What’s really going on with this impeachment attempt? Ron Paul suggests that “at every turn we see the fingerprints of the CIA and its allies in the Deep State.” See for yourself. Below, excerpts of the call transcript from the conversation President Trump actually had with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

By Dr. Ron Paul

You don’t need to be a supporter of President Donald Trump to be concerned about the efforts to remove him from office. In late September, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced impeachment proceedings against the president over a phone call made to the president of Ukraine. According to the White House record of the call, the president asked his Ukrainian counterpart to look into whether there is any evidence of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and then mentioned that a lot of people were talking about how former Vice President Joe Biden stopped the prosecution of his son who was under investigation for corruption in Ukraine.

Democrats, who spent more than two years convinced that “Russiagate” would enable them to remove Trump from office only to have their hopes dashed by the Mueller report, now believe they have their smoking gun in this phone call.

Is this about politics? Yes. But there may be more to it than that.

It may appear that the Democratic Party, furious over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, is the driving force behind this ongoing attempt to remove Trump from office, but at every turn we see the fingerprints of the CIA and its allies in the Deep State.

In August 2016, former Acting Director of the CIA Mike Morell wrote an extraordinary article in The New York Times accusing Trump of being an “agent of the Russian Federation.” Morell was clearly using his intelligence career as a way of bolstering his claim that Trump was a Russian spy—after all, the CIA should know such a thing, but the claim was a lie.

Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Trump of “treason” and of “being in the pocket of Putin” for meeting with the Russian president in Helsinki and accepting his word that Russia did not meddle in the U.S. election. To this day there has yet to be any evidence presented that the Russian government did interfere. Brennan openly called on “patriotic” Republicans to act against this “traitor.”

Brennan and his Deep State counterparts James Comey at the FBI and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper launched an operation, using what we now know is the fake Steele dossier, to spy on the Trump presidential campaign and even attempt to entrap Trump campaign employees.

Notice a pattern here?

Now we hear that the latest trigger for impeachment is a CIA officer assigned to the White House who filed a “whistleblower” complaint against the president over something he heard from someone else that the president said in the Ukraine phone call.

Shockingly, according to multiple press reports the rules for CIA whistleblowing were recently changed, dropping the requirement that the whistleblower have direct, firsthand knowledge of the wrongdoing. Just before this complaint was filed, the rule-change allowed hearsay or secondhand information to be accepted. That seems strange.

The Democrats have suddenly come out in praise of whistleblowers—well, not exactly. Pelosi still wants to prosecute actual whistleblower Ed Snowden. But she’s singing the praises of this fake CIA “whistleblower.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) once warned Trump that if “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

It’s hard not to ask whether this is a genuine impeachment effort or a CIA coup.

Ron Paul, a former U.S. representative from Texas and medical doctor, continues to write his weekly column for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, online at ronpaulinstitute.org. 

What Trump Actually Said to the Ukraine Leader

The following contains excerpts from the phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The president’s statement has been repeatedly edited so as to insinuate that Trump had asked the Ukrainian leader for a favor to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. Trump did ask Zelensky for a favor, but as readers will see it was not to look into corruption charges leveled against Biden’s family but to cooperate with a U.S. investigation into the origins of the now-debunked Russiagate scandal.

The President: I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people. … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation, I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

President Zelensky: Yes, it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a president, it is very important, and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from the United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. [Rudy] Giuliani just recently, and we are hoping very much that Mr. Guliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends, and you, Mr. President, have friends in our country, so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the president of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.

The President: Good, because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good, and he was shut down, and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down, and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the attorney general. Rudy very much knows what’s happening, and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great.

The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news, so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. It sounds horrible to me.