President Trump Was Absolutely Right To Ask Ukraine To Investigate The Bidens
/As of today, it appears that the House of Representatives is moving toward voting Articles of Impeachment against President Trump as early as next week. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee (under the chairmanship of my very own Congressperson Jerrold Nadler) released draft Articles, in preparation for hearings occurring today, and a committee vote as early as tomorrow.
Although the version of the Articles currently in circulation may change somewhat before the voting, all indications are that what we’re now looking at is substantially what they intend to go with. Really?? It looks like most everything they were previously talking about that sounded remotely serious is gone! Bribery? Gone! Extortion? Gone! Quid pro quo? Gone! In place of these things, we now have only the amorphous phrase “abuse of power.” In a federal code containing thousands of crimes, this isn’t even one of them. Isn’t “abuse of power” something that every politician could be accused of, with justification, several times every day?
The “abuse of power” being referred to here consists entirely of dealings with the country of Ukraine occurring during the summer of 2019:
Using the powers of his high office, President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election. He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that included soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage. President Trump also sought to pressure the Government of Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning official United States Government acts of significant value to Ukraine on its public announcement of the investigations. President Trump engaged in this scheme or course of conduct for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit.
Isn’t everything a politician does designed, at least in part, to influence the next election to his advantage?
So what are these things that Trump demanded that would “influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage”? Only two are stated: (1) asking for announcement of an investigation into a “discredited theory promoted by Russia alleging that Ukraine — rather than Russia — interfered in the 2016 United States Presidential election,” and (2) asking for announcement of an investigation into “a political opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.” As to number (1), whether or not you think that that theory is “discredited,” it relates to the 2016 election rather than 2020, and it’s difficult even to figure out how investigation into that issue could be improper or could materially “influence the 2020 United States Presidential election.”
Really then, this has to be about number (2), asking Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden. And the question is, is there anything wrong with that? My answer is, absolutely not. In fact, I’ll go farther: Trump would be completely remiss in his obligations to the American people to fail to ask Ukraine to find out what the hell was going on with Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine.
For reasons that I don’t understand, this issue of whether Ukraine should have been asked to investigate the Bidens seems to generate criticism of Trump on both left and right. OK, you expect the hard-left media to gin up perpetual fake outrage about everything that Trump does. But the idea that Trump’s request to President Zelensky to talk to AG Barr about the Bidens was somehow “inappropriate” has come up with numerous usually-intelligent writers like Paul Mirengoff (of PowerLine), Rich Lowry (of National Review and the New York Post) and Andrew McCarthy.
I don’t get it. What the Bidens did in Ukraine should have everybody jumping up and down and screaming and demanding explanation and/or investigation. For a more detailed statement of the facts of the situation, see my previous posts, including here, here and here. A brief version:
Former Ukraine President and Putin ally Yanukonych fled the country for Russia in February 2014. Shortly thereafter, VP Joe Biden was made “point person” for the Obama administration in dealing with the new incoming Ukraine government. Biden’s responsibilities included disbursing foreign aid to Ukraine. At the time Ukraine was being invaded by Russia.
Also at the time of the 2014 change in power, Ukrainian company Burisma held some 35 leases to produce natural gas in the country, in circumstances where somehow no major international oil or gas companies had been able to obtain any such leases at all. Burisma was (and is) owned by one Mykola Zlochevsky, who had been “Ecology Minister” of Ukraine under prior presidents, and who was closely associated with Yanukovych and Putin. Zlochevsky fled Ukraine for Russia about the same time as Yanukovych. It is a huge understatement to say that Burisma was an obvious target of allegations of corruption in Ukraine.
In May 2014 Burisma appointed Joe’s son Hunter Biden to its Board for a fee of $83,333 per month (or $1 million per year). Hunter had no prior experience in the gas business or in Ukraine. The job called for attending some two Board meetings per year. So out of the blue Burisma just happened to hire the son of the guy passing out the U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine for a do-almost-nothing million dollar per year job? To put it in simple terms, “If you should so much as think about prosecuting us, you are threatening the son of the guy who controls the billions in foreign aid that you need to survive.” Anybody looking at this and knowing no more than that would immediately realize that the mil per year was intended as protection money to keep impending prosecutions away from Burisma.
