Written by Kirk Laughead
Would you believe it if someone told you that a group of Democrat operatives and progressive billionaires got together and conspired to manufacture a presidential impeachment and then actually pulled it off? It’s true, and this is the real story of how they did it.
In January 2017, shortly after Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, a secretive group of mostly former Obama administration staffers, Democrat political operatives, progressive billionaire donors, and Clinton era cronies quietly assembled at a posh resort in Florida to plot the overthrow of a sitting president. Their plan was to use the powerful levers of government and a vigorous scorched earth media strategy to launch a full assault on the Trump presidency. Their ultimate objective was to remove him from office, either through impeachment or at the ballot box in 2020.
The comprehensive strategy was contained in a 49-page document that was distributed at the confab that spelled out in great specificity how the various efforts would be coordinated and work synergistically to tie up the administration with an endless barrage of ethics complaints, cries of corruption, and coordinated media attacks to ignite a firestorm of public condemnation that would ultimately result in the president’s removal from office.
David Brock, a well-known Democrat operative and activist had organized the event. Brock explained to the attendees how his organizations would spearhead and support the resistance efforts. The action plan introduced Brock’s groups and described in great detail how they would function together to create a united front against the president. Brock acknowledged that even though Trump may have the legal authority to implement his agenda, he felt the Democrats had the moral authority and the moral responsibility to oppose Trump, and vowed to resist the normalization of Trump by fighting him at every level of government with every tool available to them.
Launched by Brock in 2004, Media Matters would fight against misinformation and fake news by policing social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Google and holding them accountable for right-wing content. They would work to silence and punish alt-right media entities that were deemed to have poisoned our national discourse.
Their website would become an accessible database of opposition research information. Media Matters would mine through unfiltered data from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites to identify and quash what they considered to be fake news and then work to identify the offenders so they could be de-platformed and demonetized which would dry up their ad revenue. In 2017, Media Matters had 81 staff members, supported by a $13.4 million budget to accomplish their goals.
Within weeks of the 2016 election, American Bridge 21st Century (AB21), launched their “Trump War Room” which, at the time had access to over 16-terabytes of searchable data including public records requests, lawmakers’ voting histories, and over 20,000 hours of video and audio recordings. This trove of information would be the engine that drove their political opposition research efforts. It would be the clearinghouse that would produce an avalanche of progressive information intended to destroy Trump’s popularity, and make political life difficult in future elections for any candidates that supported him, as well as his nominees to federal office.
The unfortunate individuals that became designated targets of AB21, would be dogged everywhere they went and video crews would capture their every word so inaccuracies in their speeches could be identified and gaffs in their public interactions could be exploited and used against them. These techniques would even be implemented for the first time in state legislature races as well.
Their non-stop efforts would go on to play a huge role in 2018. They would even continue these efforts beyond the mid-term elections with the intention of increasing Democrat numbers in the House, returning the Senate to Democrat control, and retaking the White House in 2020. American Bridge had a $14.7 million budget to support their 146 staff members’ activities in 2017.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), would continue its role as an ethical watchdog that would use research, litigation, legal complaints, and aggressive media intimidation to impose and enforce its ethical standards and behaviors against the Trump Administration and its supporters. CREW staff would monitor potential conflicts of interest including ethics abuses, violations of law and the Constitution, campaign finance violations, misuse of non-profits for political purposes, and the illicit influence of dark money.
Supported by an army of pro bono lawyers, CREW would produce torrents of politically damaging information in an endless stream of new revelations that would focus on Trump’s ethical lapses and his inability to avoid conflicts of interest. Their goal was to bury the Trump administration with these assertions and force him to not only have to defend his conduct in court, but also against a well-coordinated and robust media onslaught. Not counting pro bono support, CREW had approximately 38 staff members and an estimated $11.6 million budget in 2017.
Share Blue, which would later be rebranded as the American Independent, was a self-described “digital attacker” that aspired to become the de facto news outlet, and the go-to source for Trump opposition leaders to get the latest dirt on the president. Share Blue vowed to take back social media and ensure that the Democrats’ cumulative aggregate messaging would be efficiently and effectively distributed. The intention was to use aggressive positions to either influence or silence Republicans, while promoting and amplifying the Democrats’ messages and positions.
