It appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats, who think they’re going to overthrow the president with yet another collusion hoax, have run into the same problems they had the last time: the truth, and a president who will tell it.
Pat Cipollone, the president’s chief counsel, has served legal notice on Pelosi and her lynch party of committee chairmen that the president will not cooperate with an “impeachment inquiry” that is illegal, unconstitutional, and seeks to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
The president, Cipollone wrote, has work to do. That work does not include involving himself in a transparent charade to destroy his presidency.
Illegal and Unconstitutional
In a letter on October 8, Cipollone harshly chastised Pelosi and her three unindicted co-conspirators — Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel — for attempting what amounts to a bloodless coup d’etat because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.
The so-called impeachment inquiry, Cipollone wrote, “is constitutionally invalid and a violation of due process.”
The full House did not vote for the “inquiry,” but in any event the denial of due process is “a fatal defect. Despite Speaker Pelosi’s commitment to ‘treat the President with fairness’ the Committees have not established any procedures affording the President even the most basic protections.”
Cipollone cited leftist leftist Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler’s concerns about due process when the impeachment target was Democrat Bill Clinton, including “the right to be informed of the law, of the charges against you, the right to confront the witnesses against you, to call your own witnesses, and to have the assistance of counsel,” as Nadler put it.
Yet “all of these procedures have been abandoned here,” Cipollone continued. “These due process rights are not a matter of discretion … to dispense with at will. To the contrary, they are constitutional requirements. The Supreme Court has recognized that due process protections apply to all congressional investigations.”
Trump, he wrote, has the right to attend hearings with counsel, see and present evidence, call and cross-examine witnesses, and object to witnesses and testimony. But “the Committees’ current procedures provide none of these basic constitutional rights.”
Instead, those proceedings have been secret. Like a star chamber.
Nor did the Pelosi posse give Republican committee members the right to issue subpoenas — a standard practice — thus ensuring that evidence contrary to the hate-Trump narrative is omitted or buried.
The Democrats also threatened members of the administration with obstruction of justice charges if they assert executive privilege in testimony or in withholding evidence, a longstanding practice. Even worse, the lynch mob threatened to withhold the salaries of those employees. That violates the employees’ due-process rights.
Schiff’s Role
Yet an even more salient fact is that Trump did nothing wrong in his phone call of July 25 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he asked to investigate the Biden-Burisma scandal.
“You have resorted to such unprecedented and unconstitutional procedures because you know that a fair process would expose the lack of any basis for your inquiry” Cipollone wrote.
Trump’s call was “completely appropriate,” Cipollone wrote, as the transcript proved.
And Schiff’s public reading of a fake version of the call proves that Trump did nothing wrong, Cipollone wrote. Otherwise, the hate-Trump congressman wouldn’t have had to fake it.
As well, Schiff has a conflict of interest because he played a role in the now-famous whistleblower’s hearsay complaint of August 12 that set off the latest impeachment hysteria. Schiff claimed that neither he nor his staff had contact with the whistleblower before the complaint was made. That was false; Schiff’s staff members advised the individual.
Thus, Cipollone wrote, “anyone who was involved in the preparation or submission of the whistleblower’s complaint cannot possibly act as a fair and impartial judge in the same matter — particularly after misleading the American people about his involvement.”
Reverse 2016
Cipollone rightly concluded that Democrats are trying to reverse Clinton’s loss in 2016 and stop a repeat Trump win in 2020.
Noting that Representative Al Green of Texas let that cat out of the bag in May — “if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected,” he said — the attorney wrote that “the effort to impeach President Trump … is a naked political strategy that began the day he was inaugurated, and perhaps even before.”
In fact, the Left began talking impeachment before Trump won the Republican nomination.
But the Founders, Cipollone wrote, did not create the impeachment process to use against a president to stop his reelection. “The decision as to who will be elected President in 2020 should rest with the people of the United States, exactly where the Constitution places it.”
The Democrats and their Deep State torpedoes do not agree.
Photo: AP Images
