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roguenewsdao · 7 years

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As 'RussiaGate' Implodes, Brits Push 25th Amendment To Remove Trump

The following article by Harley Schlanger originally appeared in the German language Neue Solidarität news magazine which you may find at EIR.de. -- JWS

Oct. 27 -- As Barbara Boyd's report in this issue of the paper demonstrates, the operation to remove President Trump has been one which, from the beginning, should have been summarily rejected as "Made in London." According to the authoritative special report she authored, which was released by LaRouchePAC, "Robert Mueller Is an Immoral Legal Assassin," the British first targeted Trump directly in 2015, with the London-based GCHQ intelligence coordination center taking the lead. [The Russian Analyst would like to add here another example of flagrant British 'ex' spook meddling in U.S. politics, that of former GCHQ employee Matt Tait who has been published by James Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes on the Democratic Deep State mouthpiece website Lawfare, where Tait accused a now deceased Republican operative Peter W. Smith of having sought Hillary Clinton's infamous deleted emails from 'Russian hackers' on the dark web, without demonstrating any proof that Smith obtained the emails or reached any hackers Russian or otherwise before Smith's death by a reported suicide near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Tait, who tweets at @PwnAlltheThings, gave testimony to Mueller's investigation in a 'coincidental' favor between the old friends Mueller and Comey -- JWS]

It was a British firm Orbis, in collaboration with an American firm, Fusion GPS, whose operatives were deployed to write the Trump "sex dossier". The leader of the team was "ex"-MI6 spy Christopher Steele, the founder of Orbis and a collaborator of the FBI, who worked together with Orbis colleague and former British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Andrew Wood, to produce the lying dossier, which alleged that not only did Russian President Putin have blackmail material on Trump, but that Putin "meddled" in the U.S. election to make Trump President. It was this dossier, delivered by U.S. Senator and Trump enemy John McCain, to FBI director James Comey, which led to the formation in June 2016 of a "Get Trump" team, by leaders of U.S. intelligence serving under President Obama, which has been at the center of "Russiagate." The targeting of Trump has nothing to do with Putin conspiring with Trump, to manipulate American voters -- the "scandal" is intended to prevent Trump, as President, from cooperating with Putin and China's Xi Jinping, to put an end to a unipolar, imperial system of geopolitics, which has dominated international political, economic and financial relations since the murder of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

On October 24, The Washington Post, one of the leading mouthpieces for this anti-Trump movement, released a bombshell, confirming that the Steele dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee. A law firm working for the Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS in April 2016, to compile the dossier. Thus, the document which provided the excuse to launch the attack on Russia and Trump was produced by British intelligence operatives, paid for by a U.S. political campaign! The article reports that the FBI offered to pay Steele to continue, after the Clinton campaign ended its funding, but dropped the effort, when the existence of the dossier was made known in January 2017.

This expose was forced by the actions of Republicans in Congress, including Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), the chair of the Judiciary Committee, both of whom have been working to highlight the role of Fusion GPS and Orbis in creating the fake narrative behind Russiagate. In the last week, Fusion GPS attorneys refused to answer subpoenas issued by the House Intelligence Committee, and the firm's co-founders pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions, when they appeared before the Committee. Further, Fusion GPS attorneys filed a request before a federal judge to prevent release of its bank records, which might provide the answer as to who funded the dossier. The investigative and legal spotlight has thus become directly focused on the role of British operatives. [After this story 'went to press' the House Intelligence Committee announced that Fusion GPS had voluntarily surrendered the bank records, though it remains to be seen if the firm fully complied with the subpoena -- JWS]

President Trump responded to their evasive actions by tweeting, "Officials behind the now discredited 'Dossier' plead the Fifth. Justice Department and/or FBI should immediately release who paid for it."

BRITISH TV: "SEX; SPIES AND SCANDALS" The problem those running the regime change operation against President Trump are having with making the Russiagate story stick is exemplified by a much-hyped "documentary" produced by British television Channel 4, "Trump and Russia: Sex, Spies and Scandal". Featuring former BBC Washington, D.C. correspondent Matt Frei, the pathetic 45-minute special was nothing more than a rehash of all the unsubstantiated charges which have characterized the phony scandal. A particularly revealing moment was an interview with The Atlantic magazine writer Franklin Foer, who admitted that the case against Trump is "a circumstantial case, but there are a lot of circumstances"! The October Atlantic's lead story is "Will Donald Trump Destroy the U.S. Presidency?" In its review of the documentary, the fiercely anti-Trump publication highlighted this dilemma: It claims there have been "numerous unrecorded meetings between [Trump] campaign members and senior Russian figures. Millions of dollars washing back and forth. The firing of FBI director Comey...the list goes on and yet, somehow, has not yet amounted to anything anyone can act on in a meaningful way." The failure to find anything substantial has not stopped the Get Trump operations. Washington insiders report that special counsel Mueller is feverishly pushing to find anything which confirms the charges of the Steele dossier, while his investigators are scrutinizing twenty-five year-old real estate deals of Trump, looking for a "smoking gun." The circulation of the LaRouchePAC dossier on Mueller, which has been distributed to most Congressional offices, has had an obvious effect, which will deepen as the role of the British and their neo-con/neo-liberal American allies is exposed.