By presenting emotionally resonant content that expressed a willingness to engage in partisan combat, Share Blue would work to develop grassroots connections via Facebook and Twitter. They would goad Trump about being thin skinned and weak, and amplify topics such his lack of a mandate having lost the popular vote, and the influence of Vladimir Putin and Russia on the Trump administration.
Conversely, Share Blue would provide positive coverage of any Democrats that aggressively went after Trump. They would exert pressure on Democrats that dared to go easy or provide cover for him. Mainstream journalists that were critical of the president would receive support and praise, while those that said anything that might normalize Trump would be held in contempt and subjected to ridicule.
Share Blue would do everything they could to demoralize Republicans by broadcasting and amplifying negative content about Trump. But they would combat resistance fatigue and boost Democrat morale by providing authentic homegrown grassroots content such as pantsuit flash mobs, dance videos, and testimonial rants against the Trump regime.
Unlike Brock’s other groups, Share Blue’s business model had the potential to raise a lot of revenue through sponsored content, premium memberships, selling their data and progressive products, and performing event marketing. Share Blue had 18 total staff and a $2 million budget in 2017.
Attorney Melanie Sloan, a nationally recognized expert on government ethics was also in attendance at the Florida meeting. During the 1990’s Sloan had served as the Minority Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee where she worked with then New York Democrat Representative Chuck Schumer. In 1993, as the Nominations Counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sloan worked for Delaware Democrat Senator Joe Biden. She also happened to be the founding Executive Director of CREW. She left the organization in 2014 after David Brock had taken over as Executive Director. Melanie Sloan has a very high media profile and has appeared on various television news and opinion shows on every major network as well as radio.
Created as a counterweight to Judicial Watch, and organized as a non-profit, CREW faced criticism under Sloan’s leadership. Though the watchdog group described itself as being non-partisan for tax purposes, it came under fire because of the extremely high number of former Obama and Clinton cronies on staff, and for the disproportionatenumber of attacks on Republican officeholders and conservative non-profit organizations. CREW has received funding and donations from left of center foundations including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and Barbra Streisand’s Streisand foundation.
As a political appointee, Austin Evers had served as Senior Counsel to the State Department on transparency and oversight matters during the Obama administration. In his capacity, he was directly involved with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests associated with the Benghazi fiasco and the Hillary Clinton email investigations.
Neither Evers nor his colleague at the State Department had any prior experience with FOIA requests when they were hired. This raised concerns at the time considering that Evers had previously worked at the law firm that had represented Hillary Clinton in her email scandal. Several problems had been experienced with the FOIA requests that were submitted as part of the Clinton email and Benghazi investigations. Evers was the one that was responsible for handling them.
The election of Donald Trump had left Austin Evers quite troubled. He was concerned that there was a lack of transparency watchdogs that would be antagonistic towards the Trump administration in the same manner as the aggressive litigation that had been directed at the Obama administration, i.e. the Benghazi and Clinton email scandals.
In his time at the State Department, Evers gained insight and expertise on the ins and outs of properly submitting FOIA requests so as to get all of the information one was entitled to. He also learned how to avoid mistakes that might limit or delay the request like committing technical errors in the language, or asking for classified items that often require excessively prolonged review periods. Even one small thing that may require a longer review time can hang up the entire information request.
In March 2017, Evers founded American Oversight where he serves as its Executive Director. The independent watchdog group seems to be a direct offshoot from the January meeting in Florida where David Brock had rolled out his goal and plan to impeach president Trump. Melanie Sloan is a senior adviser for American Oversight. Evers and Sloan would use aggressive litigation and FOIA requests to gain access to documents that would then be utilized by those with overlapping interests such as Congressional investigators and investigative journalists.
With the Republicans in control of Congress, Democrats were left out in the cold regarding ethics and oversight investigations that might concern corruption in the Trump administration such as lavish spending by cabinet officials and political loyalists getting cushy high-level government positions that they may not be qualified for. Being in the minority, the Democrats had no real power to investigate a single thing. Any real scrutiny of the administration was left up to journalists and independent watchdog groups that would have to file FOIA requests and litigation to get critical information.
There was a longstanding practice that agencies under control of the Executive Branch could basically ignore Congressional document requests unless they were submitted by the committee chairs. Republicans controlled both the House and Senate so the Democrats were prevented from conducting any serious investigations. All of that could change if the Democrats were able to capture a majority in ether the House or Senate during the 2018 mid-terms.
