Inside of newsrooms, broadcast studios, and Twitter, impeachment is going according to plan. Outside of those bubbles, it's not.
Impeachment is going so poorly for the media and other Democrats that “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd was forced to broadcast false information to support it.
A graphic was posted on Sunday’s show that purported to identify how many people in the president’s party voted in support of an impeachment inquiry in the cases of Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. It accurately noted that 31 Democrats voted in favor of impeachment proceedings for Clinton. But it inaccurately claimed that a single Republican had voted in favor of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment rules last week.
There are multiple problems with this graphic. For one thing, zero Republicans voted with House Democrats last week. Zero point zero. Zilch. Nada. None. For another, Todd’s team is hiding the bipartisan nature of the opposition to the vote last week. Not only did not a single Republican vote with Democrats, two Democrats voted with Republicans in opposition.
Todd knows that no Republicans voted for impeachment, despite the graphic he put up on national television. In fact, he said during the show, “I have one with an asterisk here. I don’t know what you do with Justin Amash. It’s not a zero. At the same time, he’s not a Republican anymore.”
I know what you do with that, Chuck. You don’t lie and call him a Republican. Todd himself gave Amash national media attention for leaving the Republican Party in dramatic fashion, interviewing him two weeks prior. In the first six seconds of the interview, he noted twice that Amash was not a Republican.
The impeachment inquiry, such as it is, has tremendous struggles. It’s been conducted in secret, with heavy control from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the man who falsely claimed for years he had evidence of Trump’s treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The inquiry is being handled by him because the more appropriate committee chair, Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., made a mess of the previous impeachment efforts by mismanaging his hearings with Robert Mueller, John Dean, and Corey Lewandowski. In fact, the Mueller hearing was such a disaster for impeachment efforts that it more or less killed a multi-year effort put in place by Resistance bureaucrats and their supporters.
Schiff has told witnesses not to answer questions when those questions would help Trump, and has badgered witnesses who were deemed insufficiently supportive of his efforts to undo the 2016 election. He and the whistleblower both lied about their coordination prior to the complaint being filed. And while he originally demanded the whistleblower’s testimony, after that coordination was revealed, he has attempted to prevent the testimony during which difficult questions would be asked.
Worse, the witnesses thus far can not point to a single crime, much less a high crime, for which to impeach the president. Instead, the witnesses either broadly support the president’s handling of foreign policy or are livid with rage over his disagreement with their...
