Do Not Bet on Republicans Saving President Trump by Tom Luongo!
(2019-10-06 at 10:06:33 )

Do Not Bet on Republicans Saving President Trump by Tom Luongo

The impeachment of Donald Trump is more likely than a lot of people realize. While the Democrats are over the moon at finally getting something on the President to hang on him, the reality is the Republicans who will ultimately decide Donald Trumps fate.

Impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. There is no legal standard for "high crimes and misdemeanors" as stipulated in the United States Constitution. That definition will stand on what the nominally Republican-controlled Senate think.

That Donald Trump is facing this attack reflects him doing a few things anathema to his political opposition, and they have all hit nearly at the same time:

-He pursued Joe Bidens own admission of pressuring Ukraine publicly to fire a prosecutor investigating his son Hunter Biden.

-Trumps State Dept., for all its faults, was finishing its review of Hillary Clintons e-mail trove. The Washington Post tried to get in front of it with this highly quoted report.

-Trump fired his incompetent and bloodthirsty National Security Adviser John Bolton in the wake of the Houthi attack on Saudi Aramcos Abqaiq facility on September 14th.

-Trump refuses to give up on diplomacy with North Korea and Iran, steadfastly refusing to go to war.

For these "crimes" and others, President Trump is, in my analysis, likely to be impeached. And the reasons have nothing to do with his guilt vis a vis abusing his office.

President Trump is fully within his rights to inquire about criminal activity of government officials. It does not matter if one of them is his political opposition. That is a consequence of him holding the office.

But that does not matter because Ukraine is too hot an issue to be allowed for him to take control over. For the past six years the United States has been actively involved in Ukrainian politics to turn it against Russia.

President Obamas involvement goes back before even the chemical weapons attack in E. Ghouta which nearly ended in a United States coalition invasion of Syria which both the British Parliament (by refusing David Cameron) and Vladimir Putin staved off.

EU accession talks with Ukraine were going on at the same time and Mr. Putin thwarted them with his deal with President Yanukovych. Three months later Victoria Nuland was on the Maidan handing out cookies.

Ukraine is a cesspit of United States meddling from several angles, including Joe Bidens quid pro quos. Former President Petro Poroshenko was a United States asset who performed admirably in implementing the worst provocations to justify a shooting war with Russia over Crimea and the Black Sea during his reign.

So many United States foreign policy imperatives are at stake in Ukraine. And one always must ask the question, "Why this, why now?"

We are getting down to crunch time on the expiration of the gas transit contract between Gazprom and Naftogaz which expires at the end of the year. The United States is putting every roadblock imaginable up between Presidents Zelensky and Mr. Putin to keep that deal from getting extended and-or renegotiated.

At the same time the Danish government is under extreme pressure from the United States to deny Nordstream 2 a final environmental permit to complete the pipeline. Why is Danske Bank suddenly back in the news on money laundering charge, originally brought up by none other than Bill Browder last year? The CEO of that Estonian branch where all the "hanky panky" took place goes missing and winds up dead at the same time?

There is an implicit threat that Danske could bring down then entire Danish banking system.

And there is no connection here?

The goal of these two pressure points is to put Gazprom in the position to not be able to fulfill its contractual obligations to European customers. Nordstream 2 is the replacement for volumes crossing Ukraine. So, stopping both is essential to undermining Gazprom in the minds of European consumer and giving the EU the ammunition to bring lawsuits against the company for failing to deliver.

This is explicitly the strategy at work here.

President Trump wants more United States access to Europes gas market and it is clear he wants Russia to have either Ukraines volumes or Nordstream 2s but not both. The Deep State does not want them to have either.

But, most importantly, from President Trumps perspective, Poroshenko assisted in building the fake RussiaGate attack on President Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton which led to Robert Muellers Special Counsel and paralyzing President Trump on foreign policy for more than two years.

Now that Mr. Mueller is in the rearview, Donald Trump, through his Attorney General, William Barr, have begun investigations into all of this and more. So, it comes as no surprise to me that Donald Trump is getting sincere pushback from the Deep State.

Do I think Donald Trump is dirty? Yes. Do I think he is dirty vis a vis Ukraine? No.

The Democrats are pulling a typical Alinsky move of accusing President Trump of the very thing they are guilty of, using their political offices to secure favors for personal gain and advantage.

This is to deflect and get in front of the real crimes here. And they know that President Trump is coming for them.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Davos) sat on this "whistleblowers" complaint for more than six weeks even though it was marked "URGENT."

Why is that?

Why would he who was so hot to impeach Donald Trump wait until now versus early August to spring this on the world?

Because the timing was not right.

They needed some way to distract from what is coming down the pike and keep the country distracted. Mr. Schiff is protecting an obvious Central Intelligence Agency asset improperly and illegally embedded in the White House to spy on President Trump.

This whole thing is an elaborate set up.

And this is the reason why I think President Trump is in serious trouble if he does not have smoking guns on these people and can bring them to bear before they fast track this thing through the United States Congress and United States Senate.

What I said at the outset is the most important. Impeachment is a political process.

The House will impeach President Trump. That is a given. They want it. And they see it as a way to hurt him and gain the White House. They know their field of candidates is terrible and this is the Hail Mary to win.

But this is bigger than that.

The shenanigans in Ukraine cut across so many different fiefdoms in the United States government that a lot of people fear what happens if Donald Trump is not removed from the White House.

So, when I do the calculus it is as follows.

The Democrats have 47 votes in the Senate. They need 20 Republicans to find Trump guilty.

The first five votes against him are easy: Mitt Romney, who is as implicated as Biden is over Burisma, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Lindsay Graham and Marco Rubio.

These are arch Neocons and are hopping mad at President Trump for refusing to attack Iran for Israel.

Getting another 15 votes does not really seem that hard does it?

Look, the GOP has not helped Donald Trump one whit since he has been President. They have left him to twist in the wind on every issue unless he is backing more war and more military adventurism. That is the bottom line.

And if the calculus is that backing him means implicating themselves and who they are beholden to Donald Trump is toast, right or wrong.

The GOP has been nothing but an albatross around Donald Trumps neck from the beginning.

They will very likely rollover here and allow Mike Pence to play the part of Gerald Ford against whoever the Democrats put up.

I have given Donald Trump a lot of grief over his foreign policy and personnel choices because he has deserved it. But, for all of his faults, his instincts about keeping the wars to a low simmer have held sway.

This tactic by his opponents reeks of desperation and cover up.

It smells like a coup, no different than the Mueller investigation.

When the stakes are this high it is better to expect the worst rather than the middle ground. Because as bad as Donald Trump is he is far better than what comes next.

Reprinted here from the "Strategic Culture Foundation" provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs. We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Since 2005 our journal has published thousands of analytical briefs and commentaries with the unique perspective of independent contributors. SCF works to broaden and diversify expert discussion by focusing on hidden aspects of international politics and unconventional thinking. Benefiting from the expanding power of the Internet, we work to spread reliable information, critical thought and progressive ideas.