If that was to happen then the Democrats would control the committees and finally have the authority to conduct investigations. However, even with the power of subpoena there was no guaranty that the committees would get the requested documents in a timely manner. Processing FOIA requests is inherently a political process. Even though federal agencies are required to respond to Congressional requests for documents that are submitted by the committee chairs, it is political appointees who then negotiate on behalf of the agency over what will be made available and provided to Congress.
These political appointees are quite practiced at deflecting questions, limiting the scope of the response, and then endlessly delaying the delivery of the documents for as long as possible. This gives the agencies great control over what may or may not be made available and when Congress may actually get the documents if at all. Other than issuing subpoenas and holding public hearings to embarrass the agency officials and Cabinet secretaries, Congress has very little power to compel the agencies to actually cooperate.
The answer to this problem would be to conduct “parallel investigations” where American Oversight and other outside groups would track and monitor oversight requests made by the chairs and the ranking members of key congressional committees. American Oversight would then file duplicate FOIA requests for the exact same information. Though the political appointees handling FOIA requests for the federal agencies are able to play all sorts of games to inhibit the document discovery process with requests made by Congress, when supervised by a federal court, FOIA litigation is handled in a completely different manner.
Federal judges are less susceptible to political interference and have very limited patience with delaying tactics. The agency is required by law to produce any documents that are responsive to the FOIA request. Instead of political appointees handling the request, career civil servants would collect, review, and release the documents. Working on parallel tracks like this, makes it impossible for the agencies to stonewall Congress. They can’t simply impose lengthy document review times that are extended endlessly. Instead, there is a firm, court-ordered deadline to produce the documents.
The Trump Administration was in for a rude awakening. It had no idea what was coming and it would be coming sooner than anyone had anticipated. After Democrats retook the House in the 2018 mid-terms, they were poised to assume control of Congress and its various committees and would finally have the full investigative powers they had been waiting for. They would make full use of them in a blistering assault on the Trump administration.
The president’s relationship with Congressional Democrats was strained at best. But it was particularly caustic with a small handful that would make 2019 a living hell for him, including Elijah Cummings at Government Oversight and Reform, Maxine Waters as chair of the Financial Services committee, Jerry Nadler chairing the Judiciary committee, and Adam Schiff leading the House Intelligence committee. It wouldn’t be long before the President felt their full wrath.
There had been calls for the president’s impeachment since July 2017, when Representatives Brad Sherman of California and Al Green of Texas filed an article of impeachment against the president for Obstruction of Justice over the firing of James Comey two months earlier. There was nothing they could do as long as the Republicans were in control of Congress. After Democrats regained control of the House in the 2018 mid-terms, the calls for impeachment grew louder. Sherman and Green reintroduced their article on January 3rd. That same day, freshman representative Rashida Tlaib would famously declare that they were going to “impeach the motherf*****.”
In April, the long-awaited Mueller Report was released. It was the culmination of what had begun over two years earlier and developed into an endless steady drumbeat of charges and scandals and innuendo and anonymously sourced stories and torrid dossiers that had been percolating through the Democrat controlled media machine. Every little thing, no matter how small, was amplified to hammer home the perception that the Trump presidency was corrupt to its core. Even though there was no evidence of Russian collusion, Democrats did not consider Trump to have been exonerated by Mueller’s report. Democrats believed that at the very least, the president was still guilty of obstructingthe investigation and should be impeached.
Frustration was rampant after all of the time and effort that had been invested in trying to nail Trump on ethics violations so that he could be impeached and driven from office. After the Mueller report flamed out and found nothing on Trump, it wouldn’t take long before another opportunity arose. On April 24, Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, was recalled to Washington and was relieved of her responsibilities the following day.
Yovanovitch was an Obama appointee that had been held over into the Trump administration. There had been concerns about her adherence to the president’s policies towards Ukraine, and there had been reports of her having made statements that were critical of the president. She served at the president’s prerogative and he had every right to fire her. But that didn’t mean that the Democrats couldn’t level charges of impropriety against the president anyway for the manner in which it was handled.
