Twenty Nineteen is gone, but not the most important lesson in the impeachment of Donald Trump. Let’s get at it this way. What do the books of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Bill Browder have in common with Adam Schiff’s State Show Trial?
Many will recall Solzhenitsyn’s profound writings about state socialism’s deadening toll on the human spirit, about Communist Russia’s so-called system of justice. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Denisovich is a loyal soldier captured by the Germans in WWII, and eventually repatriated, but he and thousands like him are considered spies, given State Show Trials, and without evidence, sentenced to years at hard labor in one of the gulags—the state penal colonies. Better, it was said, than the shot to the back of the head in Lubyanka’s basement so many other “enemies of the state” received.
In Gulag Archipelago,Solzhenitsyn details his own journey of misery. For him, the sentence of eight years to ponder mistakes in his thoughts and writings came after the usual charade of judicial chicanery. The New York Times said on June 16, 1974, Gulag is about, “the imprisonment, brutalization and very often murder of tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens by their own Government….”
Roll the tapes forward to 2015, and Bill Browder’s powerful epic, Red Notice. Indeed, Browder is the grandson of the infamous Earl Browder, who headed the American Communist Party during the Soviet era. Bill Browder distinguished himself, perhaps surprisingly, as a capitalist in post-Soviet Russia building wealth for his shareholders and fighting oligarchic corruption. Red Notice makes clear that the unrelenting brutality of Solzhenitsyn’s Russia and its KGB differs little from Putin and his FSB. The Show Trial never outlived its usefulness. Convictions with fabricated evidence are as common as oxygen molecules.
The true story of modern-day Putinesque contempt for judicial fairness led to Browder’s campaign in our country for the Magnitsky Act. Because the book was written before Donald Trump came upon the presidential scene, Browder’s assertion that Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) “Reset” policy toward the Russian Federation was one of appeasement, and that John Kerry (then in the Senate) refused to consider the Magnitsky bill for fear of damaging his chances to become Secretary of State, is striking in its irony.
None of the above is to say that Russian justice—then and now—is comparable to what occurs in our country but consider a few similarities. A head of government uses unconstitutional control over the country’s premier law enforcement authority to facilitate the development of fabricated claims before a judicial body, thus empowering the leviathan machinery of government to smear, damage, and undercut a political enemy. Yes, this is about Obama allowing Comey’s FBI (with Lynch’s acquiescence?) to launch its torpedo against Trump. Why? To protect Obama’s policy legacy, of course, as well as the raft of cronies standing to benefit from a Clinton election in 2016. Truly, the Russians only wanted another patsy in the White House: Hillary Clinton.
Now comes Nancy Pelosi, an accomplice to Obama Administration acolytes still in power, who unleashes Adam Schiff. Using Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals—the same as applied in Russian political and judicial life—Democrats impeach Donald Trump as we enter the election season with a Show Trial—by definition a proceeding with a pre-ordained outcome. Schiff and Progressive puppets use Rules 4, 5, and 13 most effectively in the prosecution of their sham case.
Donald Trump will not serve hard labor in the Gulag, of course, but the fact that powerful people in government, elected and otherwise, are unaccountably free to manufacture damning information and use it to contrive the impeachment of a U.S. president is chilling in the extreme.
Pelosi’s power tactics call to mind the Salem Witch Trials and other such horrors we thought we’d left behind. Schiff’s State Show Trial reveals a willingness to brutalize our constitutional principles merely to salve Progressives’ Neolithic urges, and destroy an enemy, however wrongly. Not satisfied, Pelosi apparently believes the longer the negativity of the untried impeachment sits in the national consciousness, the greater damage she will do to Trump (Rules 8, 10, and 11).
Majority Leader McConnell is caught between a rock and a hard place, isn’t he? Although Pelosi has withheld the Articles of Impeachment, the Senate cannot deal with them unless they are transmitted. Yet, in receiving them, McConnell must either ignore them because they’re the result of a Show Trial or try them in the Senate—much like asking SOTUS to decide if a KKK lynching is just.
The lesson for all of us is this: Given the power, Progressives will feel increasingly free to decree what Solzhenitsyn, Magnitsky, and millions have had to endure because they cannot tolerate disagreement with their party line. Put another way, if Democrats can marshal the mighty forces of government to damn a sitting president, can they not do much the same to any of us? Nightmares, anyone?