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A malicious indictment Mitch should toss out

About the impeachment of President Donald Trump she engineered with her Democratic majority, Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday: “It’s not personal. It’s not political. It’s not partisan. It’s patriotic.”

Seriously, Madam Speaker? Not political? Not partisan?

Why then were all eight House members chosen as managers to prosecute the case against Trump, who ceremoniously escorted the articles across the Capitol, all Democrats? Why did the articles of impeachment receive not a single Republican vote on the House floor?

The truth: The impeachment of Donald Trump is the fruit of a malicious prosecution whose roots go back to the 2016 election, in the aftermath of which stunned liberals and Democrats began to plot the removal of the new president.

Consider. In this impeachment, we are told, the House serves as the grand jury, and Adam Schiff’s Intelligence Committee and Jerry Nadler’s Judiciary Committee serve as the investigators and prosecutors.

But the articles of impeachment on which the Judiciary Committee and the House voted do not contain a single crime required by the Constitution for impeachment and removal. There is no charge of treason, no charge of bribery or “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

So weak is the case for impeachment that the elite in this city is demanding that the Senate do the work the House failed to do.

The Senate must subpoena the documents and witnesses the House failed to produce, to make the case for impeachment more persuasive than it is now.

Not our job, rightly answers Mitch McConnell.

The Senate is supposed to be an “impartial jury.”

But while there is a debate over whether Republicans will vote to call witnesses, there is no debate on how the Senate Democrats intend to vote — 100% for removal of a president they fear they may not be able to defeat.

There is a reason why no crime was charged in the impeachment of Donald Trump. There was no crime committed.

Not political, said Pelosi. Why then did she hold up sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a month, after she said it was so urgent that Trump be impeached that Schiff and Nadler could not wait for their subpoenas to be ruled upon by the Supreme Court?

Pelosi is demanding that the Senate get the documents, subpoena and hear the witnesses, and do the investigative work Schiff and Nadler failed to do.

Does that not constitute an admission that a convincing case was not made? Are not the articles voted by the House inherently deficient if the Senate has to have more evidence than the House prosecutors could produce to convict the president of “abuse of power”?

Can we really have a fair trial in the Senate, when half of the jury, the Democratic caucus, is as reliably expected to vote to remove the president as Republicans are to acquit him? What kind of fair trial is it when we can predict the final vote before the court hears the evidence?

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Patrick J. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist.

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