by Matt Gaetz
Jordan bit the line so hard I almost had to readjust the drag. He was all in to turn up the heat. Reps. Ron DeSantis, Mark Meadows, Andy Biggs, Mike Johnson, Raul Labrador, and many others soon joined. The last Republican Judiciary Committee member to join our new offensive game plan was Chairman Goodlatte. When the letter finally went to Attorney General Sessions calling for parity in the special counsel game, Goodlatte placed it above his signature. We had dislodged the cemented Republican establishment, if only for a moment.
Soon, though, a frustrated Trump noticed a few of us were now eager to stop playing defense and fight back against the phony proceedings. It was time to make some noise in the congressional hearings about it all instead of just sitting there like a bunch of worried defendants told by their lawyer not to testify on their own behalf. It’s not just that this quiet tactic tends to make your side look guilty. It also means you’re not pointing out wrongdoing on the other side. Time to go on offense. Silence is stupidity is complicity.
It was clear that the anti-Trump forces were willing to try winning the whole struggle through innuendo even if it went nowhere in court. Denigrate, then destroy, but never debate.
No longer limited by any rules of decorum that might have restrained her while still in the White House, former national security advisor Susan Rice, no doubt taking her cue from powerful friends like Obama and Hillary Clinton, said on ABC News in July 2017 of Trump:
“He’s taken a series of steps that, had Vladimir Putin dictated them, [Trump] couldn’t have mirrored more effectively. What his motivations are, I think is a legitimate question, one that the Special Counsel is investigating, but the policies this president has pursued globally have served Vladimir Putin’s interests in dividing the West, undermining democracy.”
Here’s a question for Rice: Is it not undermining democracy for an unelected group of bureaucrats to decide what can and can’t be done by the next president?
Her main argument in closed-door hearings was that Trump allies such as Flynn kept downplaying the Russian threat, calling it a declining power, and describing China as a rising danger—as indeed it is! But maybe it was Trump’s frequent campaign talk of getting tough with China in trade negotiations that really freaked them out. China is not only rising in importance relative to Russia, but it also—as recent events have made clear—has its tentacles deep inside the American business, academic, and political establishment, where it has spread around millions of dollars. China’s apologists include venture capitalists like Mike Moritz of Sequoia (which backed Google!) and New York Times columnists like Thomas Friedman, who openly envy China’s authoritarian leftism.
Establishment Republicans, for their part, were equally wary of Trump’s potential to rock the boat. I think some were genuinely unsure how they wanted to see the Mueller investigation play out. Many were content to roll the dice and avoid staking out a strong position on the merits of the underlying evidence.
It was an unholy if convenient alliance between Democrats, establishment Republicans, and the Permanent Washington bureaucracy. At the time Mueller was appointed, Speaker Ryan, Rep. Gowdy, and Sen. Lindsey Graham all supported the appointment of a special counsel, with Graham (later to become a fiery critic of the Democrats’ impeachment circus) assuring the public that the Mueller investigation was “not a witch hunt.” Trust the process, they all said. But the process was the punishment and the political outcome desired.
For my part, I viewed Mueller’s appointment as an attempt to put a legalistic gloss on a political attack upon the president, done with the help of establishment Republicans like Goodlatte.
By the time he left office in 2019, Goodlatte—elected in 1992—had been chair of the Judiciary Committee for six years and, in the mid-2000s, chair of the powerful House Agriculture Committee for four. You don’t serve as the chairman of not one but two congressional committees if you don’t blindly follow leadership. The warriors quickly realized that dealing with Goodlatte was worthless.
I wasn’t going to just sit back and let gridlock carry the day. For a populist revolt to fizzle out in ambiguous legal proceedings would be one of the saddest letdowns in the history of our democracy. Those of us who had been willing to fight to get Trump and his allies into office were now spoiling for a fight on the House floor. Behind the scenes, Trump, who understands stagecraft, looked forward to seeing what we could do.
Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jordan, Nunes, Meadows, Biggs, and others emerged as the new class of fighters. Starting in the summer of 2017, we openly said that no collusion had been proven with anything like normal legal standards. We called out the investigation as something that had become an end unto itself, a club with which to beat up President Trump, not an honest attempt to unearth the details of any known or seriously suspected crime.
Trump’s defenders were determined to draw attention to the heavy-handed tactics of the investigators themselves, and I think this contributed to the very cautious, almost softball tone of a defeated-looking Mueller’s eventual report in 2019. That report acknowledged, albeit with many weasel words, what a few of us had always known: no evidence of serious wrongdoing was found.
Mueller’s testimony remains the most-watched moment in recent political history. An astonishing 22 million tuned in. The press had mythologized Mueller as the embodiment of virtue, honesty, and strength. Fifteen Republicans and the Clinton-Democrat machine couldn’t take out Donald Trump, but Mueller could—or so they hoped.
After reviewing every moment of testimony Mueller had given Congress over a multi-decade career, I could see why they were bullish. The man was downright steely. On the day of the hearing, I half expected Mueller to ride in on a lightning bolt, hurling spears of fire at the committee. The reality was much different.