The Democrats had already been investigating career service employees’ claims that they had allegedly been asked to make statements of loyalty to the president or had been targeted for reassignment due to potential anti-Trump sentiments. The firing of Ambassador Yovanovitch fit very nicely into the narrative the Democrats had been developing of the political targeting of those the president deemed to be his enemies.
On May 21, 2019, American Oversight submitted a FOIA request for records associated with the firing of Ambassador Yovanovitch. This had all of the telltale markings of a parallel investigation and an example of American Oversight’s overlapping interests with Adam Schiff the Congressional Intelligence Committee chair, and his team of staffers and investigators that had been working the previous two-years trying to bring down the president.
Stories had been circulating for some time about Joe Biden’s son Hunter gaining lucrative opportunities in China and Ukraine. The story in Ukraine had a somewhat troubling background. The duly elected leader of Ukraine had been forced to flee the country. Wealthy oligarchs filled the void, and behaved like provincial governors carving up Ukraine and dividing the spoils. Out of this process, a shady company, Burisma Energy, purportedly owned by one of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs with a checkered and violent past of his own, was able to gain fast-track rights to exploit massive proven natural gas reserves under the vast shale fields located in eastern Ukraine.
Within days of the coup, drilling and fracking equipment was already being set up in the shale fields. Hunter Biden was named to the Board of Burisma and given a lucrative position within the company. Ostensibly he was cast in the role of a legal analyst. Recent revelations seem to indicate that his job was to provide access to the Obama Biden administration and exert the kind of influence that only the son of a sitting vice president might provide. At the time, red flags had been raised about Hunter’s arrangement all the way to the highest levels of the Obama Biden administration. There was little to no interest in the media about Hunter Biden’s special arrangement with Burisma Energy.
The media readily accepted Joe Biden’s admonition that his family’s business activities were off limits. Biden claimed that what his family did had no bearing on his official capacity as Vice President, and he had never once discussed anything with Hunter that was related to his employment at Burisma. Joe Biden was taken at his word and there was no serious inquiry into his activities in Ukraine. But it may have been Joe Biden’s own words that would be his undoing.
In a now well-known tape, Joe Biden bragged about withholding a billion-dollar loan guaranty to Ukraine unless a certain prosecutor was fired. It hadn’t garnered much interest at the time he made the remarks, but when the video did surface, the blatant quid pro quo nature of the statement raised questions about the perception of impropriety. At the very least it had brought the spotlight onto Biden and the activities in Ukraine.
It is believed that the impeachment process started as a result of the infamous phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. During the call, Trump asked the new leader of Ukraine to look into Joe Biden’s claims about the prosecutor being fired. The phone call happened to be coincident with a temporary hold that Trump had placed on an aid package to Ukraine over his concerns about corruption.
The hold had subsequently been released when Trump was satisfied that the new leader of Ukraine was committed to fighting corruption. But the Democrats had conflated the hold on the funds with the request that Trump had made to Zelensky on the call, and represented it as a quid pro quo. This became the basis for charges against President Trump for “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” This was based on the assumption that Joe Biden was the Democrat presumptive nominee for president.
The Democrats had a problem and that was that no one knew about it because it was a private call. One potential narrative that seems to enjoy some consensus is that one of the main impeachment witnesses against the president, Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, had been on the call and provided information about Trump’s conversation with Zelensky to one of his associates. Vindman’s friend would ultimately go on to be designated as the Ukraine call whistleblower.
Joe Biden knew the person that would go on to become the whistleblower as well, from having previously worked with him. Joe Biden also knew how to weaponize and use whistleblowers from having used them in the past. One case in particular happened in 2007, when Joe Biden led Senate Democrats in a contrived 24-hour marathon session to protest a Republican filibuster of the Levin-Reed amendment that would have set a date certain to end the war in Iraq. By holding their own symbolic filibuster, complete with cots and sleeping bags, the Democrats had hoped to drive home the message that the Republicans cared more about protecting President George W. Bush than protecting our troops.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had held aloft a copy of USA Today with a glaring headline and front-page story exposing the Marine Corps leadership for failing to provide Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles or MRAPs to the Marines in the field during a time of war. The story had been presented as evidence that Bush failed to provide proper protective equipment to our troops while they were in harm’s way. This failure by the president was the Democrat’s primary reason for their sense of urgency in bringing home the troops.
