Like a reluctant bride mumbling vows written by her eager but unwelcome groom, Nancy Pelosi read the words House intelligence committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D.-Calif.) probably wrote to further aggrandize his shiny new Ukraine hoax. “We do place ourselves in a time of urgency and the threat to the Constitution, a system of checks and balances, that is being made.” Although Speaker Pelosi didn’t specifically identify the provision of the Constitution currently being threatened, it’s not hard to see what really has Washington so upset. Donald Trump has threatened the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
What? There is no 28th Amendment you say? Well, this one isn’t actually written down or ratified but it’s very real. It explains how much of Washington actually works. If it were reduced to writing, it might read, “Thou shalt not mess with another swamp creature’s side-hustle.”
The 28th amendment might have originated after the 1978 ABSCAM scandal in which one senator and six congressmen accepted or solicited bribes from undercover FBI agents. What a bunch of amateurs! Everyone in Washington knows that you don’t act as your own bag man when selling favors!
Corruption in modern D.C. is shaped like a triangle. A person or entity seeking a favor doesn’t hand the money directly to the politician or public official. Instead, the money goes to a trusted family relation under a vague “consulting” or “speaking” arrangement. This golden triangle of corruption appears over and over again in the Russia collusion hoax.
The Clinton email scandal and the Biden/Ukraine scandal have a lot in common. Both originated with snooping into high-level triangle schemes but morphed into a counter-scandal against Trump. In Clinton’s case, she deleted 30,000 emails that likely contained more evidence of favors to donors and friends. The process was so formalized that one Clinton Foundation official actually wrote a memo bragging about how the foundation work led to lavish speaking fees for Bill Clinton. As an example, he obtained speaking fees for Clinton from UBS in the amount of $900,000, $750,000 from Ericson “plus $400,000 for a private plane.” The memo author bragged that he negotiated a $1,000,000 fee for a one-hour Bill Clinton speech in China. When Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, she no longer had influence to sell and the donations to the “charitable” foundation dried up.
But there have been several other triangle arrangements. Consider the Ohrs. Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Burce Ohr, a very senior attorney in the Justice Department, lent his credibility to Hillary Clinton’s opposition research contractor by sponsoring it to the FBI. The same contractor, Fusion GPS, paid Bruce Ohr’s wife tens of thousands of dollars to work on the same project.
Then there are the McCabes. On July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not refer Clinton for prosecution for the email scandal. In this announcement, he said, “I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.”
But in May of 2016, Director Comey initiated a string of emails to his Deputy Andrew McCabe (among others) titled, “midyear exam.” The FBI titled the release “Drafts of Director Comey’s July 5, 2016 Statement Regarding Email Server Investigation.” Thus, McCabe was involved in the early version of the statement exonerating Clinton (even though Comey said he didn’t coordinate his comments with anyone in government). This brought to close the FBI’s investigation which formally began in July of 2015.
But Clinton’s “oh shit!” moment came in March of 2015 when she realized she might face criminal charges. Coincidentally—ha!—close Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe approached McCabe’s wife to run for office in March of 2015. He then steered $675,000 into her campaign coffers.
Then there are the corrupt but yet unidentified reporters. In November of 2017, court documents revealed that Fusion GPS made payments to three journalists between June 2016 and February 2017. This period overlaps with the Clinton campaign utilizing campaign funds to secretly pay Fusion GPS to help promote the Russia collusion hoax. Thus campaign money was potentially used to influence journalists. If you look in the FEC’s cold storage bin, you might find the campaign finance violation complaint about campaign money secretly making its way from Clinton’s attorney to Fusion GPS.
Then there are the WilmerHale alumni that came home after working on the Mueller team. We just learned that the Justice Department waived a conflict of interest triggered by Robert Mueller’s work with WilmerHale. WilmerHale took money from Clinton to do legal work on some of the very same email scandals that involved the State Department/Clinton Foundation shenanigans. At the time Mueller’s team was gearing up, we were told that Mueller and several of his team members “gave up million-dollar jobs to work on special counsel investigation.” But did they? We’ve recently learned some of these WilmerHale alums have returned which raises concerns that these attorneys had informal outside agreements at the same time they’re supposed to be independently serving a special counsel investigating Clinton’s political opponent.
So if you believe that the golden triangle of corruption is essential to the Washington power-for-sale business model, you scream bloody murder when you see one of these hustles threatened with exposure. It only works if everyone honors the gentleman’s agreement to look the other way. That’s why permanent Washington calls President Trump “dangerous” and a “threat.” And that’s the real reason for the Ukraine scandal. Donald Trump “abused his power” by drawing attention to the Biden golden triangle. That’s a violation of the unwritten 28th Amendment. For that, he must be impeached or the whole pay-for-play system could come crashing down.