“If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” —John Adams (1775)

As longtime Patriot Post readers know, we are diligent in our morning editor’s call to select only those news and policy matters that have significant implications for American Liberty. Thus, the brief analytical reports that make the cut in The Patriot Post Mid-Day Digest are worthy of your time — and it’s easy to navigate through what does and does not interest you. In other words, we avoid the relentless churn and click-bait that the rest of the mainstream media depend upon for advertising revenue, and we focus on what actually matters — which is one reason we accept no advertising.

But this task is made difficult when there are long-term “investigations” whose sole objective is nullifying the election of a duly elected president.

Just 20 minutes after Donald Trump was sworn in on January 20, 2017, The Washington Post ran a prophetic headline declaring, “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”

That headline foretold how, for the next 30 months, the Democrat Party (with the full support of its Leftmedia public relations conglomerates), would collude with deep-state operatives in the CIA and FBI, essentially saboteur holdovers from the Obama administration, to undermine the Trump administration. The Russian-collusion hoax amounted to, in effect, a silent coup d'état against the Trump administration.

From its outset, we waded through the Mueller investigation that, predictably, failed to provide any shred of evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. In fact, we learned unequivocally that Hillary Clinton’s corrupt campaign had actually colluded with Russia. But the damage had already been done: Democrats seized on the phony “Trump Colluded!” narrative to take control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, which has given them free rein to harass and obstruct the Trump administration via endless subpoenas and witch hunts.

(BTW, recall that Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk donated more than $10 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013, including when Clinton was secretary of state. Hillary had deep ties to Ukraine.)

It may be too little too late, but the upcoming Justice Department reports from Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Durham will unveil some of these Demo/deep-state criminal conspiracies. In fact, IG Horowitz is scheduled to testify before the Republican-controlled Senate on December 11, just after the expected release of his report. Regarding the expected length of the Horowitz report, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), formerly a federal prosecutor, wryly observed, “It doesn’t take an inspector general 500 pages to say that everything was done correctly and properly.” But it is Durham’s as-yet unfinished report that ultimately matters, because only it can hold deep-state Democrats accountable via criminal referrals.

Will the mainstream media give either of these damning reports the attention each deserve? We’re not holding our breath.

So, just as your editorial team was ready to take a post-Mueller breather, enter rotten-to-the-core Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who used his office to collude with another Demo deep-state CIA saboteur to once again set up President Trump — this time for impeachment.

It’s no coincidence that just days after the aforementioned WaPo inaugural headline that the lawyer representing this so-called whistleblower, Mark Zaid, declared on his social-media account, “#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately.”

As an aside, the identity of this “mole” is the worst-kept secret in Washington. And, judging from this bureaucrat’s elitist background and his strong ties to Joe Biden, it’s easy to understand why Schiff, who weeks ago promised that the whistleblower would testify before his committee, is now lying to the American people that he doesn’t know the mole’s name.

Now that the Democrats’ Coup d'État 2.0 is underway, Schiff’s shift from Russia to Ukraine, in the interest of your time, we’ve launched a section in The Patriot Post titled “Schiff Show Roundup,” under which you’ll find only the most significant news on the impeachment charade.

While our Schiff Show coverage is a 30,000-foot overview, let’s take a Mach 3 ride up to 80,000 feet for a strategic survey of those overviews. What follows are few of the most important directional indicators in the Democrats’ impeachment ruse, Day 1,034.

Off we go.

First, if you want to better understand the whole charade, watch Rep. Devin Nunes’s opening statement, which you can view here. Nunes also lists some key questions for the whistling mole.

Second, as the title of this column suggests, Schiff has pivoted from “quid pro quo” to “extortion” to “perjury and bribery,” because most Demo low-info constituents apparently have no idea what “quid pro quo” means. And because — we kid you not — “bribery” polled best among their focus groups.

We assumed that Schiff would cast a wide impeachment net in an attempt to catch Trump on something beyond Ukraine — the same model Mueller used to catch Trump associates like Paul Manafort on charges completely unrelated to the Russia investigation or the Trump campaign. But with the two aforementioned Justice Department reports coming up, some Demos may get caught in their own net.

And it’s precisely this concern about getting caught in his own net that accounts for Schiff’s shifting position on allow the “whistleblower” to testify. Why? Because cross-examination by House Republicans would likely reveal Schiff’s lies about not having colluded with that witness.

As for Schiff’s shift from how he initially framed the impeachment inquiry, to “perjury,” that was the basis for Bill Clinton’s impeachment — who was clearly and demonstrably guilty.

Who can forget Clinton’s contortions in his grand jury testimony — a masterpiece of verbal contortion in which he attempted to defend his lies by insisting, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the — if he — if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”

Got that?

Today’s Trump-hating Democrats have a far flimsier case, but they hope to use the perjury precedent to snag Trump on some twist of wording in the written responses he supplied during the Mueller investigation that they can pass off as lying to federal investigators — which would be a felony.

As for “bribery,” that of course is one of just two specific crimes mentioned in our Constitution (Article II, Section 4) as grounds for impeachment, i.e., “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Schiff, whose relationship with the truth is, well, complicated, shamelessly invoked the Framers in trying to make his case: “Bribery … as the founders understood bribery — it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader. It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest.”

Horse pucky.

The only bribery connection relevant to this case was a Ukrainian company paying Hunter Biden $83,000 a month to influence his then-vice president father, who was at the time the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine. Recall that it was Joe Biden himself who bragged about his BILLION dollar quid pro quo of the Ukrainian government to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin before he could fully investigate Hunter Biden.

Even The New York Times asserted, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.”

Until the Demos present solid evidence of perjury or bribery, here’s what they have: Among other things, in his phone call with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump wanted the Ukrainian government to announce that they were finally going to investigate the Bidens.

I never thought I’d say this, but Trump should have tweeted this request and his reference to Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election instead of broaching these two subjects in the phone call with Zelensky.

That notwithstanding, the road to Trump’s impeachment has more potholes than Detroit.

But given the unfurling dragnet, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy notes, impeachment can be unpredictable, which is to say it can be perilous. But this is entirely predictable: The Democrats will pull their original Russia collusion farce back into their impeachment narrative because they can’t let it fade. That would be tantamount to admitting it was a hoax – and if they allow that, then by extension it implies the current impeachment inquisition is a hoax…

For sure, the Democrats have the votes in the House to make the Senate referral, despite a few Party defections.

That being said, a review of the Democrat/deep-state chronology reveals government corruption that is much more serious and consequential than the charges that led to Richard Nixon’s impeachment. This was, in effect, a government conspiracy to overthrow the Trump administration, a coup d'état. And Trump’s impeachment is a diversionary political tactic that has trivialized the constitutional impeachment authority of Congress.

And what is the outcome Demos are seeking in this charade? Trump will not be ejected from office, so their objective is to use the Senate impeachment vote exonerating Trump to defeat a few Republican senators in vulnerable states, retake control of the Senate in 2020, and if Trump survives the impeachment smear and is reelected, the Democrat-controlled Senate can block any further conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.

However, Trump’s presidency should be decided at the ballot box.

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Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776