There is no other way to describe the Democrats’ attempt at impeaching President Donald Trump except as a Deep State coup d’état.

A CIA official finds his way into the White House. He uses “multiple sources” to compile claims about a telephone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He prepares a report that is leaked to the media and the Democrats, who use it to call for impeachment — before reading the transcript.

Some Democrats were already demanding impeachment, in the wake of the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. After two years of intense investigation, he found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and came to no conclusions about obstruction of justice.

But frustrated Democrats decided that what was in the report was damning enough to support a political case, if not a legal one, for removing Trump.

In that context, the new accusations seem designed to provide an additional, missing pretext for an impeachment process.

The “whistleblower,” who did not hear Trump’s conversation with Zelensky first-hand, describes it as an effort to “solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” It thus repeats the very charge that Trump was cleared of by the Special Counsel.

But there is nothing in the actual transcript about the 2020 election.

That is why Democrats insisted that the whistleblower report was more important than the underlying evidence — after insisting, for months, that they would not accept Mueller’s report until they saw the “underlying evidence.” They wanted the accusation of “collusion” to be reproduced. They describe it as “credible” — though it is untrue. (They used that same word — “credible” — for allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year.)

This is the second attempt by Democrats, in coordination with the intelligence community and the media, to remove President Trump from office. The first was the allegation of “Russia collusion” itself.

That began when the FBI used the phony “dossier” to apply for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign associates in 2015, then leaked the results of that spying to Democrats and the mainstream media.

In the course of that effort, Democrats did not merely “solicit” information from foreign sources: they paid millions of dollars to foreign sources to dig up dirt on Trump that was then used by the Obama administration to investigate the opposition.

The goal was to paint candidate Trump as a Russian agent, then to ensnare the President-elect, and those around him, in enough lower-level crimes to give Congress an excuse to impeach the new administration.

What the Deep State did not expect is that Trump, and his supporters, would fight back. When conservative radio host Mark Levin called the Deep State’s effort to oust Trump a “silent coup,” and Trump tweeted that Obama had his “wires tapped,” Democrats and the media cried foul. But the country learned in April that it was true: “I think spying did occur,” Attorney General William Barr told Congress. It was a coup that failed. But it was not the last.

Trump’s opponents learned from the first try: this time, they prepared their own “report.” But they underestimated him again: by releasing the transcript, he undercut the report’s claims. The conversation was not about the election — even if information about Biden might affect it.

As Democrats have told us, the “integrity” of democracy requires us to know if candidates are “compromised” from abroad.

Unless, of course, Democrats don’t really care about democracy.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.