In February 2015 Viktor Shokin became Prosecutor General of Ukraine. We know that Shokin thereafter conducted at least some investigation into Burisma and/or Zlochevsky because, among other things, in early February 2016 Shokin’s office announced the seizure of certain assets of Zlochevsky in Ukraine.
At some time in late 2015 or early 2016, Joe Biden demanded that Shokin be fired, allegedly because Shokin himself was corrupt. We know this because Joe bragged about it on a widely-viewed video clip at an event in 2018. The tape can be viewed here. Although in the clip Joe does not give the date on which he made the demand, from the context of what he says on the clip you can infer that he was in Ukraine at the time. Matching the list of his trips to Ukraine against the timing of Shokin’s departure would place the date of the demand as December 9, 2015.
But Shokin was not immediately fired after December 9. February 4, 2016 is the date that Shokin’s office published a court order authorizing seizure of certain property of Zlochevsky in Ukraine.
On February 11, 2016 Joe Biden called and spoke to then-President Poroshenko of Ukraine. No transcript of this call has been produced.
On February 16, 2016, Poroshenko finally demanded the resignation of Shokin.
The investigation of Burisma then went into remission.
These facts are completely damning on their face. Is there any possible answer to them?
Believe it or not (and of course you will), the far-left Washington Post’s “fact checker” Glenn Kessler took a crack at it in a December 4 piece titled “GOP tries to connect dots on Biden and Ukraine, but comes up short.” Kessler awards statements by Devin Nunes and Lindsey Graham about the Biden/Ukraine situation his usual “four Pinocchios.” But remarkably, Kessler concedes literally all of the facts I have set forth above, including specifically numbers 4, 5, 6 and 7 above. How can this conduct by the Bidens possibly be defended?
Kessler adopts the simple device of asking a few of his friends about Joe Biden’s motives and taking their word for it over the alternative of making obvious inferences from objective facts:
Anna Makanju, Biden’s senior policy adviser for Ukraine at the time, also listened to the calls and said release of the transcripts would only strengthen Biden’s case that he acted properly. She helped Biden prepare for the conversations and said they operated at a high level, with Biden using language such as Poroshenko’s government being “nation builders for a transformation of Ukraine.” A reference to a private company such as Burisma would be “too fine a level of granularity” for a call between Biden and the president of another country, Makanju told The Fact Checker.
Everybody wanted Shokin fired! Biden was just carrying out administration policy! Are you buying that? Then ask yourself why Joe didn’t tell Hunter to get the hell off the Burisma Board before demanding the firing of Shokin. Instead, Joe got Shokin fired and Hunter got to keep his do-nothing job and million bucks a year for another three years.
At best Kessler is giving us his own tendentious version of the facts, based on his own totally partisan investigation intended from the outset to find some basis to exonerate Biden. Why aren’t we entitled to an official investigation here?
And if you’re still tempted to buy the preposterous Biden defense, try reading this piece from Eric Levitz at far-left New York Magazine on December 9, titled “Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.” Commenting on the widely-reported confrontation between Biden and an Iowa voter who questioned him about the Ukraine situation, Levitz remarks:
Biden has not bothered to prepare credible, coherent answers to those questions. In fact, the Democratic front-runner can’t even respond to the most predictable queries on the issue without flying into a barely concealed rage.
That’s because Biden really has no good answer here. Joe and his spokespeople can say as often as they want that his demand to fire the prosecutor was perfectly fine because it was in accordance with U.S. and international policy. But the facts remain that Joe controlled U.S. policy and the action he took protected $3 million worth of paydays for his son in a country being funded with U.S. taxpayer money. At that point, it’s really irrelevant whether Shokin was a good or bad prosecutor or whether he deserved to be fired.
Was that $3 million diverted from U.S. taxpayer funds in some way, shape or form? Aren’t we entitled to know?