THE UKRAINE COOKIE JAR

If the Lying Swine don’t already regret going all in to promote the Shifty Schiff impeachment farce, they will soon.

Approval of President Trump has risen since the hearings began. Support for impeachment plunged.

Even though the broadcast as well as the cable networks covered it live, not many watched the first hearing. Viewership dropped significantly since.

Schiff said he began impeachment proceedings after a “whistleblower” told him that during a phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Trump said aid would be withheld unless Ukraine reopens an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a shady energy firm which paid Biden’s crackhead son Hunter more than $3 million.

That’s a quid pro quo, an attempt by Trump to get dirt on a 2020 rival, Democrats charge. IMPEACH, they screech.

Foreign aid typically comes with strings. Whether a quid pro quo is good or bad, legal or illegal depends upon what the quid and the quo are.

Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations he made $1.1 billion in aid conditional on Ukraine firing a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma Holdings.

That, for sure, was a quid pro quo.

But there was no mention of a quid pro quo in Trump’s conversation with Zelensky, we learned when the president declassified a transcript. It was Zelensky, not Trump, who brought up Biden.

They were never told – in that phone call or in other meetings with U.S. officials – that to get aid they had to reopen the Burisma investigation, say Zelensky and his foreign minister.

The “whistleblower” – who had no firsthand knowledge of what was said – either had got bum scoop, or was making things up.  Extremely likely the latter, since Eric Ciaramella was John Brennan’s personal mole in the Trump White House.

The Ukrainians say they weren’t pressured, and Ukraine got aid without reopening the Burisma investigation, so there is no evidence of a quid pro quo.

That fact makes the Schiff show Kafka-esque. Democrats want to impeach Trump for not doing what Biden did.  Call it, as cartoonist Ben Garrison does, The Ukraine Cookie Jar.

And that fact makes the hearings the Mother of All Nothingburgers. It’s hard not to be boring when your “witnesses” have no evidence to present.

Shifty’s star “witnesses” last week were middle echelon bureaucrats who admitted they had no firsthand knowledge, said Burisma should be investigated, wouldn’t say they thought Trump committed a crime.

But they were butt-hurt the president is conducting Ukraine policy without asking their input or following their (unsolicited) advice.

The star witness Tuesday (11/19), LtCol. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer detailed to the National Security Council staff, essentially outed himself as the “whistleblower’s” source.

Vindman, who listened in on the call, said he thought Trump “demanded” Zelensky investigate Burisma – the very same word the “whistleblower” used.

Asked why he went to a lawyer with his concerns rather than to his boss, Tim Morrison, Vindman said Morrison was too busy. But that same day Vindman met with Morrison to discuss Vindman’s edits of the transcript.

Vindman is even more butt-hurt than last week’s witnesses that Trump – and not he – makes Ukraine policy.

Vindman is unreliable, is suspected of leaking, Morrison said. He and the other witness Tuesday afternoon said they knew of no quid pro quo.

He assumed there was a quid pro quo, Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified Wednesday (11/20). But no one told him there was one, and President Trump explicitly told him he didn’t want one, Sondland said.

During each recess Schiff lies to reporters about what the witnesses said, confident the Lying Swine will report that, and not testimony that eviscerates his narrative.

Despite gaslighting on a galactic scale, the truth keeps poking through holes in the narrative. More Americans than before the hearings began know Schiff is running a kangaroo court, has bupkis.

The hearings make more Americans wonder what’s been going on in Ukraine.

Formerly part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine is one of the poorest, and most corrupt, nations on earth.

Ukrainians of Russia descent – about a third of the population – tend to support Putin. The other two thirds hate the Russkies.

Volodymyr Zelensky is the Donald Trump of Ukraine. An outsider – he was a comedian before being elected president last April – Zelensky is a reformer who pledged to drain the swamp in Kiev.

The swamp is very deep, dark and fetid there. Ukraine is a center for money laundering and human trafficking.

Since 1992, the United States sent between $3 and $5 billion to Ukraine. Much of the money is unaccounted for. Tens of millions – maybe hundreds of millions – have been siphoned off by crooked politicians and bureaucrats in Ukraine, or kicked back to crooked politicians and bureaucrats here in America.

Ukraine’s (new, Zelensky-appointed) Prosecutor General Ruslan Ryaboshapka said Wednesday Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, “is suspected of theft of government funds on an especially large scale.”

Burisma siphoned off $1.8 billion in U.S. and IMF aid funds, says investigative reporter Peter Schweizer in his book “Secret Empires.”

Democrats don’t want you to find that out, or that the previous Ukrainian government intervened in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary.

But now that they’ve opened Pandora’s Box, Dems and Fake Newsers will find it hard to put the lid back on.

The Senate will hold hearings on Ukraine. Senators will call the witnesses Schiff wouldn’t, doubtless including Joe and Hunter Biden, and Alexandra Chalupa, the DNC liaison with the Poroshenko government in Ukraine that intervened on behalf of Hillary.

Maybe Alexandra can tell us why Ukraine is the single largest donor to the Clinton Foundation.

A very special witness will be Eric CIAramella, the “whistleblower” whose name we dare not speak, who has a fascinating past. We’ll find out why after promising and promising and promising to call him as a witness, Schiff reneged.

We’re likely also to hear from Ukraine’s ambassador, and from the prosecutor Biden had fired.

Because of their gavel to gavel coverage of the Schiff show, the Lying Swine will find it hard to ignore Senate hearings. It’ll be must see tv.

When President Trump declassified the transcript of his telephone call with Zelensky, it should have been clear to Democrats he’d baited them into a trap.

For Schiff to go forward with impeachment after that was an act of suicidal hubris. And it was suicidal hubris for the MSM to go all in on the con.

Besides peeving daytime tv viewers whose soaps are pre-empted, the breathless, gavel to gavel coverage of one Nothingburger after another diminishes their credibility.

Americans aren’t as stupid as Fake Newsers think.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  Until his retirement in January 2017, he was the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.