THE 25TH AMENDMENT It is therefore not surprising that, given the failure to prove Russian meddling/Trump collusion as a basis for impeachment, there has been a surge of articles and commentaries appearing which suggest using the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump. The 25th Amendment was adopted in 1967, to "modernize" the succession process if the President were to become incapacitated. Section 4 of the Amendment states that if the Vice-President and a majority of the cabinet conclude the President is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," they can go to the Congress to ask that he be removed. Those behind the talk of utilizing the 25th Amendment argue that Trump is "unstable;" "incompetent," "impetuous", etc., i.e. crazy, and liable to incinerate humanity in a nuclear war, due to these qualities. Using the 25th Amendment was presented as a possible scenario at the time of Trump's inauguration, with Foreign Policy magazine suggesting it on January 30, 2017, "Three Ways to Get Rid of President Trump before 2020." The article argued for its application, saying it became clear from his first days in office that "he is as crazy as everyone feared." The other two ways proposed to remove him were impeachment and military coup! An earlier, more inflammatory piece, appearing in The Spectator (of London) on January 21, 2017, was titled, "Will Donald Trump be assassinated, ousted in a coup, or just impeached?" The following is a partial listing of the spate of calls for removing Trump using the 25th Amendment: 1. October 11, Vanity Fair -- Gabriel Sherman writes that Trump "advisers struggle to contain a president who seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods." The author quotes former Trump adviser Steve Bannon saying that he told Trump they might use the 25th Amendment to remove him. 2. October 14, UK Guardian -- columnist Jonathan Freedlander, who also is employed by the BBC, writes "Yes, Trump can be removed from the U.S. presidency. Here's how." He also uses the word "contain" to describe the situation in the White House, writing that "the one being contained is Trump himself." After describing how the 25th Amendment could be applied, he asks, "Who wouldn't want to end this presidency, swiftly and cleanly?" Freedland wrote a book, under a pseudonym, this summer, titled "To Kill the President", about how cabinet members conclude the only way to prevent nuclear war with Korea is to kill the president, since neither impeachment, nor the 25th Amendment could complete the job in time. 3. October 16, The New Yorker -- runs an article on a group of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts who published a book, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump." They have formed an organization called "A Duty to Warn", and are organizing a series of events to create a mobilization to force the use of the 25th Amendment. The theme of the book, and their actions, is that Trump "suffers from an incurable malignant narcissism that makes him incapable of carrying out his presidential duties and poses a danger to the nation."

4.October 20 -- the chief ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, Richard Painter, begins a barrage of tweets saying "We ignore the 25th Amendment at our peril." These come a day after Bush himself delivered what the New York Times described as an "unexpected and eloquent speech against Trumpism." Among other things, Bush said that U.S. politics is today "more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication." He added "we have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty" -- this from a President who lied to get the U.S. into a regime change war against Iraq, and justified torture as "enhanced interrogation." 5. October 23, Foreign Policy takes up the theme again, under the headline "How Far Must Trump 'Unravel' Before the 25th Amendment Kicks in?" Foreign Policy was founded by Clash of Civilizations theorist Samuel P. Huntington, and was bought by the Washington Post in 2008. Huntington's work is based on an idea advanced by British imperial geopoliticians, that there are no common interests among nations with different religions and ethnicity, and to seek such agreements is folly. Seen in this context, the sudden, more aggressive push for applying the 25th Amendment to remove Trump is due not only to the failure, thus far, of the Russiagate narrative to provide grounds for impeachment, but because it has not deterred Trump from pursuing cooperative relations with Russia and China. On November 3, he will begin a trip to Asia, with a November 8 meeting scheduled with China's President Xi, and a likely meeting with President Putin at one of several international conferences. It is the prospect that such meetings will lead to a more active engagement of the U.S., under Trump, with Russia and China, that is likely behind the push to use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump.

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