The heart of the issue had been a claim that the Marine brass had let an emergency request for MRAPs sit and gather dust for 18-months while people in the field were dying. Though Joe Biden had appeared to be working with the Corps to get the badly needed heavy armored vehicles to the troops, in reality he was conspiring with an alleged whistleblower to create the USA Today headline that was held up during the Democrat’s indoor campout.
The Corps leaders were no match for the assault led by Biden and Senate Democrats and were completely blind-sided by the vicious attack that followed. Their facts and figures were steamrolled by the finely tuned political and media assault machine that Joe Biden and the Democrats had unleashed upon them. Biden had fully weaponized the “whistleblower” and utilized it in a manner that helped the Democrats to attain their political goals. Though they ultimately failed in forcing Bush to end the war in Iraq and bring home the troops, the attacks damaged Bush politically.
This would be the perfect situation for Democrats to use a whistleblower. But technically, they didn’t have one. Of course, they didn’t actually need a real whistleblower. They just needed the perception of one that would provide yet another scandal that their well-oiled media machine could ramp-up and hype as the next big thing.
It had worked well with the Justice Kavanaugh appointment when Christine Blasey-Ford was presented as a whistleblower. Using the term whistleblower automatically provided her claims with instant gravitas that dictated that it must be treated as sacrosanct with all of the validity that the term whistleblower conjures up. But more importantly it would allow Blasey-Ford to enjoy the anonymity and protections that come with the whistleblower designation. Not to mention a potential financial windfall from Go Fund Me pages, book deals, and speaking events.
Kavanaugh was an entirely different situation though. He wasn’t being charged with anything related to his employment or his interactions with the government. Blasey-Ford was ostensibly presented by Senator Diane Feinstein, but was really brought forward by private attorney, Debra Katz who had a well-established history in the whistleblower community.
Katz had also represented the whistleblower in the MRAP case. No doubt her involvement lent the Kavanaugh scandal even more credibility. Though the actual case against Kavanaugh fell apart and he was ultimately confirmed to the SCOTUS, he had been terribly mistreated and suffered considerable personal attacks. He was just collateral damage from the Democrats’ war on Trump.
In the case of the president’s phone call, they would need to pull an inside job. The call had been classified, so leaking it to the media had risks. Discussing it with someone that had the proper security clearance and was involved in the same general sphere of business would satisfy any required clearance levels, or need-to-know restrictions that may have been placed on the information when it was classified.
Vindman’s friend satisfied those concerns but he wasn’t on the call so he had no standing to file a whistleblower complaint. It was a requirement of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) that a whistleblower have firsthand knowledge of the incident in order to process a whistleblower complaint. Without it, the case could not move forward.
This led to one of the biggest mysteries of the entire impeachment process. One that still hasn’t been resolved. The whistleblower form had been changed sometime in August 2019. This was after President Trump’s ill-fated call with the president of Ukraine. However, the new revised form had not been uploaded into the system until just a few days before the whistleblower complaint was declassified and released to the public. It’s still not clear who had actually modified the form and uploaded it into the intelligence community’s computer system. This suggests that someone from within the intelligence community itself was involved.
The changes had eliminated the requirement that the complainant must have first-hand knowledge of the incident in question. Complaints based on hearsay, rumor, or gossip had previously been rejected by the ICIG. The person with the first-hand knowledge would have had to submit the complaint.
The timing couldn’t have been more convenient for the case against president Trump because the whistleblower had very little if any direct first-hand knowledge of the issues submitted in their complaint. Instead it read like a gossipy game of telephone. “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials,” “officials have informed me,” “officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me,” “the White House officials who told me this information,” “I was told by White House officials,” “the officials I spoke with,” “I was told that a State Department official,” “I learned from multiple U.S. officials,” “One White House official described this act,” “Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me,” “I also learned from multiple U.S. officials,” “The U.S. officials characterized this meeting,” “multiple U.S. officials told me,” “I learned from U.S. officials,” “I also learned from a U.S. official,” “several U.S. officials told me,” “I heard from multiple U.S. officials,” and “multiple U.S. officials told me.”
The complaint itself was extremely polished, and included unusual legalistic references with detailed footnotes. It was as if it had been written by a law professor who was assisted by Congressional members or their staff. This made it appear to be politically motivated more than anything. The complaint itself relied almost entirely on hearsay and information openly available in the media.
