"Friday Night Massacre"

For starters, a little history. Saturday Night massacre (massacre of Saturday evening), Americans call the events of a distant day - October 20, 1973. The 37th U.S. President Richard Nixon, annoyed that Special Attorney Archibald Cox, who seized the Watergate case with a bulldog, demanded that he record secret conversations in the Oval Office, and ordered the Attorney General to fire Cox. Attorney General Richardson refused - and immediately resigned himself. And about. Attorney General became Richardson's Deputy Rackelshaus. But before he had time to occupy the office of the former chief, Nixon turned to him with the same demand. However, instead of firing Cox, Rackelshaus followed Richardson to write a letter of resignation.

New and. about. the prosecutor general, Robert Bork, was not so principled. Perhaps the point was that, unlike Richardson and Raxelhaus, Bork did not give personal assurances to the oversight committees of Congress that he would not intervene in the investigation of the special prosecutor. Or maybe he just didn’t have the guts to refuse the president when the limousine sent by Nixon came for him and Borka was taken to the White House in the middle of the night. One way or another, Bork finally fired Cox - and that was the end of the “Saturday Night Massacre”.

After 47 years, Washington was shocked by the events that the democratic press hastened to christen the “massacre of Friday night.” On Friday, February 7, President Trump fired the three people who were part of his administration. The victims of the “massacre” were US Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Windman, his twin brother Eugene Windman and US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland.

The difference between the events of October 1973 and February 2020 is obvious. The “Saturday Night Massacre” was, in fact, a hysteria driven into a corner, caught on Nixon’s lies (it was not by chance that speaking to the nation on television, he persistently repeated: “I'm not a rogue!”). And if until October 20, 1973 the “cunning Dick” still had chances to keep his chair, then the “massacre” became the trigger for the impeachment procedure (the House of Representatives initiated it ten days after Cox’s dismissal).

The 2020 “Friday Massacre” took place after Trump’s impeachment attempt ingloriously failed in the Senate. Generally speaking, Trump's endurance and self-control can only be envied. Outwardly, he can give the impression of a person who is very impulsive and emotional, but all this is just a disguise, designed to confuse his enemies. Remember the famous movie of 2007, in which Trump knocks to the floor and “beats” his friend, promoter Vince McMan? Many took this "fight of billionaires" at face value, but in fact it was a staged show, and all the emotions that reflected on the face of the future US president were also part of this show.

They had long been expected from Trump that he would follow in the footsteps of Nixon and dismiss Special Prosecutor Mueller, who had plagued him with his “investigation” for almost two years. Trump ridiculed Muller on Twitter, mocked him in the inner circle, probably angry - but suffered. And not in vain: the investigation of the “Russian case”, as you know, failed, and the president’s authority grew.

Trump, of course, left and right fired those of his employees, whose loyalty he doubted, but he was very careful with open enemies. And not in vain: until recently, each of his sharp attacks on the enemy side could do him more harm than good. But now, after the failure of impeachment, everything has changed. The president’s hands are untied, and he can finally begin to weed Washington's densely overgrown political weeds.

I must say, the Democrats both expected and were afraid of such a turn of events. Late last year, Delaware Democratic Senator Christopher Koons, anticipating the evil, said that "if the Republican majority refuses to punish him (Trump) by declaring impeachment, he will receive unlimited power."

And even earlier, in March 2019, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi - the one who defiantly broke the president’s speech after his message to Congress - warned her party members that an impeachment attempt, if it fails, could be “destructive for the country.”

Bearing in mind, of course, that if Trump persists, then the Democrats will face a serious counterattack.

And now the worst fears of the Democrats began to come true. On Thursday, February 6, at the 68th National Prayer Breakfast, Trump answered rather sharply to Harvard professor and The Washington Post columnist Arthur Brooks, who reminded in his statement of the covenant from the Sermon on the Mount Christ preach - to love his enemies. “Arthur, I don’t think I agree with you,” Trump commented on Brooks' fiery speech. And he skillfully turned the arrows on those of his enemies who spoiled him the most blood in the process of impeachment: on the traitor Mitt Romney (the only Republican who voted for the charge of abuse of power) and on the speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. “I do not like people who use their faith to justify deliberately wrong actions. I also do not like people who say, "I will pray for you," when I know that this is not so. "

But these were still flowers. In the evening of the same day, speaking in the East wing of the White House with a triumphal speech about the failure of impeachment, he called Pelosi and Adam Schiff (head of the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, who is considered the "top manager of impeachment") "vicious" and "terrible »By people.

Immediately, in the East wing, the names of the first victims of the future "massacre" sounded. Lt. Col. Alex Windman and his twin brother, who, according to Trump, did something wrong with recording his conversation with the President of Ukraine - unfortunately, in this place the speech of the US President is somewhat incoherent. But it is clear that Trump's Windman brothers were extremely unhappy.

