Chasing down the wrong rabbit hole ...

Trump and his Republican allies are wasting their time trying to prove Biden was corrupt.

Everyone knows he has been and still is. Everyone. 

His nitwit son with no discernable relevant job skills got a board seat paying him $50K a month with a corrupt Ukrainian gas company while Joe was VP in charge of the Ukraine.  Then the same son flies on Air Force II with daddy to China and gets a $1.5B private equity deal with China shortly after. 

Later, Biden goes out on video bragging about how he leveraged a billion in aid to Ukraine to get a key prosecutor fired who was about to interview his son Hunter about corruption in the same Ukrainian gas company – which, BTW, was owned by a Russian oligarch. 

Here’s the problem:  Trump and the Republicans are trying to prove there was a reason why they wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. They don’t have to.  Trump had every right to ask, regardless.  Meanwhile the Democrats are saying asking a foreign country (Ukraine) to help U.S. investigators was all a plot to damage Trump’s most likely opponent – Joe Biden.

But Biden was never going to be Trump’s Democrat opponent. He didn’t have a prayer of getting the nomination because he’s an idiot, too moderate, and has too much baggage from the Obama years. There’s a reason Obama tried to persuade him not to run. 

Let me put it another way. It’s like pass interference in football: there’s no pass interference if the ball was obviously uncatchable.

Trump couldn’t damage a political opponent who wasn’t ever going to win the Democrat nomination in the first place.  Everybody but Biden, perhaps, knew he didn’t have a chance. 

Trump didn’t go after Biden because he feared him, but because Biden and his family are crooks. Biden’s son used his father’s position to cash in, as did Joe’s brother, just as Hillary used her position to enrich herself and her family when she was Secretary of State. 

That’s demonstrable corruption. 

However, Republicans are missing the bigger issue as they tumble down the Biden rabbit hole. They should be concentrating on corruption in our own intel agencies and forget about Biden.

If people in the CIA, FBI and NSA are trying to take down a lawfully elected President, that should give every American the heebie jeebies. If we can’t trust them to be impartial, we’re all screwed.  

The Senate should be investigating the FBI, CIA, and NSA, much the way these agencies were investigated years ago when they were found to be operating way outside the law.

For reference look up Church Committee Hearings in the 1970s.  It was a Democrat Senator, Frank Church, who headed up the Senate’s investigations.

Here’s what the Church Committee found:

The CIA was participating in assassinations and engineering coups of democratically elected foreign leaders like Allende in Chile, along with developing plots to kill other leaders around the world, such as Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.  The FBI used spies and illegal wiretaps to build files on civil-rights leaders like MLK and others, journalists, and potentially to blackmail anyone giving them trouble. The FBI and NSA were snooping on ordinary Americans even then – listening into phone calls as well as opening and copying U.S. mail, all without warrants.     

The agencies acted as if they were above the law and accountable only to themselves. In essence, they felt they could get away with anything – even murder. 

At the time Church was quoted as saying: “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

One of the outcomes was the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which required special judges within newly created FISA Courts to approve surveillance by domestic intel agencies of foreign powers suspected of espionage or terrorism. 

Congress had to act to expose our intel community’s arrogance and dirty dealings. It took aggressive Senate investigations to clean house and put an end to all that.

                                                

Temporarily, it appears.  Now the same intel agencies are back to their old dirty tricks. 

If the Mueller probe proved anything, it was that key players in our intel community decided it was their right to use all their powers to interfere in a Presidential election to favor their preferred candidate.  And then, when that failed, try to unseat an elected President they didn’t like.  Not because he did anything wrong, but simply because he might upset their hold on power.

The evidence of their illicit and unconstitutional activities is in plain sight.

Think about Comey’s actions to illegally pass on FBI memos to the media. 

Think of how the FBI repeatedly used false information from Russians – that the FBI knew was false – to deceive a FISA Court and spy on Trump and his campaign. 

Think of how our intel community outsourced spying to foreign intel operations to skirt our laws against spying on U.S. citizens.

Think about leaks to the media of private White House conversations with world leaders. 

Think about the latest whistleblower complaint from someone who described himself or herself as a CIA operative assigned to the White House.    

Back in the days of Senators Frank Church and Sam Ervin, Democrats would be leading the charge to investigate abuse in our intel community with all this evidence. 

But not now. That’s why the Republicans in the Senate need to do it. That’s why the upcoming reports from Barr, Durham, and the IG about these alleged abuses are so important.

And that’s why Democrats and players in our intel community are fighting tooth and nail to destroy Trump and Barr, now. As quickly as possible.  They know what’s likely to come out. 

The obvious:  our intel community has been corrupted. It can’t be trusted.  As in the days that led to the Church Committee hearings, our intel community again believes it has the power to do anything it wants, even if that means ousting a democratically elected President.

Someone needs to rein them in. They need to be thoroughly investigated.  And then purged of the bad actors who have created this mess. 

Frank Church was right to warn us what could happen if we don’t.  Tyranny. And an abyss from which we cannot return.       

That’s where the real story is for Trump and the Republicans; not a washed-up fossil like Biden who never had a chance, anyway.