Mueller’s team had leaked in the days before the hearing that he wasn’t all there—that calling him would be a mistake for Democrats. In late-night prep sessions with my fellow Republicans, I passionately preached not to believe it. “Mueller has been preparing for twelve hours a day to embarrass us all!” I exclaimed. “He’ll be the best we’ve ever seen, so we better be our best.”
Whoops. From Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler’s opening questions it was clear Mueller wasn’t playing with a full deck. He seemed old, confused, distracted, at times not seeming to know what was in his own report. Even softball questions from the Democrats stumped him. Mueller’s testimony looked more like elder abuse in progress than the culmination of a fair investigation.
For a moment, I felt sorry for him. But the moment quickly passed.
With their whole case resting on the sandpile of cheap insinuations that was the Steele dossier, I put it to Mueller like this at one point in the hearings, when he tried to claim that validating the Steele dossier wasn’t his “purview”: “No, it is exactly your purview, Mr. Mueller, and here’s why. Only one of these two things is possible: either Steele made this whole thing up and there were never any Russians telling him of this vast criminal conspiracy that you didn’t find—or Russians lied to Steele.”
“As I said before and I’ll say again, it’s not my purview, as others are investigating what you address,” Mueller told me feebly.
Mueller’s testimony was a dud and it left Democrats bitter and demoralized. After months of daily assurances from Maddow and a foolish press that Mueller would “destroy” Trump, they had, instead, destroyed their own credibility.
Yet the investigation mania would return with the sudden shift to the topic of Ukraine. The same gang that had clung for two years to a failed Hillary Clinton campaign had a new phony outrage to flog—and they were now looking to defend the new establishment champion: Joe Biden.
CHAPTER FOUR
A PERFECT CALL
December 19, 2019
The White House. Private residence. Evening.
The towering president extended his arm, pointing as if to amplify the
history lesson he was giving.
“He wrote the Gettysburg Address right over there,” Trump told a few of us on a visit to the White House. “Lincoln was very melancholy. We would call it depressed today. Melancholy sounds more elegant. Everything was going wrong for the guy. His son died. His wife was not right. Worst of all, he kept losing. At the beginning of the Civil War, he lost and lost—all the early battles. He almost lost the country! Then he put a great general in charge—Ulysses S. Grant. Everyone told Lincoln that Grant was crazy. He drank too much. He used bad language. He was a real son of a bitch. A butcher. But Grant was a winner.”
President Lincoln once said of Grant, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
Grant knew that to defeat Lee he didn’t need beautiful formations but men grinding away at their objective, come what may. Preserving the Union required nothing less than total focus and devotion.
Like Lincoln, Trump also cultivates a team of rivals, but tonight the band of brothers—and one sister—could be permitted a bit of R and R. President Trump turned to the small group of guests that included Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko, Mike Johnson, and their spouses. All had joined for the White House Christmas party. My date was there too—way out of my league, as the president delighted in telling me in front of her.
“Lincoln had the great General Grant…and I have Matt Gaetz!” (She was impressed, though perhaps not that much. There wouldn’t be a second date.)
Some presidents didn’t allow their own vice president in the White House residence. Trump has his friends over enough to have their mail sent to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He gives tours and tells stories with the gusto and pageantry of a true showman. The Lincoln Bedroom is his favorite attraction. The House Judiciary Committee had voted out articles of impeachment earlier that day. We were in the middle of the fight for the Trump presidency. It was a fight we were winning, and we knew it. All smiles.
Days later, the left-leaning Guardian newspaper would begrudgingly publish: “So far, all impeachment has done is make Donald Trump more popular.” Indeed, Trump has an inhuman ability to absorb the most vicious attacks and turn them to his advantage. Impeachment, once considered the gravest of choices for Congress, was now just the same old politics by different, more destructive means.
Donald Trump is still America’s president. Impeachment over Trump’s communication with Ukraine was a frivolous distraction—an exorcism of sorts for Democrats who, immediately after their election loss and failed Russia investigation, still needed an outlet for the Trump Derangement Syndrome warping their electorally, if not eternally, damned souls. In the end, the constitutional system of checks and balances worked. But win a few battles though we may, understand this: they will never stop coming after him—or us.
As recently as May 18, 2020, long after the last echoes of #UkraineFirst bureaucrats and #AmericaLast liberal law professors had faded, House Democrats were still filing pleadings asserting an active impeachment investigation remains underway. If they spent half the time legislating that they spend investigating, Americans would have better roads, cleaner air, and better health care. But it isn’t about the American people to the radical Left—it is about power and power at all costs. Trump shocked the world by taking control from the elites of Permanent Washington. They wanted it back. They still do. And they may yet get it. In politics, there are neither permanent defeats nor permanent victories. We must keep fighting.
To quit is to admit their defeat. They can’t abandon the strategy of trying to delegitimize President Trump and our movement, because they’ve seen that they can’t beat us in fair debates, open hearings, or fraud-free presidential elections. Politics used to be “win the argument, win the vote,” but if the vote can be subverted and overturned, well, why participate politically? Better to demonize, denigrate, and destroy than debate.