The next day, Lt. Col. Alex Windman was fired and shamefully exiled from the White House under the escort of the security service. "He did not obey at all," the president briefly explained his dismissal, flying away from Washington for the weekend. At the same time, Alex's twin brother, Eugene Windman, lost the post of legal adviser to the National Security Council. However, he did not remain without work, as he returned to his former duty station in the Pentagon. And then the US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, told reporters that he was being called back to Washington.

Here is how the columnist of The Washington Post, Max Booth (born, by the way, in Moscow in the year when Nixon became president of the USA) describes the events of the “Friday massacre” as “characteristic of pathos”: “What happened on Friday was the political equivalent of a gangster assembly a film where Don’s enemies are shot to the accompaniment of an opera score. That's just Don in the White House has not finished yet. " Booth, like many other Trump enemies, fears that now the president will give vent to his revenge.

Trump is “interested in firing” Michael Atkinson, inspector general of the US intelligence community and, apparently, one of the key deep state soldiers. It was Atkinson who filed a congressional complaint with Congress that the US president, in conversation with the Ukrainian president, put pressure on Zelensky to initiate an investigation into the corrupt former US vice president Joe Biden. And the main witness who confirmed the "truthfulness" of the words of the informant to the congress was - this is a surprise! - Lt. Col. Alex Windman, Director of European Affairs and Chief Specialist for Ukraine, US National Security Council.

"It was inappropriate, it was wrong for the president to ask - to demand - to conduct an investigation against a political opponent, especially from a foreign state," said Windman, testifying to Congress. - This would have significant consequences if it became widely known. And this would be perceived as a political game that will undermine our policy towards Ukraine and our national security. ”

Perhaps it's time to reveal the cards. The real name of Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman is Alexander Semyonovich: he, like Max Booth, was born in the USSR.

Only not in Moscow, but in Kiev, in 1975. When little Sasha was three and a half years old, his mother died, and his father, Simon Windman, decided to move with his children to New York, to Brighton Beach.

How two acrobatic brothers from a poor emigrant family made their way from Little Odessa to the very top of the American political Olympus (both Alexander and his twin brother Eugene, also a lieutenant colonel, were senior officials of the National Security Council until Friday) - a topic for a separate article. For us, it is important that, once in the elite of the American empire, the Windman brothers maintained a touching loyalty to their distant and thoroughly corrupt homeland - so strong that they were not afraid to go even against the president himself. For which they paid.

Unlike the Windman brothers, who from the very beginning felt like saboteurs in the camp of the enemy and were just waiting for the moment when it would be possible to stab in the back of the president, the US ambassador to the EU, Sondland initially played on the side of Trump. He was part of a small group, unofficially called tres amigos (the other two “amigos” were former presidential special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Walker and former energy minister Rick Perry), which maintained contacts between Trump and the presidential administration of Ukraine.

Moreover, he was one of the prominent donors of the president’s inaugural committee. But at a crucial moment, he broke down and testified in Congress, confirming that Trump really linked the allocation of military assistance to Kiev with the investigation of the Biden family affairs. Thus, Sondland, officially a witness from the Republican Party, played into the hands of Democrats who accused Trump of imposing a quid pro quo (service for service) deal on Zelensky. In addition, Sondland handed over all with whom he worked: Kurt Walker, and Secretary of State Pompeo, and former adviser to the President on National Security John Bolton, and vice president Mike Pence. “Everyone was in the know,” Sondland told congressmen, referring to the notorious quid pro quo.

The motives that pushed Sondland to these revelations are unknown. It is only known that he lost his warm place in Brussels - and rightly so. There is no place for traitors in the civil service.

The fact that the brothers Windman and Sondland "massacre" does not end, everyone understands. The only question is who will Trump's anger fall in the near future. The above Max Booth is worried: "They say Trump is plotting to punish Romney and Schiff." Booth quotes one of Trump’s tweets about Schiff: “He hasn’t paid for what he’s done with our country!” - and, of course, he immediately accuses the president that his attacks on the chairman of the intelligence committee could turn into a tragedy : in Arizona, a man had already threatened Schiff with reprisal (although this happened in October, and this man just wrote a post on social networks, being also very drunk).

It seems, however, that anyone, and Schiff, does not threaten to become the new victim of the "massacre" - and not only because he is a congressman, but also because the chairman of the intelligence committee for Trump is no more than a pug yapping at an elephant.

“They say he's a screenwriter, a loser screenwriter,” Trump said about Schiff in a speech in the East wing of the White House. “Unfortunately, after that he went into politics.”

The real enemies of Trump, still preserving poisonous teeth and capable of a fatal bite, are hiding in the silence of the offices of the bulky bureaucratic system, in the maze of corridors of power of the American empire. And so the blow of the impeachment of the president, freed from the beliefs, should be aimed at them.

What Trump’s enemies call “massacre” and “revenge” is actually just a logical process of cleaning the state apparatus, from top to bottom pierced by the tentacles of the deep state - the notorious state in the state that has been preventing the 45th president of the United States from leading the country for three years the course that he promised his voters.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.