with Ukraine, he had no experience or expertise in China. He had limited expertise in private equity.
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Financial giants like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America—they aren't getting deals like this. So what did Hunter bring to the table? What did he have to offer beyond being the son of America's second-most-powerful decision maker?

Even Hunter has admitted that the only thing he brought to the
Burisma board was his dad's influence. In an October 2019 interview with ABC News, Amy Robach asked, “If your last name wasn't Biden, do you think you would have been asked to be on the board of Burisma?” Hunter answered: “I don't know. I don't know. Probably not. I don't think there's a lot of things that would've happened in my life if my last name wasn't Biden.”
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At least ABC News asked the question, which is ten times more than most of the press corps has been willing to do. Prior to the Trump impeachment putsch, the media was happy to write about the Hunter-Ukraine story, since it helped Democratic presidential candidates whom the press preferred over Joe Biden. But once Trump asked about the Biden corruption, the media declared it a dead issue. Instead of digging further into the Hunter affair, the press proclaimed the Bidens innocent of any wrongdoing and the story off-limits.

The press engaged in the same cover-up when it came to another example of corruption: Democratic efforts to enlist Ukraine to help defeat Trump in 2016. We know some of the details of this story because, again, the press was interested—right up until it preferred the story be only about Trump and Russia.

On January 11, 2017—before the Russia collusion hoax truly engulfed the public—
Politico
ran a story by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern. The headline: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire: Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.” The first line: “Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.”

According to the piece, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”
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The story detailed how a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Alexandra Chalupa, had asked the Ukrainian embassy in 2016 to get dirt on Donald Trump and his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in hopes of inspiring a congressional investigation in the run-up to the election. She even asked the embassy to arrange an interview with then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, to grill him for ugly details on Manafort. That sounds an awful lot like Democrats requesting a foreign government to interfere in our election.

Writing at
The Hill
, reporter John Solomon built on this story, in 2019 getting the former Ukraine ambassador to the United States to confirm this DNC pressure campaign had occurred. Solomon also reported that two top Ukrainian officials provided dirt to the U.S. media that smeared Manafort, forcing him to step down as Trump's campaign manager. And he noted that Nellie Ohr, a contractor for Fusion GPS (which was behind the infamous dossier), testified to Congress that some of her opposition research against Trump came from a Ukrainian parliament member.
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Our Trump-hating media insists that the Ukraine election-meddling story has been debunked. They want to pretend that Russia was the only meddler. That's a lie. Ukraine's involvement was real and consequential, which is why three Senate committee chairmen—Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham—are investigating the matter. Unlike Democrats, these Republicans care about interference in our system, regardless of which country is meddling.

These two issues—Biden corruption in Ukraine and Ukraine's election meddling—are essential to understanding the Trump impeachment. Democrats ignored these realities, instead shamefully twisting a routine conversation into something nefarious—for their own political gain. These issues also highlight the absurdity of the impeachment “articles” the House brought against the president. The left doesn't care about corruption or election interference. All it cares about is weaponizing any tool at its disposal against Trump.

On April 21, 2019, Ukrainians elected forty-one-year-old Volodymyr Zelensky, a lawyer and comedian, as their new president. Zelensky ran against rampant Ukrainian corruption, promising to bring honest people to power. He won by a landslide. Ukraine is ranked one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, and Western leaders were excited about the reformer. They watched anxiously to see if Zelensky's party would win enough seats in the July 21, 2019, parliamentary elections to allow him to push through his agenda. His party won an absolute majority, the first time in Ukrainian history.