The latest effort to undo the 2016 election through crookedness and deceit.

Mass hysteria is gripping the Democrats, their allies in the media, and the other Trump-haters who yearn to use the manufactured Ukrainegate “scandal” to overturn the election of 2016 through impeachment. They don't dare trust the American people to choose their next president a year from now, lest Donald Trump is elected for a second term.

Speaker-in-name only Nancy Pelosi herself has gone off the deep end, claiming without a shred of evidence that “Russia has a hand” in Ukrainegate. Somehow in Nancy Pelosi’s fevered imagination, Ukraine and Russia – two countries literally at each other’s throats – have conspired together in an unholy alliance to help President Trump win the 2020 election. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who went off the deep end long ago with his Russia collusion obsession, made up his own fictional version of the July 25, 2019 call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fit his “mafia shakedown” narrative. In his opening statement at the televised committee hearing Thursday with the U.S. top intelligence officer, acting Department of National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire, Schiff claimed that President Trump asked President Zelensky to “make up dirt” on Mr. Biden. “I’m going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good,” according to the words that Schiff falsely put into President Trump’s mouth. “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand? Lots of dirt, on this and on that.” Nothing of the kind actually transpired, of course, according to the most authoritative detailed account of the call that was released last week. Schiff himself was guilty of making up dirt on President Trump, which he later lamely referred to as a parody. That’s the way Schiff rolls.

Committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) condemned Schiff for putting out an “improvised fake dialogue between President Trump and President Zelensky.” Instead, she added, “We should focus on the facts.” But facts do not matter to Trump-hating character assassins like Schiff. Pelosi, now the titular leader of the palace intrigue to depose President Trump through artifice, mimicked Schiff’s lies, also accusing the president of using taxpayer money to “shakedown” a foreign leader for his own personal benefit.

Democrat allies in the media picked up on the same fake mafia boss talking points. CNN and MSNBC paraded their airheads, who parroted these same tiresome lines of attack against the president. The Los Angeles Times published a column entitled “Your lawless president, Mafia Don.”

The fact that Joe Biden did what Pelosi, Schiff and their media flunkeys falsely accuse President Trump of doing is beside the point as far as they are concerned. It was Joe Biden, while serving as Barack Obama’s vice president and assigned as Obama’s point man to manage U.S. relations with Ukraine, who appeared to use taxpayer money as leverage to force the dismissal of the head prosecutor investigating corruption allegations against the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, that was at the same time paying his son Hunter for sitting on the company’s board. Hunter secured this cushy position, for which he had no qualifications, mostly for the purpose of helping to whitewash Burisma’s tainted image.

Joe Biden has since bragged about the ultimatum he delivered to Ukrainian authorities. “I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars,” Biden boasted. “I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” Biden claimed that he acted to rid Ukraine of a corrupt prosecutor. But documentary evidence unearthed by The Hill’s John Solomon points to disinformation intended to undermine the fired prosecutor’s credibility. It mentioned certain individuals associated with Blue Star Strategies, a consulting firm run by folks who had worked in the Clinton administration and were representing Hunter Biden’s employer to help fend off a prosecutorial investigation of the company, who reportedly apologized for the disinformation after the fact.

Biden’s defenders can claim until the cows come home that the Biden family’s shenanigans in Ukraine were perfectly innocent. But they are hypocrites, as Bill Maher – certainly no fan of President Trump – has pointed out. "This kid was paid $600,000 because his name is Biden by a gas company in Ukraine, this super corrupt country that just had a revolution to get rid of corruption," Maher said. He noted how MSNBC host Rachel Maddow would have been all over the story if Donald Trump, Jr. had done the very same thing.

One problem with the anti-Trump mafia boss narrative perpetuated by President Trump’s enemies is that Ukrainian prosecutors had decided to reopen the investigation into Hunter Biden’s employer more than two months before the July 25th call between President Trump and President Zelensky. Moreover, as the New York Times reported last May, new details had emerged that “show how Hunter Biden and his American business partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama administration. Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma prompted concerns among State Department officials at the time that the connection could complicate Vice President Biden’s diplomacy in Ukraine, former officials said.”

