COLUMN: The Impeachment Frenzy

The following article is an opinion piece and reflects the views of only the author and not those of AllOnGeorgia.

By: Ken Herron Sr.

The Democrats lost the presidential election in 2016 to the Republicans and Donald Trump. All during the primary season the liberal press laughed about Donald Trump running for president. They were surprised when he won the nomination at the Republican convention but they thought he could never beat Hillary Clinton. When the election was over they could not believe that Hillary lost the election. They were certain that something had been done by Donald Trump that was illegal and caused him to win the election.

The Democrats did achieve a victory by winning the majority of the House of Representatives in 2018. For the first two years of his presidency Donald Trump had a majority in both houses of Congress. The Senate did not have enough of a majority that they could get critical bills passed. It only takes 51 votes to pass a bill in the Senate but it takes 60 votes to close debate. The Republican Speaker of the House was a Never Trump man and he did not help the president to achieve changes that the president wished to make. Since the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives they have only passed liberal bills and sent them to the Senate. The Senate will not vote on these bills.

Since the results of the election became known the Democrats have been searching for a crime or an illegal action by Donald Trump that will allow them to remove him from office. The Department of Justice and the FBI left in place by President Obama worked on this project to try to remove the president from office. Many of them lost their jobs over this effort and eventually some of them may serve time in prison. None of the investigations including Robert Mueller’s 2 ½ year foray has shown any wrongdoing by President Trump.

This has not slowed down the criticisms and accusations from the Democrats and the liberal media that believe something had to be wrong for President Trump to be elected. Many of them have the attitude that if anything is wrong anytime it must be somebody else’s fault. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were so confident that she was going to win the presidency that she did not work very hard. After all it was her time to become president. Many of the Democrats thought that winning the Democratic nomination for president was a guarantee that she would be elected. There are more Democrats in the United States than there are Republicans. Two times since I have become an adult the Republicans have won the presidency with a minority vote. The founders of our country established the Electoral College to prevent three or four large states from determining who will be president. Republicans often win the vote in as much as 70% of the land area of the country. This represents less votes than are cast in the large states.

After trying every angle that they could think of, the Democrats have been unsuccessful in removing Donald Trump from the presidency. The latest effort involves a person they are calling a whistle blower. He is accusing President Trump of threatening to withhold aid to the nation of Ukraine if they do not restart their investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter. It is a matter of record that while Joe Biden was vice president his son was given a position at the largest energy company in the Ukraine. He was paid $50,000 per month for his service. He had no experience in the energy business. There was a prosecutor in the Ukraine who was investigating the company for corruption. He has stated that his next interviews were to determine why Hunter Biden was put on the board of directors. The most obvious reason was that this would give them influence with the vice president of the United States. Vice President Biden threatened the president of Ukraine with withholding aid from the United States government if this prosecutor was not fired. He told the president of Ukraine that he was leaving the country in six hours and if this man was not fired within that time Ukraine would not receive any aid from the United States. A new president was elected in the Ukraine in July 2019. President Trump called him on the telephone to congratulate him on his election. President Trump admits that he suggested that the new president investigate this incident with the Bidens but there was no threat of withholding aid.

There are four men who listen to all of the president’s telephone calls and write down what they have heard from both parties of the telephone call. They compare their notes and the official record is a consolidation of the four sets of notes. None of the four men is the whistle blower. A copy of the consolidated notes is sent to each of the 15 intelligence departments. Locating the leak is a very difficult task. There is no sound recording of the president’s telephone calls. The whistle blower stated that he had not seen the transcript of the call himself but it was told to him by someone who had read it. His identity has not been disclosed but he is thought to be a member of the intelligence services.

The new president of the Ukraine stated that there was no threat either verbally or implied by President Trump that aid would be withheld by the United States. The Democrats in the House of Representatives have jumped on this information and are using it to stir up their members on the subject of impeaching the president. None of the information was officially released to them at the time of their declarations and they were using their imagination as their current evidence. The transcript of the telephone call was released on Wednesday, September 25, after the multitude of Democrats had declared that it was worthy of impeachment. The transcript did not contain a threat of any sort.

In my mind the biggest investigation of this incident should be how the whistle blower obtained his information. The president’s telephone calls should be private and not available to anyone. As it relates to foreign affairs the president should be able to assure the other party that what is said on the telephone by either of them will not be revealed. One unusual feature of the whistle blower’s report was that it was written in a legal format indicating that it was prepared by a lawyer. It makes you wonder which member of Congress arranged this.

There is a law that protects the identity of whistle blowers in the intelligence departments. It protects a person who has seen something firsthand that is improper. The person who reported this telephone call does not qualify for the protection of whistle blowers since what he reported was secondhand and hearsay.