Trump critic asks: Impeachment . . . or CIA coup?
CIA red-faced at disclosure it changed whistleblower rules to permit hearsay;
So now another 'more knowledgeable' spook is being pressured to save coup
Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman and libertarian activist, has challenged the Trump administration on various fronts, including the attempt to punish Julian Assange for publication of covert U.S. data.
By RON PAUL
Oct. 01, 2019
You don’t need to be a supporter of President Trump to be concerned about the efforts to remove him from office. Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against the President over a phone call made to the President of Ukraine.
According to the White House record of the call, the President asked his Ukrainian counterpart to look into whether there is any evidence of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and then mentioned that a lot of people were talking about how former U.S, Vice President Joe Biden stopped the prosecution of his son who was under investigation for corruption in Ukraine.
Democrats, who spent more than two years convinced that “Russiagate” would enable them to remove Trump from office only to have their hopes dashed by the Mueller Report, now believe they have their smoking gun in this phone call.
It this about politics? Yes. But there may be more to it than that.
It may appear that the Democratic Party, furious over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, is the driving force behind this ongoing attempt to remove Donald Trump from office, but at every turn we see the fingerprints of the CIA and its allies in the U.S. deep state.
In August 2016, a former acting director of the CIA, Mike Morell, wrote an extraordinary article in the New York Times accusing Donald Trump of being an “agent of the Russian Federation.” Morell was clearly using his intelligence career as a way of bolstering his claim that Trump was a Russian spy -- after all, the CIA should know such a thing! But the claim was a lie.
Former CIA Director John Brennan accused President Trump of “treason” and of “being in the pocket of Putin” for meeting with the Russian president in Helsinki and accepting his word that Russia did not meddle in the U.S. election. To this day there has yet to be any evidence presented that the Russian government did interfere. Brennan openly called on “patriotic” Republicans to act against this “traitor.”
Brennan and his deep state counterparts, James Comey at the FBI and James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, launched an operation, using what we now know is the fake Steele dossier, to spy on the Trump presidential campaign and even attempt to entrap Trump campaign employees.
Notice a pattern here?
Now we hear that the latest trigger for impeachment is a CIA officer assigned to the White House who filed a “whistleblower” complaint against the President over something he heard from someone else that the President said in the Ukraine phone call.
Shockingly, according to multiple press reports, the rules for CIA whistleblowing were recently changed, dropping the requirement that the whistleblower have direct, firsthand knowledge of the wrongdoing. Just before this complaint was filed, the rule-change allowed hearsay or secondhand information to be accepted. That seems strange.
As it turns out, the CIA “whistleblower” lurking around the White House got the important things wrong, as there was no quid pro quo discussed and there was no actual request to investigate Biden or his son.
The Democrats have suddenly come out in praise of whistleblowers – well not exactly. Pelosi still wants to prosecute actual whistleblower Ed Snowden.1 But she’s singing the praises of this fake CIA “whistleblower.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer once warned Trump that if “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” It’s hard not to ask whether this is a genuine impeachment effort…or a CIA coup!
The commentary above is reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity and the site Antiwar.com, which often prints Paul's work.
1. Pelosi was one of the few people in Washington who was kept informed about the Obama administration's illegal program of massive surveillance of Americans that was exposed by Snowden. -- P.C.
The Invisible Man comments:
'2d whistleblower' touted as coup attempt falters
The New York Times is reporting that another intelligence official is "considering" becoming a whistleblower. This person, the Times says, has more specific knowledge of the President's conversation with Ukraine's leader.
It seems fair to draw the conclusion that Deep State spookdom saw that its maneuver was faltering and is attempting to rescue its coup attempt from disaster.
The import of Schumer's observation on the power of the intelligence system to exact revenge on presidents and lawmakers is that Congress and the Executive Branch have lost control of this force. Top-tier spooks have become members of a new aristocracy, the likes of which had never before been seen in our freedom-loving country.
Americans quite often idolize aristocrats -- as long as they are foreign ones with something glamorous about them. Otherwise, the taint of aristocracy has always been a death knell to political ambitions. This is how Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans overthrew the power of the entrenched Hamiltonian Federalists, who were perceived by the public as persons of aristocratic pretensions. Similarly, the populist Andrew Jackson brought to the fore the interests of the common man (if he was not an indigenous American) over against the interests of the monied elite.