The New York Times now tells us to never mind. Moreover, in its infinite unwisdom, the Times quoted Alexander Hamilton completely out of context to support a theory of impeachment against President Trump based on his alleged ties to a foreign country. “When the framers were designing the Constitution and its power of impeachment,” the New York Times lectures us, “one of the high crimes they had in mind was giving into what Hamilton called ‘the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.’” What the “newspaper of record” fails to tell its readers is that Mr. Hamilton was explaining the rationale for the Electoral College, which the Times wants to get rid of, in the Federalist Paper No. 68 entitled “The Mode of Electing the President.”

Ukraine will not "gain an improper ascendant in our councils” simply because Ukraine’s new president, who has vowed to tackle the rampant corruption problem in his country, agreed to do the right thing. President Trump asked President Zelensky to do what said he wanted to do anyway - investigate both alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton’s benefit and the cover-up of a serious allegation of corruption against a Ukrainian company that employed Joe Biden’s son. It was Joe Biden, by threatening to withhold U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine unless the prosecutor looking into his son Hunter’s company was fired, who allegedly sought to “gain an improper ascendant” in Ukraine’s councils.

Finally, Pelosi was peeved, along with her cohorts, that President Trump sought to allegedly “cover up” the details of his July 25th call with President Zelensky by directing the storage of the memo of the call in a very highly secured server. The whistleblower complaint referred to this as a “lock down.” Both the memo and the whistleblower complaint have been made public – hardly a cover up. They were not destroyed. The call memo was placed in a location that would limit access by would-be leakers to prevent a recurrence of leaks of previous calls between President Trump and foreign leaders that chill candid communications.

Conservative radio host Mark Levin, the author of “Unfreedom of the Press,” put things into proper perspective when he defended President Donald Trump against the whistleblower complaint on Sunday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends.” Asked whether the president had done anything illegal, Mark Levin responded: “What crime was violated? It’s not illegal. The question is whether Biden did something illegal. The president didn’t do anything illegal. You know how I know? Because Nancy Pelosi’s been on every tv show and she can’t cite one section of the United States code where it’s illegal. My question is, why is Joe Biden above the law? Why is his son above the law? Where is Hunter Biden today? Where is the media? Don’t they want to know? Don’t they want to know if the leading contender for the Democrat nomination is a crook and if his son is a crook?”

When the Fox News host Ed Henry asked whether Mr. Levin was “OK with a president asking his counterpart — this is a simply yes or no —to dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden and his son,” Mr. Levin sharply corrected him. “He doesn’t say I’m digging up dirt on Biden,” Mark Levin said. “He doesn’t say do me a favor and get Biden. He says, ‘Why don’t you talk to my attorney general, look into this. People have questions.’ Wow. And all the sleazy activity that’s going behind the scenes. I want to know. I want to know if Adam Schiff and his staff, working with this phony whistleblower. I want to know who the lawyers are who helped him write that complaint as I was the first to point out before. I want to know the whole activity that’s taking place in the shadows of this government to try and bring down a president of the United States.” As to the alleged “cover up,” Mr. Levin dismissed the charge out of hand. “The president has a power to issue an executive privilege order. Doesn’t matter if he kept it in his pillow. He can still protect that, but he didn’t. He gave it up.”

Nancy Pelosi said that the impeachment inquiry she now supports is “not a cause for any joy that we have to go down this path. It’s a difficult decision to make.” Pelosi was speaking to several hundred Democrats attending the New Jersey Democratic State Committee‘s convention at an Atlantic City casino ballroom. What a bunch of self-righteous nonsense. She is ecstatic at the prospect of bringing the president down. But she is rolling the dice. If the effort fails after acquittal by the Senate and President Trump remains in office, her party will be playing a bad hand in 2020.