This contradicted the original ICIG requirements that complaints be based only on first-hand information of urgent concern. Hearsay is generally inadmissible in court as evidence because it violates the Constitutional right to confront one’s accusers. On top of all of this, there were even claims made in the complaint that didn’t happen on the phone call. To date, the whistleblower has never been questioned under oath about any of these discrepancies.
Possibly the most troubling aspect about timing though is that just days after Adam Schiff had expressed numerous complaints about President Trump and accused the president of abusing aid to Ukraine in order to hurt Joe Biden, the whistleblower complaint surfaced and was directed to the House Intelligence Committee where Schiff was the committee chair.
Something appears incredibly suspect about the timing of when the whistleblower complaint form had been updated; when the whistleblower complaint was released; when Adam Schiff commented about Trump’s potential abuse of aid to Ukraine; and then somehow the whistleblower complaint itself ends up in Schiff’s lap all within about a week. It’s hard to believe it is all just a coincidence. It was more in line with the template that had been used with the now since debunked Clinton campaign-funded Steele Dossier that had sparked the charges of Russian collusion and ultimately the Mueller investigation.
The Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel released a legal opinion along with the phone call transcript. The opinion stated that the complaint was not connected to, nor did it involve, any member of the intelligence community. Instead it was based on confidential communications between the president and a foreign leader.
The opinion determined that the complainant’s submission was statutorily deficient and did not demonstrate urgent concern. As such, the complaint was not required to be submitted to Congress. The opinion also noted that the ICIG had found “indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of the Complainant in favor of a rival political candidate.” The White House subsequently declassified and released the transcript of the call anyway.
As convoluted as this all may seem, it is important to understand that the whole point of this was not so much to file a whistleblower complaint but to spark controversy and scandal. That is why the nature of this complaint was unlike a typical filing. It was more like a dossier with a lot of unsubstantiated claims that would fuel a media bonfire.
This wasn’t intended to stop waste, fraud, or abuse. The concept of the whistleblower process had been totally corrupted and weaponized to create a narrative that could then be used as a premise for an impeachment investigation. The word whistleblower added a sense of scandal just on the sound of it. Enough to justify impeaching the president.
In fact, once the impeachment was under way, the whistleblower was declared to no longer even be needed for the case. So, any questions about the identity of the whistleblower, the lack of first-hand knowledge, the inaccuracies in the complaint, or the modifications made to the complaint form were no longer relevant and were quickly dropped from the narrative. The weaponized whistleblower had fulfilled its function perfectly by manufacturing an official anonymous source whose word was beyond reproach or question.
Of course, the president’s impeachment hearings led to a cavalcade of drama with stories about corruption and quid pro quos, his destruction of our country’s reputation in the world, and how mean he was. The whole thing was the culmination of years of planning and working to bring it about. There was never a doubt that the president would ultimately be acquitted by the Senate. But the damage was done and even the acquittal became part of the scandal.
But it accomplished its main purpose of continuing the perception of corruption that had been created and perpetuated according to the plan laid out by David Brock at that fateful meeting three years earlier. He said he was going to get President Trump impeached. Brock had laid out his plan of how he was going to do it and he actually pulled it off. It’s still too soon to know whether his second goal of preventing Trump’s reelection will be met as well. Only the coming election will tell.
It’s been almost a year and the impeachment has all but been forgotten. The abuse of whistleblowers has continued, and if anything, it has accelerated based on its newfound ability to instantly create scandal based just on the use of the word alone. In September 2019, there had been an additional whistleblower case that had been filed in regard to Trump’s Ukraine call.
In yet another case filed that same month, a claim was made that someone had been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service’s audit of the president.
In April of this year, a whistleblower claimed he was demoted because he didn’t support hydroxychloroquine. His attorney Debra Katz, had represented Christine Blasey-Ford, the Kavanaugh whistleblower, and Franz Gayl the whistleblower in the MRAP case.
This past September there were three whistleblower cases. One alleging that border security-threat data was being manipulated, to exaggerate the perception of danger at the Mexican border to justify Trump’s wall.
Another whistleblower claimed Trump was going to use heat rays on protesters.
And, as no surprise to anyone, Adam Schiff has announced the existence of yet another whistleblower that claims intelligence analysts are manipulating information regarding Russian meddling in the current election cycle.
