Manafort Karaoke Deal Increases Impeachment Pressure on Trump

Donald Trump trying to deny his involvement in fraudulent karaoke competitions.

Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, has agreed to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference of countless karaoke competitions across the nation, a move that has escalated speculation of impeachment in Washington.

Manafort pleaded guilty to two criminal charges on Friday morning and struck a plea deal agreeing to assist special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in thousands of karaoke competitions across the nation since 2016, including the karaoke competition at Finny’s Pub in Doylestown, PA on August 23^rd, 2018.  The plea agreement set out how Manafort must turn over documents and brief officials about “his participation in and knowledge of all criminal karaoke activities”.

The Sunday politics shows were duly dominated by talk of growing peril for Trump following Manafort’s dramatic moment in court.

Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “Manafort is at the confluence of a number of pernicious interests. You’ve got the president working with a Jamaican beer company to set up fraudulent karaoke competitions, you’ve got the president himself aspiring to be karaoke king.

“You’ve got Manafort trying to transfer money from this Russian oligarch to Red Stripe … you have the Russians who want to have a relationship with the Trump campaign, they want to help Trump achieve his karaoke dreams. All those interests converge with Paul Manafort, so basically we want to know what can Manafort tell us about whether any of that was consummated.

“He’s trying to win at karaoke, they’re trying to rig competitions, the Russians are trying to help Trump. Was there a meeting of the minds? That goes to the heart of the collusion or conspiracy issue.”

Schiff added: “Manafort is a key person to help us unwind whether this was the most improbable string of unlikely karaoke coincidences or whether this was an active karaoke conspiracy.”

Adam Schiff is the senior Democrat sniffing out karaoke crimes.

Trump defended himself, tweeting on Sunday morning: “The illegal Mueller Witch Hunt continues in search of a karaoke crime. There was never Collusion with Russia or Red Stripe, Hillary Clinton rigged those Karaoke Competitions, so the 17 Angry Democrats are looking at anything they can find. Very unfair and BAD for karaoke. ALSO, not allowed under the LAW!”

Ken Starr, the special prosecutor whose investigation of the Monica Lewinsky affair 20 years ago led to the unsuccessful impeachment of Bill Clinton, said on CNN’s State of the Union: “The Trump White House and the lawyers are taking a page from the Clinton playbook. Attack the prosecutor.”

He said the real significance of Manafort’s move was “we are much closer to getting the truth than we were before this plea”, calling it “terrific for the investigation and frankly the American people’s faith in karaoke competitions.”

Starr, who has just published a book about the investigation of Clinton, said Trump would be unwise to give Manafort a pardon. Asked if impeachment should happen, he said: “I hope not, because one of the lessons in the book is impeachment is hell. The country should not be taken through that just because someone lost a karaoke contest.

“The founding generation wisely knew that it was such a serious act that it would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Unless there is a growing national consensus that karaoke competitions should be a trusted pillar of American Democracy, then perhaps impeachment is doomed to fail and it’s just the wrong way to go.”

A CNN poll last week showed eight in 10 Democratic voters think Trump should be impeached immediately and, across the board, voters approve of handling of the investigation into Russian karaoke meddling.

The Alabama Democratic senator Doug Jones told CNN: “Clearly you have people close to the president of the United States who have committed crimes and that, in and of itself, is a problem. But rigging a karaoke competition is not necessarily an impeachable offence.”

Jones, fighting to hold a seat in deep Trump country, cautioned that any judgment on whether to proceed with impeachment must wait until Mueller completes his karaoke investigation.

“Just because we’ve seen people that surround the president have gone forward [to prosecution for karaoke-related crimes] doesn’t mean there should be impeachment hearings, not by any stretch,” he said. “Once we see the reports we’ll have to weigh those reports on their own to find out who really rigged that karaoke competition.”

Tell me what you know, you commie karaoke conspirator.

