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Tom Steyer’s Itching, Scratching Need to Impeach

As special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s two-year, $34 million investigation into the Trump campaign’s supposed “collusion” with Russia in 2016 turns out to be the “nothingburger” it was always believed to be, the investigation at least did reveal the Left’s ongoing inability to accept the results of the 2016 election. Even with a lightly redacted Mueller report made public on Thursday, it should come as no surprise that some on the Left still aren’t satisfied and never will be.

Chief among them is Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager turned Democratic mega-funder. Steyer, better known for his insistent pushing of an environmentalist (and given his investments, totally altruistic) agenda, is now the key funder behind the impeachment cabal, even after Mueller’s report greatly diminished the likelihood that congressional Democrats will move to impeach the President.

If you ask Steyer—called “Mr. Impeachment” in March by New York Magazine—his attacks on Trump were never about the Mueller report, but rather “a broad sense of criminality.” But so far, Steyer succeeded only in making the word “impeach” de rigueur among the leftists who insist Trump be removed from office for a yet-unidentified offense.

In January, Steyer told the press: “I will be dedicating 100 percent of my time, effort, and resources to one cause: working for Mr. Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.”

The San Francisco billionaire’s effort to impeach the President went so far that in February Politico reported that Steyer had “threaten[ed] to unload on Democrats if they don’t impeach Trump.”

Steyer’s super PAC, Need to Impeach, is leading the effort. As of early April, the FEC reports the super PAC raised $15.3 million—81 percent ($12.3 million) of which came from Steyer himself. The PAC itself reports that it has committed $40 million for independent expenditures—mainly canvassing and media buys—to pressure Democrats into calling for impeachment .

In October, Need to Impeach lead strategist Kevin Mack bragged to Politico that the super PAC has “virtually unlimited resources” to spend and would “turn on the spigot” urging impeachment if Democrats won back the House of Representatives in 2018. Mack is a senior partner at Deliver Strategies, a political consultancy that lists a number of Democrats as clients, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

A Need to Impeach press release reports that it’s run by 50 staffers, many from the Obama campaigns and administration.

According to its FEC filings, Need to Impeach is registered at the office of Deane and Company, a Sacramento, California-based political consulting firm that caters to left-wing campaigns and PACs. Shawnda Deane, president of the firm, is the super PAC’s treasurer.

Steyer has already spent liberally through his “NextGen Climate” groups. In the 2018 election cycle, the super PAC NextGen Climate Action Committee spent $63.8 million, mainly on independent expenditure campaigns supporting Democrats and contributions to other Democrat-supporting PACs. Fully 93.8 percent of the $64.5 million raised by the super PAC—or $60.5 million—came from Steyer himself.

That’s not unusual for Steyer, who became the single biggest political donor of the 2016 election after spending a massive $91 million in federal elections.

Ironically, Steyer claims he’s only fighting the effect of big money in politics—by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in elections. When asked by CNN in 2017 if he was “part of the [big money] problem,” Steyer said, “I am absolutely in favor of changing the way that money is used in politics.”

But for all his talk of change, Steyer doesn’t have many victories. Of the seven candidates he supported in 2016 (including Hillary Clinton), for example, only three won, leading the Washington Times to label Steyer the “biggest loser” of the 2016 election.

The environmental “crusader” supported failed statewide bans on fracking in California in 2014 and Nevada in 2017. But, hypocritically, Steyer’s own firm, Farallon Capital Management, owned more than $300 million in oil drilling companies when Steyer left the company in 2013.

With Mueller not recommending further prosecutions, Need to Impeach will probably never accomplish its raison d’être—and that would be the best outcome for America. Impeaching President Trump without evidence of wrongdoing would destroy the American republic as we know it.

Let’s be clear: instead of examining the reasons for the Democratic Party’s unpopularity outside of ultra-liberal cities, the Left spun a dangerous conspiracy theory that painted President Trump as traitor while intentionally undermining the validity and integrity of the U.S. election process—all to unseat a duly-elected president.

This January, the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer wrote that “we may never find evidence of covert collusion . . . the collusion that is sitting in plain view is one of the worst scandals in American political history.”

Just two weeks before Mueller delivered his report, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait claimed the president’s allies were “hiding a corrupt relationship with Vladimir Putin’s gangster state.” (Recall that Chait published a piece in January 2018 titled, “What if Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?”)

It’s clear now that the Left’s efforts to remove President Trump from office were never about Russian collusion: they were about pushing a radical agenda.

But Trump shouldn’t expect any apologies from his enemies. If the crusaders behind Need to Impeach confirm anything, it’s what many conservatives already knew: the Trump-hating Left will stop at nothing to destroy the president.

Photo Credit: Steve Pope/Getty Images

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