Phase Three of the Coup against Trump So Far—Zilch and Many People with Their Hair on Fire

Oct. 17, 2019 (EIRNS)—While it is always dangerous to provide analysis on the basis of leaks, you have to assume that the Democrats are giving the best they got and more in their leaks about the secret impeachment hearings concerning President Donald Trump, which have taken place each day Monday through Thursday this week, and that analysis shows that, once again, they have come up with a totally dry hole with respect to any misconduct by the President: zilch, nada, nothing. But their accompanying information warfare operation, featuring cherry-picked leaks and dubious opinion polls, seems to be having an impact.

The new narrative, it will be recalled, is to substitute Ukraine for Russia in the meme: Trump received dirt from a foreign source to influence the election. The country spent two years on the bogus tale concerning Russia. The new piece of pulp fiction being written by Representatives Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi says: Trump pressured Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden and information about Ukrainian involvement in the multi-foreign state/U.S. intelligence community dirty deeds on behalf of Hillary Clinton in 2016, in order to help his 2020 election prospects. In the course of that, he victimized a wonderful U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, by causing her firing and conducted a rogue foreign policy of his own, outside official channels.

However, what appears to be emerging as fact goes something as follows. Kurt Volker, the President’s envoy to Ukraine and the coordination point for the Congressional Ukraine Caucus’s/U.S. intelligence community’s determination to continue the war in East Ukraine by providing lethal military aid to Kiev, realized that the President was not about to send more lethal aid to the country, because Trump believed, correctly, that the country had “tried to take him down” and was completely and historically corrupt.

It is well known that since the 2014 Ukraine coup, millions of dollars of U.S. aid have simply disappeared into the pockets of various oligarchs and political operatives. Trump was skeptical that the new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was serious about reform. Trump told the team attending Zelensky’s May 20 inauguration, which included Volker, European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to talk with attorney Rudy Giuliani about this.

Giuliani had been investigating Ukraine’s role in the illegal targeting of the President’s 2016 campaign and Ukrainian corruption in general for a long time. He interviewed two former Ukrainian prosecutor generals about this, back in January 2019, confirming previous stories published by Politico about DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa’s targeting of Paul Manafort in collaboration with what Chalupa says were various journalists, Ukrainian government officials, and private intelligence agencies.  These investigations were coordinated with the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Giuliani’s investigation had nothing to do with electoral politics. It was conducted to rebut Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s anticipated report on the President.

In the course of his investigation, Giuliani came across information concerning Hunter Biden receiving $50,000 a month for sitting on the Board of the corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas venture Burisma, including statements from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin that Joe Biden got him fired because he refused to close down the series of corruption cases involving Burisma. Shokin’s successor as Prosecutor General, Yuriy Lutskenko, said that Shokin was not corrupt, as alleged by Joe Biden, and that Ambassador Yovanovitch had provided him with a “do not prosecute” list which included Ukrainian officials involved in the 2016 election activities in support of Clinton.

While not endorsing running Ukraine policy in conjunction with Giuliani, Volker and Sondland realized that Trump was not at all interested in further interventions in Ukraine unless the new government could give some assurances about combatting corruption.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, however, went nuts. Already involved in a fratricidal war with the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton dispatched his deputy Fiona Hill to monitor and report on Trump’s back-channel negotiations through Volker, Sondland, and Perry. Bolton and Hill attacked the State Department-centered crew as being rubes who so endangered U.S. national security by their ignorance that Hill suggested launching a counterintelligence investigation. Many in Washington suggest that Bolton or those close to him are the faux whistleblowers in the impeachment drive.

While critical of Giuliani’s involvement, both Volker and Sondland have testified that the President was emphatic that there was no quid pro quos regarding lethal aid and investigations of the Bidens, or even of cooperation with the Justice Department’s investigation of Ukraine. Other State Department officials have been brought into the mix to yelp about the fact that Trump is running back-channels and his own foreign policy, and is ignoring them whilst defending Ambassador Yovanovitch.

To reiterate: There is nothing illegal or impeachable or even unusual in any of this. Numerous Presidents, best exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt, ran multiple back-channels around the permanent Washington bureaucracy to the country’s enormous benefit.

In the meantime, Judicial Watch and others say they have well-sourced claims that that Yovanovitch, while U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, ordered the monitoring in Washington of social media accounts associated with journalists who support Trump. “Yovanovitch reportedly ordered monitoring keyed to the following search terms: Biden, Giuliani, Soros and Yovanovitch,” Judicial Watch states in their press release about their FOIA request to the State Department about the monitoring. They believe that the following people were being monitored: Jack Posobiec, One America News host; Donald Trump, Jr., son of President Donald Trump; Laura Ingraham, Fox News host; Sean Hannity, Fox News host; Michael McFaul, President Obama’s Ambassador to Russia; Dan Bongino, Fox News contributor; Ryan Saavedra, reporter at the Daily Wire news agency; Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney; Dr. Sebastian Gorka, former strategist for President Trump; John Solomon, Executive Vice President at The Hill; Lou Dobbs, Fox Business host; Pamela Geller, political commentator; Sara Carter, Investigative Reporter and Fox News contributor.