Bozell & Graham Column: The Incredible, Vanishing 'Whistleblower'

October 16th, 2019 7:12 AM

The partisans at The Washington Post pretended in a front-page “news” article on Sunday that somehow President Trump was losing his marbles in “rage,” going “beyond his often-untethered bounds.” Post readers were supposed to be highly disturbed about his mental state when he held a raucous rally in Minneapolis and said supposedly crazy things like the Democrats are carrying out “a brazen attempt to overthrow our government.”

What is this attempt to impeach and remove Trump, if not an overthrow of the president? Democrats might argue that Vice President Pence will remain, thus there will be a continuum. But does anyone believe they would be satisfied with that? The Post recently published a kooky article laying out how they could also take down Pence and make Nancy Pelosi the president.

Pelosi placed House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff in charge of this impeachment attempt, and the whole thing is getting stranger and more secretive by the hour.  First, we were told, an allegedly patriotic “whistleblower” must testify to underline how Trump committed some kind of impeachable high crime on a phone call with the president of Ukraine. This “whistleblower” wasn’t even present at the scene of that suppose crime.

There’s an obvious reason why they have obscured this alleged hero’s identity. It’s now come out that he worked with Joe Biden in the White House on Ukraine issues. A story worth explaining? This whole scheme looks like a Democrat plot. Suddenly, the incessant pro-impeachment media went dark on their central figure.

His testimony was no longer the piece de Resistance, pardon the pun.

Susan Ferrechio at the Washington Examiner noted that Republicans planned to ask this “whistleblower” all kinds of questions about when he met with Adam Schiff’s staff and how they coordinated. So now “it is appearing more likely Republicans will never have the chance to ask the whistleblower any questions at all about how closely he worked with Schiff’s team.”

Even some of the liberal “fact checkers” felt pressed to admit Schiff lied when he claimed on national TV that his staff and he never met with this “whistleblower.” Clearly, he doesn’t want any more questions about how coordinated this impeachment plot is.  A GOP source said “At some point, both Schiff and the whistleblower came to the conclusion that his personal testimony stands to do more harm than good to both of them.”

The back-pedaling has been furious. Schiff appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and said now that they have the call transcript, “we don't need the whistleblower who wasn't on the call to tell us what took place during the call.” Both Schiff and CBS’s Margaret Brennan agreed the most important priority of this probe is keeping the identity of the “whistleblower” a secret – without questioning for a moment how that could be considered fair to the president being impeached.

Imagine the Republicans in 1998 trying to impeach Bill Clinton for some phone call he made to a foreign leader, saying they had an anonymous “whistleblower” who never heard Clinton’s phone call. The press would have mocked all that as an enormous waste of time and money and a huge distraction from the legislative “business of the people.”

Their completely different and partisan reaction to this only underlines how much collusion goes on between the journalists and the Democrats. They’re hard to distinguish from each other. They use all the same talking points and catch phrases. They’ve had a shared goal of impeaching Trump from the day he was inaugurated. There is no balance or any fairness in anything the media “reports” on this brazen attempt to overthrow this administration.