by Matthew J. Peterson
Asking for the assistance of our global friends and allies to help reveal the wrongdoing of the American ruling class is now an impeachable offense. Investigating their wrongdoing is wrongdoing. Exposing their corruption is corruption. In the Clown World we currently inhabit, the president of the United States must be removed from office for daring to ask they be investigated abroad.
The events of this week reveal the new standard. Like sharks to a whale carcass, our elites routinely feast upon precarious situations in other nations: The Podesta Group, Hunter Biden, and others were content to make a buck off the tensions in Ukraine along with Paul Manafort, just as the Clintons and others were happy to take tens of millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs. We all know that Manafort would be sitting in a house in Malibu right now with the same immunity deal the likes of Podesta, Biden, and the Clintons apparently possess if only he had never decided to work for Donald Trump.
Recall that the supposed original sin of the entire Russian-collusion gambit was that when approached (apparently mostly by agents of the United States government working for President Obama and friends) then-candidate Trump or his team were interested in recovering the emails that Hilary Clinton unwisely and illegally sent and then deleted from her private server so that no one could read them. There would be plenty of reasons for Americans and the U.S. government itself to seek out these emails, of course, if only to determine to what extent they threatened national security—never mind the power and wealth of the foundation engaged in international money collection that her husband ran while she was Secretary of State.
But while the supposed reasons for it change every week, the Ukraine fiasco reveals the real underlying cause of the Left’s outrageously hypocritical march towards impeachment. The ruling class is now effectively saying to President Trump: “We know that domestically we have nothing to fear from the media and the law—so how dare you ask other countries about us! You must be impeached for this crime and this crime alone—asking other countries about our wrongdoing! Only an insane or evil person would do this!”
Note that while asking other nations about the wrongdoing of Democrats is an impeachable offense, asking other nations about the alleged wrongdoing of Republicans is considered our noble, patriotic duty—our higher loyalty.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign had no problem with investigating Trump in other nations and paying foreign operatives for dirt about Trump. After all, that’s what ex-British spy Christopher Steele was hired to do. And the media had no problem with spreading it.
The Obama Administration had no problem asking Ukraine about Paul Manafort and his financial transactions with government officials, which were soon mysteriously released. Nor did the Obama Administration have a problem surveilling the Trump campaign using foreigners and investigating Trump and his team internationally.
And many Democrats had no problem with impeaching the president based on what those foreigners said. When that turned out to be uncorroborated nonsense, they said he must be impeached because he tried to fight off the investigation based on such nonsense. Now they seek to impeach him for asking for an investigation into one of their own.
You got that? “We will use the investigatory power of the federal government to surveil and investigate and impeach you; we will seek out dirt on you from overseas to impeach you; if you try to fight back we will impeach you, and if you ask others to investigate us overseas we will impeach you for that, too.”
But fair is fair. President Trump should publicly announce to the denizens of the entire fetid swamp in Washington, D.C. that, yes, he will potentially initiate investigations with any nation willing to cooperate to expose the wrongdoing of the American political class. In fact, as president, it is his sworn duty to do so—to fulfill his oath to execute the laws and defend the U.S. Constitution.
Why shouldn’t Trump publicly acknowledge that the American government now wants to recover all of Clinton’s emails she foolishly sent from an unsecured server and then deleted? Why shouldn’t he ask the Ukrainians what they know about the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s server? Why shouldn’t he ask them about any and all efforts by the Obama Administration to influence or delegitimize the results of the 2016 election?
“You want to talk about Ukraine and Russian money? Let’s do it! If Manafort is going to be arrested by a SWAT team and put into solitary confinement and get the book thrown at him for tax evasion, we should also investigate everyone else who made millions in Ukraine and from Russian oligarchs in the past decade. The Podesta Group, Hunter Biden, everyone. The investigation into Joe and Hunter will just be the beginning. And just wait until we start looking into China . . .”
It’s time for President Trump to build a big, beautiful door in the wall of propaganda that papers over the actions of American elites. And make the Democrats pay for it.
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Matthew J. Peterson is the Claremont Institute’s Vice President of Education and the Editor of The American Mind. [Follow him on Twitter @docmjp.]
