Pelosi’s Contemptible Fraud

by Conrad Black

It is depressing to consider that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives committee of inquiry into the events of January 6 will probably not be generally exposed as the contemptible fraud that it is by the tainted and corruptly partisan national political and social media. It has already been adduced beyond challenge that President Trump advised his followers on January 6, if they went to the Capitol, to “demonstrate peacefully and patriotically.” On listening to his speech again, it is completely unexceptionable, and he gives clearly his complaints about the voting and vote-counting procedures. 

A moron could deduce that where there are 44 million mailed and “dumped” ballots floating around, strange things are likely to happen in an election where a flip of 50,000 votes in three states would have changed the election result. It is an incontestable fact that the Trump Administration and campaign had nothing to do with what went on after the president addressed his followers near the White House on January 6. It is equally clear that almost none of the intruders at the Capitol were armed. There is not one scintilla of truth in any claim that President Trump or his collaborators had anything to do with promoting any intrusion at the Capitol or any physical threat to anyone, or any disturbance of the normal lawful processes of government. It has also been clearly established that President Trump, several days before the intrusion at the Capitol, offered 10,000 National Guardsmen as supplementary reinforcements in recognition of the fact that some of his supporters might be in a hostile mood on January 6.

The FBI, tarnished and demeaned by the Comey-McCabe politicization of the bureau though it is, can still presumably conduct a competent investigation. Hundreds of people arrested as Capitol trespassers on January 6 have been intensively interrogated for months with all the enticements available to American prosecutors to extort and suborn false inculpatory testimony with immunity against perjury proceedings, and nothing damaging to Trump or his campaign has emerged. 

It is inconceivable that Pelosi’s one-party Star Chamber, pre-confected smear job of the former administration will produce anything of any probative value. The huge crowd that the president addressed on the morning of January 6 had come to Washington to demonstrate their outrage at what they believed—with considerable reason, despite totalitarian attempts to suppress all discussion of it—was a tainted election, and in addition to protesting the failure of the judicial system to judge the merits of any of the 19 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and other plaintiffs including the attorney general of Texas supported by 18 other states, to address the integrity of the voting and vote-counting procedures of the six swing states. (The election went off without any controversy at all in the other 44 states, which in itself implies targeted electoral tampering.)

In Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, there were a great many more votes than were needed to change the election result that were either unverifiable as valid or counted without the required effective observation of the representatives of all of the parties in the election. In each case, the modifications to voting conditions taken allegedly in respect of the requirements of the pandemic to facilitate access to the polls, were not approved by the state legislatures as the Constitution requires, but by either the state executive or judicial branches. None of these cases was judged on its merits and all were rejected for process reasons. In these circumstances, it would have been astonishing if the 75 million Trump voters and the candidate himself were not seriously aggrieved.

In the absence of a proper adjudication, no one can say with the circumstantial evidence that has accrued and is notorious, that there is not a significant possibility of a dishonest election. The refusal of the judiciary at several levels including the U.S. Supreme Court, to hear any of the relevant cases incites the inference that the high court at least was sufficiently sensitive to campaign and post-election Democratic calls for an expanded Supreme Court that they ducked the issue knowing that overturning an election result especially in favor of so controversial a politician as Trump would overload the system and create an intolerable state of controversy. That may have been a correct political decision and agitation for a radical alteration of the Supreme Court seems to have abated, giving the country an increased state of confidence of dispassionate verdicts in politically sensitive cases. But the justices are jurists and not politicians, and the high court’s evasions did nothing to assuage the anger and the disappointment of the Trump supporters and of Trump himself.                       

When current cant and emotionalism subside, it will be seen that Trump’s own response to what he has some reason to believe was the theft of an election was comparatively moderate: an address to a very large number of his supporters with a request that they be peaceful if they proceeded to the Capitol. The reason for the successful trespass was the rank negligence of Speaker Pelosi and the hopelessly incompetent mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, in ignoring the request of the chief of the Capitol Police transmitted by the sergeant at arms for reinforcements and in declining the president’s offer of reinforcements. 

Instead of any promise of an objective inquiry following upon any unfinished business from the extensive investigations that have already been conducted by people whose avocation it is to investigate illegalities and not put on down-market political circuses, we can be sure of a Trump-hate burlesque of the impartial and dignified inquiry that the apologists and promoters of this pre-cooked farce have promised. It was enough to be confident of this when the Red Queen Pelosi banished two of the Republicans Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) dutifully nominated to a committee which he had declared in advance to be an industrial-strength smear job against the former president.

This was reinforced by Pelosi’s replacement nomination of two of the most vociferous Republican Trump-haters, Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). And just to get us into the mood for the disgrace that was afoot, television viewers were treated to the greatest act of partisan and congressional pretended sniveling since Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), moved by President Trump’s temporary suspension of direct entrance into the United States from terrorism-exporting or afflicted countries in 2017, simpered that the Statue of Liberty was weeping and then induced a few tears himself. This week’s sequel was when Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the most egregious and frequent liar in the Congress, still professing to have found evidence of collusion between President Trump and the Russian government that he has been unable to produce, started whimpering and sobbing with grief over some aspect of the January 6 episode. Kinzinger, who should be expelled from the Republican Party along with Cheney and any other Republican who voted to impeach Trump, gave a follow-up act which, while a better and lengthier simulation of weeping than Schiff’s almost slap-stick effort, was a less monstrous affront to the intelligence and taste of viewers.

This abominable charade will be an even greater enormity than the second Trump impeachment which, it will be recalled, occurred after Trump left office. The almost complete absence of integrity and responsibility of the American national political and social media is a national crisis. They may try to pretend that Pelosi’s kangaroo court is genuine, But it will almost certainly be an even greater failure at mudslinging and defamation than the shameful Mueller inquiry and the two impeachments. Tom Friedman of the New York Times told us that Trump-Russian collusion was as serious an attack on the country as Pearl Harbor and 9/11; George Will and others make the 9/11 comparison. Surely when this nauseating and redundant slanderfest bombs out, unreasoning Trump-hate will be a harder sell.

First published in American Greatness.