One notable individual in the world of whistleblowers, is former CIA analyst Andrew Bakaj. He’s credited with writingthe regulations that the CIA must follow to remain in compliance with President Obama’s Policy Directive 19, that protects whistleblowers in the intelligence community from retribution. Bakaj was the attorney that filed the initial whistleblower complaint in the Ukraine phone call scandal that resulted in the impeachment of Donald Trump. Coincidentally, or not, he also had assisted with the MRAP whistleblower case as well. Not in filing the original complaint but protecting and shielding the whistleblower from retribution associated with his complaint. The best part of having whistleblower status is escaping any potential blowback.
Though Bakaj had been involved in developing the whistleblower policies under Obama and Biden, he fell out of favor when he attempted to intervene on behalf of whistleblowers that the Obama Biden administration wanted to prosecute. He left the administration under a cloud and went into private practice where he has become a very prominent whistleblower attorney with no need to constrain his partisan disposition that was shaped during his internships with Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.
Bakaj’s partner, Mark Zaid is responsible for the second Ukraine whistleblower that came forward a month later.
With all of these players that seem to keep popping up in whistleblower land, it makes you wonder who is paying for all of this. Apparently being a whistleblower can be a very lucrative occupation. Some are making hundreds of millionsof dollars. No doubt the attorneys representing them are getting their fair cut of that as well. Maybe that is why they can do all of the pro bono work we always hear so much about.
Somehow, organizations like CREW, Media Matters, and American Bridge are able to come up with huge budgets to support their work. Melanie Sloan refuses to talk about where American Oversite gets their money. No doubt there are countless progressive billionaires out there that are willing to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to groups like these to get rid of a president they hate. It must be nice to be able to afford a hobby.
One source that was associated with these groups was the New Venture Fund. They provide guidance to progressive groups that have projects that require funding. New Venture Fund helps them with project and proposal development and assistance connecting them with the people who have money to support their projects with. Another is Schooner Capital which specializes in progressive grantmaking to left-of-center organizations that are active in areas like campaign finance regulation and left-progressive judicial policy. Schooner donated $100K to American Oversight.
But that doesn’t really account for the true cost of these projects. There are literally thousands of cases filed and litigation that needs to be settled in the courts. How much of our court backlogs and costs are a result of the aggressive litigation practices of these so-called watch dog groups? The goals stated by David Brock when he revved up his machine in January 2017, were all political. It was all solely intended to destroy President Trump and the Republicans.
No actual workers were being protected from hazardous conditions. They weren’t preventing waste. No corporate fat cats had been halted from corrupting our system. In fact, their frivolous litigation seems to be the very thing that is corrupting the system. The hours wasted to fight over these records and the cost to the government to provide them has to be enormous and it is all just to discredit the president and divide the country against itself.
There are literally thousands of government agencies and private contractors with over a million employees among them that have some sort of secret clearance. The initial justifying intent of the whistle blower act was to prevent financial fraud and abuse by government agencies and contractors. That concept has been completely forgotten in the Trump era where whistleblowers have become the weapon of choice for the resistance.
This is in stark contrast to the Obama Biden years when whistleblower cases weren’t filed so frivolously. In fact, during the Obama Biden administration, whistleblowers weren’t even favorably viewed. At least eight whistleblower cases were prosecuted by Obama and Biden under the World War I era Espionage Act. That’s more whistleblower prosecutions than had happened in all previous presidential administrations combined.
These attacks on transparency weren’t limited to just the whistleblowers either. They were also extended onto the reporters that covered these cases as well, even though not a single incident had involved double agents or wartime threats. They were mostly just cases of leaked documents. In spite of all of the talk about transparency, and supporting and protecting whistleblowers, and the enactment of whistleblower protections, the Obama Biden administration viewed whistleblowers as inside threats and treated them as such.
But one area that is most concerning is the disparity with which whistleblower cases are perceived to be legitimate or not. Cases on the left seem to enjoy automatic whistleblower status without question, like in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings when Christine Blasey Ford was presented as a whistleblower and held up as a hero. She became a celebrity and made over a half-million dollars off of her Go Fund Me page.