The Russia hoax was born of Obama’s train-wreck foreign policy and Hillary’s failed candidacy. The straight-to-DVD Ukrainian impeachment sequel followed the scuttled Russia hoax. Had they succeeded with Russia, you better believe you wouldn’t know the name of any Ukrainian president or prosecutor—not unless you were Joe Biden keeping track of familial kickbacks.
In the fights still to come, remember: Speaker Pelosi doesn’t lack political skill. Her strategy and tactics changed from Russia to Ukraine. They continue changing. We didn’t beat her then and won’t beat the radical Left now by gently lecturing in dulcet tones that people on our side should contain their “outrage.” We were at our best when we were on offense—like General Grant!
Every part of the swamp wants its shot at our president. First, the FBI failed with the Russia hoax, then the State Department crowd in Foggy Bottom failed with the Ukraine hoax. Impeachment proves that conservatives lose when we wait and see. We win when we take bold action and hit back hard—harder than they do.
I wasn’t on the Judiciary Committee just to politely take lectures from law professors who couldn’t win an election for the Mosquito Control Board but whose hatred for President Trump triggered their anti-democratic impulses. I wasn’t sleeping on a cot in the Longworth Office Building four nights a week so some #AmericaLast Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduates could substitute their foreign-funded “studied” judgment for that of those of us who had successfully earned the trust of American voters. That’s not how it works when America is at her best.
The Ukraine saga taught us how we must keep fighting in the era of Trump: unapologetically, sometimes loudly, with all we’ve got.
It started with what President Trump would later dub “a perfect call.”
September 25, 2019
The White House. Roosevelt Room.
The Wall Street Journal had explosive reporting. President Trump had, on eight occasions, directly and explicitly threatened the president of Ukraine, they alleged. Either fork over dirt on Biden to help me win an election, or I’ll withhold the weapons you want, so the story went. The Journal said a transcript existed of the call. A whistleblower had firsthand evidence!
I was about to learn that none of it was true.
About a dozen senators and representatives sat nervously under the portrait of Theodore Rex, raised up on his magnificent horse in obvious triumph of some kind. We were young and old. Male and female. Moderates and right-wingers. Our commonality was that we had been selected by the White House to review the Trump-Zelensky phone call transcript for the first time. We were the supporters the president knew he needed on the front lines, going line by line.
“The reporting is false,” said White House Counsel Pat Cipollone as he handed out the transcript. “The president is going to be releasing this transcript today. Once people see it, this should all go away. I honestly don’t get what all the fuss is about.” Pat is a brilliant legal mind but, like the rest of us, he clearly misjudged the power of an unquenched craving for impeachment.
Sen. Ron Johnson is a Ukraine policy encyclopedia. After several minutes of group silent reading, he blurted out, “This is it? This is nothing. We’ve been trying to get Ukraine to clean up their act for years. President Trump was reinforcing what Republicans and Democrats have been working towards with Zelensky. He’s obviously looking out for our country.”
About time, if you ask me. Senators Barack Obama and Chuck Hagel spent billions of your dollars in the Ukraine, that most corrupt of European countries, to pay the Ukrainians not to arm up. Rather hilariously, the senators offered the same deal to Russia, which wisely realized that if Ukraine disarmed, Russia could just take what it wanted from them. And that is exactly what ended up happening.
Democrats, who once joined Senator Ron Johnson in signing bipartisan letters urging action against rampant corruption in Ukraine, would soon act as if the place were the Garden of Eden, free of all sin. They suddenly contended it was ridiculous and possibly criminal for heightened investigations into dirty deeds in the former Soviet sa
tellite state. Trump asking President Zelensky to help was tantamount to treason!
Goldman Sachs labeled Ukraine the third-most corrupt country in the world in which to do business. It’s a big world, with lots of corrupt places. International money flows through Ukraine in—shall we say—odd ways. To attack a U.S. president for asking why is insane.
Several Biden allies and former Obama administration intelligence operatives on the call sensed a potential threat to the establishment’s brand-new (yet quite old) Great White Hope, Joe Biden. As Biden appeared likely to become the Democratic presidential nominee, these hacks couldn’t just sit back and do nothing while they watched a campaign liability created out of Biden’s son, Hunter, who had sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma—the very company under a corruption inquiry spotlight.
Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian influence-peddling racket wasn’t a secret to the Obama/Biden posse or really to anyone in Washington. When Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was preparing for confirmation hearings, the “Hunter issue” was given particular attention. George Kent, an anti-Trump witness from the State Department, confessed that Burisma’s corruption warranted even more investigation. He had America’s embassy pull out of a joint venture with Burisma over corruption concerns.
Are we really supposed to believe that a corrupt Ukrainian company, under investigation, hired Hunter Biden because of his talent rather than his access? Not even Hunter Biden believes that. In an ABC interview, he candidly said that he probably wouldn’t have gotten the job but for his last name. There are plenty of Americans who benefit from a good surname. I sure have. But we don’t use our good names to bleed cash from bad, corrupt foreign companies while our dad is vice president.
“I did nothing wrong—and I’ll never do it again” would functionally be the confusing response from Biden.