The CIA, with its long history of clubiness with crony capitalism, has long functioned as the enforcement arm of the crony capitalist aristocracy. It is evident that these aristocrats are bent on ousting an upstart populist who presumes to represent the people.
Correction: A previous version of this post mistakenly cited "Paul's Antiwar.com site." Paul is not listed as affiliated with that site.
According to the White House record of the call, the President asked his Ukrainian counterpart to look into whether there is any evidence of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and then mentioned that a lot of people were talking about how former U.S, Vice President Joe Biden stopped the prosecution of his son who was under investigation for corruption in Ukraine.
Democrats, who spent more than two years convinced that “Russiagate” would enable them to remove Trump from office only to have their hopes dashed by the Mueller Report, now believe they have their smoking gun in this phone call.
It this about politics? Yes. But there may be more to it than that.
It may appear that the Democratic Party, furious over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, is the driving force behind this ongoing attempt to remove Donald Trump from office, but at every turn we see the fingerprints of the CIA and its allies in the U.S. deep state.
In August 2016, a former acting director of the CIA, Mike Morell, wrote an extraordinary article in the New York Times accusing Donald Trump of being an “agent of the Russian Federation.” Morell was clearly using his intelligence career as a way of bolstering his claim that Trump was a Russian spy -- after all, the CIA should know such a thing! But the claim was a lie.
Former CIA Director John Brennan accused President Trump of “treason” and of “being in the pocket of Putin” for meeting with the Russian president in Helsinki and accepting his word that Russia did not meddle in the U.S. election. To this day there has yet to be any evidence presented that the Russian government did interfere. Brennan openly called on “patriotic” Republicans to act against this “traitor.”
Brennan and his deep state counterparts, James Comey at the FBI and James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, launched an operation, using what we now know is the fake Steele dossier, to spy on the Trump presidential campaign and even attempt to entrap Trump campaign employees.
Notice a pattern here?
Now we hear that the latest trigger for impeachment is a CIA officer assigned to the White House who filed a “whistleblower” complaint against the President over something he heard from someone else that the President said in the Ukraine phone call.
Shockingly, according to multiple press reports, the rules for CIA whistleblowing were recently changed, dropping the requirement that the whistleblower have direct, firsthand knowledge of the wrongdoing. Just before this complaint was filed, the rule-change allowed hearsay or secondhand information to be accepted. That seems strange.
As it turns out, the CIA “whistleblower” lurking around the White House got the important things wrong, as there was no quid pro quo discussed and there was no actual request to investigate Biden or his son.
The Democrats have suddenly come out in praise of whistleblowers – well not exactly. Pelosi still wants to prosecute actual whistleblower Ed Snowden.1 But she’s singing the praises of this fake CIA “whistleblower.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer once warned Trump that if “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” It’s hard not to ask whether this is a genuine impeachment effort…or a CIA coup!
The commentary above is reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity and the site Antiwar.com, which often prints Paul's work.
1. Pelosi was one of the few people in Washington who was kept informed about the Obama administration's illegal program of massive surveillance of Americans that was exposed by Snowden. -- P.C.
The Invisible Man comments:
'2d whistleblower' touted as coup attempt falters
The New York Times is reporting that another intelligence official is "considering" becoming a whistleblower. This person, the Times says, has more specific knowledge of the President's conversation with Ukraine's leader.
It seems fair to draw the conclusion that Deep State spookdom saw that its maneuver was faltering and is attempting to rescue its coup attempt from disaster.
The import of Schumer's observation on the power of the intelligence system to exact revenge on presidents and lawmakers is that Congress and the Executive Branch have lost control of this force. Top-tier spooks have become members of a new aristocracy, the likes of which had never before been seen in our freedom-loving country.
Americans quite often idolize aristocrats -- as long as they are foreign ones with something glamorous about them. Otherwise, the taint of aristocracy has always been a death knell to political ambitions. This is how Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans overthrew the power of the entrenched Hamiltonian Federalists, who were perceived by the public as persons of aristocratic pretensions. Similarly, the populist Andrew Jackson brought to the fore the interests of the common man (if he was not an indigenous American) over against the interests of the monied elite.
The CIA, with its long history of clubiness with crony capitalism, has long functioned as the enforcement arm of the crony capitalist aristocracy. It is evident that these aristocrats are bent on ousting an upstart populist who presumes to represent the people.
Correction: A previous version of this post mistakenly cited "Paul's Antiwar.com site." Paul is not listed as affiliated with that site.
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