There was more outrage when Blasey-Ford’s name was leaked to the press than there was when Tara Reade raised serious claims of sexual assault against Joe Biden. Reade was not only deprived of whistleblower status but was unable to even find a lawyer that would handle her case. Which is no surprise when lawyers that do work on conservative whistleblower cases are subject to retribution and harassment. One conservative lawyer claims his business insurance was revoked, which rendered him unable to even represent whistleblower cases.
We must have robust whistleblower capabilities and protections in place to prevent government waste, fraud, and abuse. But when that capability itself is abused and is weaponized in the manner that Joe Biden and the progressive Democrats have used it, then it can have a very detrimental impact on decision making and may result in far reaching consequences.
In the MRAP case, the political circus that Joe Biden created, caused what should have been a short-range decision, to be blown so far out of proportion that $45 billion was spent to address a problem that could have been solved with a mere fraction of what Biden had ultimately ended up spending. There was unnecessary waste and abuse on such a phenomenal scale that it demonstrated a complete and total disregard and lack of respect for how the people’s money is spent.
When Joe Biden attacked our military leaders the way he did in a time of war, it unnecessarily damaged the morale of the very service members that needed to depend on and trust their leaders. We will likely never really know how badly our readiness may have been impacted, or the level of deterioration that may have set-in due to a lack of training and maintenance, or which forward looking programs may have suffered long-term consequences due to the funding that was denied them because Joe Biden unnecessarily took that money to pay for MRAPs that were not needed in anywhere near the sheer numbers that he irresponsibly caused to be produced.
Let’s not forget that it was Joe Biden and the Democrats who tore at the very fabric of our society with their spurious and malicious use of the Ukraine whistleblower that led to the impeachment of a duly elected president. Look at the distraction it caused and the wasted time, money, and effort that could have been better invested in creating jobs, and repairing our infrastructure. Or ensuring that we were prepared for the deadly pandemic that struck while our leaders and media were obsessed with an impeachment that now seems to have been completely forgotten. An impeachment that was manufactured according to a plan that the Democrats rolled out and executed with Incredible precision. Unfortunately, they showed absolutely no regard for the best interests or even the will of the people.
It was a hijacking of our system that resulted in our society being pushed to the brink of open conflict by a monolithic media that can no longer be trusted. When those that only provide the party-approved “truth” are praised and rewarded, while those that dare speak out against it are punished, banished, and cancelled, then the concept of a free press has been reduced to nothing more than an anachronistic cliche.
It is clear we need a fair and impartial news media that exhibits journalistic curiosity to watch these so-called watchdogs, so that charlatans and rank partisans will be identified as such. Those that bemoan and condemn the illicit influences of dark money on our society shouldn’t be excused when they use it for their own illicit purposes with such impunity, and without fear of even the slightest recourse against them simply because it serves over-lapping political interests. We need to know when the people who proclaim that the virtue in their heart justifies their actions, that their actions aren’t more corrupt than the very people that they are railing against.
We must insist that our social media is not held captive by one side that dominates and controls the dialogue through selective censorship that restricts the free expression of ideas that they may disagree with. Though they are private entities, they must embrace the fundamental concept of free speech that is embodied in the First Amendment so that social media can realize its full potential of being an open marketplace of intellectual exchange without the opinions and agendas of big-tech executives and progressive billionaires being forced upon us.
Finally, it is time to reform the laws authorizing whistleblowers and to implement proper controls so that whistleblowers can never again be weaponized and used to advance partisan political goals. The authority granted to our leaders bestows immense power upon them and wielding this power requires great personal responsibility and restraint to guard against abuse and prevent the corrosive effect it has on our common mutual contract that is requisite for a civilized society to thrive. Joe Biden and the Democrats do not possess the quality of character that is required in order to be entrusted with these special enforcement powers that, by their very nature exist and operate at the extreme fringes of what our Constitution allows.
This is not to say that Donald Trump or the Republicans are better suited to wield these powers. It is saying that Joe Biden and the Democrats, by their own actions have disqualified themselves. Their track record over the last four years demonstrates a total disregard for the limitations inherent in the original intent of the policies that they violated and weaponized. Joe Biden and the Democrats callously abused their power for personal enrichment and political gain while exhibiting little to no regard for the pain that they were causing to others and the great damage they were inflicting on our country in the process. The full extent of that damage will never really be known.