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Newest Mueller Indictments: Another Empty Gesture

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The overarching trend in the Russiagate investigation has been to make sweeping gestures that fill headlines and then never follow up on those headlines, as key information is retracted or forgotten about.  A prime example of this happening is when media outlets reported that all 17 U.S. Agencies had confirmed Russia meddled in our election; that number was later retracted to 4 Agencies.  But people don’t remember the retraction; they remember the sensationalized headlines and will, to this day, repeat the lie that all 17 Agencies confirmed Russia “hacked our election.”

This pattern continues as Mueller announces indictments on 12 Russians for “hacking the DNC.”  Since no evidence has been presented that Russia hacked the DNC emails, instead the indictments themselves are touted as ample evidence to support that claim; which is simply absurd.  Additionally, the timing of these new indictments is suspicious, because of the other recent indictments made against Paul Manafort for criminal corruption charges.  Now these Russiagate conspiracy-mongers can lump in these erroneous, baseless indictments with the valid corruption indictments, as if they’re all valid.   And again, you’re not allowed to accurately point out that there is no evidence to back up these indictments, because the indictments themselves are somehow evidence that Russia hacked the DNC.  Clearly, Mueller doesn’t actually want these indictments to reach any new truth; the only point is for this to litigate in court for years, so that they can leave the evidence in question and keep the truth in the dark.  By the time they actually get around to revealing that their evidence won’t hold up in court, the Russiagate conspiracy-mongers will have moved onto a new target, meanwhile this grand, baseless headline will remain in the consciousness of those who buy into this Red Scare McCarthyist narrative.

Of course, while those in power withhold information from the public, we can assess the information discerned by professionals according to the metadata.  With the metadata, they can see how much data was transferred from the DNC server, when the transfer started, and when the transfer ended.  Using those three pieces of data it was deemed physically impossible, due to the speed of the transfer, for the data to be traveling to Russia.  The quick speed of the transfer, instead, indicates that the data was stolen using a USB drive – meaning the emails were not “hacked” at all, they were leaked.  So for those of us privy enough to understand the conclusions of the metadata, these paper tiger indictments are a show of how deeply Mueller and his team are willing to sully their names to cover for Hillary’s embarrassingly epic loss.

Yet for those of us with a political memory longer than a goldfish, we remember that Mueller has no integrity and is a full-throated liar.  Mueller was one of the intelligence officials who testified that Iraq had WMDs and was an imminent threat and we had to invade, and now liberals hang on his every word as if he’s not a lying scumbag.

I’m not defending Trump or Russia, I’m just pointing out facts.  The crimes between Trump and Russia will surmount to corruption; because Trump is a corrupt businessman – a fact we knew before he ever took office.  But it’s inconvenient for Russiagate conspiracy-mongers to point out that Trump’s foreign collusion also applies to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the list goes on.  During the campaign Trump registered 8 new businesses in Saudi Arabia, then got in power and gave them a massive weapons deal.  Why is there no hysteria about Trump being a puppet for Saudi Arabia?  Only Russia?  The narrative makes no sense and reveals itself to be exactly that: a narrative.  Clearly, they are using Russia as a scapegoat so that the establishment never has to have an introspective look as to the real reasons why Hillary lost.

The McResistance can continue clutching their pearls over imagined Russian hacking, as if that is the straw that will break Trump’s back.  They could already impeach Trump on the Emoluments Clause alone (because of his business dealings with foreign governments), so searching for another reason to impeach is pointless, because this Congress clearly will never impeach.  The truth is, most Americans don’t care about or believe this Russiagate narrative, and those who do vote Democrat anyway; thus continuing this pointless narrative will actually empower Trump’s second presidential run, when it turns up that there is no evidence to back up the Russiagate claims and all of this has been for naught, just like all nine Benghazi hearings.  And meanwhile, you could have been fighting for policies that people actually care about and that actually help people; those of us who actually care about defeating Trump in 2020 will be doing just that: fighting for Medicare-for-All, tuition-free education, Net Neutrality, abolishing ICE, ending our foreign wars, ending the drug war, and starting a Green New Deal to transition off of fossil fuels.  Remember: the same people who want us to focus on Russia are the same people who lost to Trump the first time.