It’s up to House Republicans to pull the trigger on impeaching Joe Biden, which should happen though I’m sure there are more than enough squishes, like Mitch McConnell, who are reluctant to do so. If the millions of dollars being funneled into shell companies owned by Biden family members, coupled with 170-plus suspicious activity reports from six banks and Joe’s secret email account he used to communicate with Hunter Biden, isn’t enough, then let’s revisit Ukraine.
Democrats dismissed it during the first Trump impeachment over the quid pro quo that never happened, though Trump was right; the Bidens were corrupt. We’re referring to Joe Biden’s open admission that he withheld aid to the country as vice president unless they fired the prosecutor looking into Burisma. Hunter Biden sat on its board, making $50,000/month. The original prosecutor was fired, though he was commended in private for making headway in peeling away the layers of wrongdoing occurring at the company, long thought to be a bribery operation.
Law professor Jonathan Turley explained how the initial Biden defense of their actions in Ukraine has collapsed and how the Democrats’ snap impeachment after January 6 paved the way for the House GOP to launch an impeachment effort of their own, though one based on facts and evidence (via NY Post):
In a 2018 interview at the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden bragged that he unilaterally withheld a billion dollars in US aid from the Ukrainians to force them to fire prosecutor general Viktor Shokin.
The Ukrainians balked, but Biden gave them an ultimatum: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
[…]
A State Department memo is shedding disturbing light on that account and shredding aspects of Biden’s justification for the action.
Indeed, the ultimatum may have been the quid in a quid pro quo agreement as part of the Biden influence-peddling scandal.
The premise of the story is that Biden took this extraordinary stand because there was little hope for the anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine if Shokin remained prosecutor.
[…]
The State Department had identified it [Burisma] as a corrupt company engaged in bribery.
Recent testimony from Devon Archer, a business associate of Hunter Biden, revealed that Burisma executives made the removal of Shokin a top priority and raised it with Hunter.
He described how the need to neutralize Shokin was raised with Hunter and how “a call to Washington” was made in response.
President Biden has insisted, “I did nothing wrong. I carried out the policy of the United States government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. And that’s what we should be focusing on.”
Indeed, that will now be the focus, including the close correlation of the money and demands going to Hunter and the actions of his father.
[…]
Trump was alleging there was a conflict of interest with the Bidens, and the evidence could have challenged Biden’s account and established his son’s interest in the Shokin firing.
I still do not believe Trump should have raised the matter in that call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
This evidence may not have made a difference to some senators, but it demonstrates why impeachments should proceed after fact hearings.
Instead, in the second impeachment, the Democrats went one better.
They used what I called a “snap impeachment” without even a hearing on the impeachment standards and articles.
The House could now have little choice but to hold the very hearings the Democrats blocked during the earlier impeachment — with a different president under constitutional scrutiny.
Turley did warn Democrats not to go down an impeachment road that did not contain usual investigative protocols for this reason—because now anyone can file these motions over purely political reasons. Democrats either knew this and didn’t care or genuinely thought the implications wouldn’t matter because they could get the GOP votes in the Senate to convict Trump.
As for Ukraine, the FBI’s informant stated in the FD-1023 report that the Bidens were paid $10 million in 2015-16, with further conversations alluding to the legal shield the company would have with Hunter on its board.
UPDATED THROUGH THE MORNING OF AUGUST 22: @ABC @CBSNews @NBCNews have ignored Biden's Burisma bribery for 74 days straight. https://t.co/JmiCRuBSgs
— Geoffrey Dickens (@GCDickens) August 22, 2023
"The memos from Joe Biden’s office and Hunter Biden’s laptop make two things clear.
— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) August 23, 2023
As Shokin’s efforts to investigate Burisma ramped up negative publicity, Hunter Biden was forced into action by the company paying him large sums of money in Ukraine as his father oversaw…