The Patriot Post® · Trump Subpoena Election Theater

In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign colluded with Barack Obama’s FBI and the Leftmedia to falsely accuse Donald Trump of working with the Russians to win the election. That relentless effort handicapped the first three years of Trump’s presidency with Robert Mueller’s investigation and then, after GOP defeat in the 2018 midterms thanks to the fabricated narrative, the first (and arguably second) impeachment. In 2020, Democrat activists in the media and Big Tech suppressed key information about pay-to-play corruption involving Hunter Biden at the direction and to the lucrative benefit of Joe “Big Guy” Biden. Had voters known, we’re convinced the election would have turned out differently.

Yet heading into next month’s critical midterm elections, Liz Cheney and the Democrats (but we repeat ourselves) want you to focus on Trump’s role on January 6, 2021.

That’s why the big headline news this morning is that the sham House committee investigating January 6 voted unanimously to subpoena the former president.

“Why didn’t the Unselect Committee ask me to testify months ago?” Trump demanded to know. Because the committee has an election to win in less than four weeks and Trump makes a compelling villain. Trump issued a 15-page statement today shredding the “highly partisan political Hacks and Thugs” on the committee.

“A key lesson of our investigation is this: Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold, regardless of the political cost,” opined Cheney, who recently lost her Wyoming primary, in self-aggrandizing remarks yesterday. “We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.” They sure aren’t in place now.

Others in the former president’s orbit have either refused to testify or done little more than plead the Fifth while doing so. Will Trump challenge the subpoena, refuse to show up, or take the opportunity in front of a huge audience to argue his case?

Trump’s behavior on and leading up to January 6 was reprehensible and utterly unworthy of the office he held. The committee certainly seems to think it proved Trump knew he lost and still, in Cheney’s words, carried out a “premeditated plan to declare the election was fraudulent and stolen before Election Day,” followed by leading an Insurrection™. In a new video clip shown yesterday, Nancy Pelosi exclaimed on January 6, “It’s just horrendous, and all at the instigation of the president of the United States.”

But a witch-hunting committee with two token Republicans (who both already voted for the second impeachment and aren’t returning to Congress) has fallen woefully and deliberately short of a truthful accounting of events that day. For example, Pelosi has been let off the hook for her dereliction in boosting security at the Capitol. The resulting one-sided, hyper-partisan tale is because the inquisition’s sole purpose has been to get the Bad Orange Man.

So, let’s do the unthinkable and shed some context on events.

Democrats threw a four-year-long caterwauling tantrum over Trump’s 2016 victory. They poked and prodded and hectored and maligned and falsely accused and investigated and impeached President Trump. The deep state attempted to oust him in a veritable coup. Given that Trump’s primary brash New Yorker attribute is that he behaves like a Democrat, it’s no wonder he spent the two months after the election lashing out and trying every which way from Sunday to prove that the election was, as he said again today, “rigged and stolen.”

Most red-blooded Americans in his position probably would have responded similarly. A Democrat most certainly would have.

Does that make it presidential character? Not even close, but presidents of character are pretty hard to come by. We sure don’t have one now. In any case, do voters in the midterms care more about January 6, or Biden’s economic calamity and a host of other ills he’s brought upon our country?

In other Trump news, the Supreme Court denied his request to have a special master review the classified materials he kept at his Mar-a-Lago home. Frankly, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information after he left office presents a greater threat to him than anything brought by the January 6 Committee.

With that, however, we’ll turn back to where we started — the whole Russian-collusion hoax. Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into all of that appears increasingly likely to fizzle out entirely. It was always probable that the only justice Hillary Clinton would ever face for pulling off the worst political scandal in American history was losing to Trump. It seems ever more apparent that even her cutouts at the FBI and elsewhere won’t face justice.

During the trial of Russian-born lawyer Igor Danchenko this week, we learned that the FBI offered dossier author Christopher Steele $1 million for evidence proving his charges. Steele couldn’t provide it, and yet the FBI proceeded anyway, acting before even interviewing Danchenko, Steele’s principal source.

Perhaps it’s 4D chess, but Durham is taking the same losing tack as he did with the acquitted Michael Sussmann — acting like the FBI was just duped instead of a willing participant in the hoax. Danchenko’s attorneys are the ones making the damning case against the FBI, and Durham’s only lasting accomplishment may end up being conviction in the court of public opinion.

As for the 2020 scandal of Hunter and Joe Biden, the president barely even faces questions about all of his corruption. There is speculation that Hunter will work out some sort of plea deal over his tax fraud and lies on an ATF form when buying a gun, and that his legal troubles will provide pretext for Joe to step aside because, let’s face it, he’s not running in 2024. But that would involve at least a modicum of accountability from the Bidens, which seems unlikely.

So, again — Democrats at every level of government and the media have acted shamelessly and deplorably to win elections at all costs. Trump and his rioters were no better on January 6, but Democrats are the ones who are making far more consequential progress undermining “democracy” and Rule of Law.