President Biden To Be Impeached?
The House GOP Presents Its Case
Now comes the question, will Joe Biden be impeached by the House of Representatives"?
Certainly the three committees involved in the impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden–the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, the Committee on the Judiciary, and the Committee on Ways and Means–present a report1 that details an extensive pattern of corruption and abuse of the office of Vice President during the Obama-Biden Administration.
Even the executive summary of the report makes the case in significant detail, particularly in regards to Hunter Biden’s questionable dealings involving Ukrainian interests:
First and foremost, overwhelming evidence demonstrates that President Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family. Among other aspects of this conspiracy, the Biden family and their business associates received tens of millions of dollars from foreign interests by leading those interests to believe that such payments would provide them access to and influence with President Biden. As Vice President, President Biden actively participated in this conspiracy by, among other things, attending dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and speaking to them by phone, often when being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden. For example, in 2014, Vice President Biden attended a dinner for Hunter Biden with Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina. Following the dinner, Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a firm associated with Hunter Biden. Then, months later, as Hunter Biden and his business associates continued to solicit more money from Baturina, Vice President Biden participated in a phone call with Baturina and Hunter Biden where Vice President Biden told Baturina, “you be good to my boy.” Moreover, President Biden knowingly participated in this conspiracy. Based on the totality of the evidence, it is inconceivable that President Biden did not understand that he was taking part in an effort to enrich his family by abusing his office of public trust.
The evidence also establishes that the Biden family went to great lengths to conceal this conspiracy. Foreign money was transmitted to the Biden family through complicated financial transactions. The Biden family laundered funds through intermediate entities and broke up large transactions into numerous smaller transactions. Substantial efforts were also made to hide President Biden’s involvement in his family’s business activities
The report presents the case that Joe Biden, while Vice President, sold access to the Obama-Harris Administration for cash, all funneled through his scapegrace son Hunter.
There is a supreme irony that Ukraine should be at the epicenter of the Republican case against Joe Biden. Ukraine, people may recall, was at the epicenter of Donald Trump’s first impeachment—and touched on many of the same issues and events being arrayed as evidences against Joe Biden. Hunter’s involvement with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma has itself been an ongoing scandal which has played out alongside the many trials and tribulations of Donald Trump.
Thanks to the emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, there is clear evidence Joe Biden was involved in a material way with Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business dealings, and that the reason for that involvement was that Joe Biden was at the time Vice President of the United States.
Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads
At a minimum, we are presented with the question whether or not these activities rise to the level of a prohibited conflict of interest2.
That question becomes even thornier and more compelling when we recall that Joe Biden himself has bragged on video of involving himself in Ukrainian government prosecutions of corruption—including a case involving Burisma, the company with which Hunter Biden was involved.
Whether this conduct is impeachable is, of course, a political question. What is not in question, based on the House impeachment report, is that the conduct occurred.
The corporate media, unsurprisingly, chooses to downplay the report. The New York Time rather arrantly dismisses the report as lacking evidence.
The NYT repeats the Bidens’ claim that Joe Biden was not involved in Hunter Biden’s business affairs.
The Bidens and several of their business associates have repeatedly denied that Mr. Biden was involved in his son’s businesses, despite the efforts of some business partners to cut him into deals after he left the vice presidency.
“I did not involve my father in my business, not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions, domestic or international, not as a board member and not as an artist, never,” Hunter Biden said in the opening statement of his deposition to the committees in February.
However, just the emails retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop and the video shown above suggest that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden’s business affairs—and involved corruptly in Hunter Biden’s business affairs.
There is little doubt but that if Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma played any part of Joe Biden’s insistence that a Ukrainian state prosecutor be fired, that would be a clear conflict of interest and an abuse of office. That US loan guarantees—ultimately, taxpayer dollars—were also involved makes the case even more egregious.
Surely it is no coincidence that in 2020 Ukraine reopened the investigation ito Burisma and allegations of corruption.
Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired.
But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
What the NYT calls “no evidence”, most everyone else would call “clear and convincing evidence.”
CNN’s assessment on the matter is little better.
The trio of Republican-led committees leading the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden on Monday released a report arguing that the president has “engaged in impeachable conduct” without making a formal recommendation for the House of Representatives to move forward with impeachment.
Instead, the 291-page report recycles previous unsupported claims to argue that Biden “knowingly participated” in a conspiracy to leverage his office while as vice president and beyond to financially benefit his family, and leaves it up to the House of Representatives to evaluate.
Except, of course, the claims are not “unsupported.” The media forgets how much of this was prime media fodder during Trump’s first impeachment. A much more lucid and coherent Joe Biden back then sought to excoriate Donald Trump over these allegations.
The same New York Times which said there was “no proof of crime” in 2019 reported that Hunter Biden had a stake in the firing of Ukrainian state prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
The pressure campaign eventually worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was voted out months later by the Ukrainian Parliament.
Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.
The New York Times went so far as to acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s and Joe Biden’s activities regarding Ukraine “intersected.”
The broad outlines of how the Bidens’ roles intersected in Ukraine have been known for some time. The former vice president’s campaign said that he had always acted to carry out United States policy without regard to any activities of his son, that he had never discussed the matter with Hunter Biden and that he learned of his son’s role with the Ukrainian energy company from news reports.
But new details about Hunter Biden’s involvement, and a decision this year by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general to reverse himself and reopen an investigation into Burisma, have pushed the issue back into the spotlight just as the senior Mr. Biden is beginning his 2020 presidential campaign.
Conflict of interest laws exist precisely for situtaions such as that. By all normal understandings of the ethics regarding conflict of interest, Joe Biden should have recused himself from any policy dealings regarding Ukraine, and in particular any decisions to pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating a company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.
That Joe Biden did not do so is the epitome of “conflict of interest.”
Almost reflexively, the Democrats have dismissed the report as a political hit job, and “revenge” for the Donald Trump impeachments.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries denounced the report at “baseless”.
The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have claimed (not accurately) that the impeachment investigation “exonerates” President Biden.
After investigating President Joe Biden for more than a year and a half, Republicans have amassed 3.8 million pages of documents and approximately 80 hours of testimony from transcribed interviews and depositions of 19 witnesses. This mountain of evidence definitively proves that Joe Biden did not commit any wrongdoing, let alone any high crime, misdemeanor, or other impeachable offense.
The evidence detailed by the House GOP clearly does no such thing. Democrats might argue the evidence does not rise to the level of warranting impeachment and removal from office—indeed, that would be the substance of a debate during a vote over articles of impeachment and of an impeachment trial itself.
Politically the report is unlikely to have much impact, as there does not appear to be much enthusiasm among the House GOP to proceed with articles of impeachment.
It was not clear if Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson would schedule a vote to impeach Biden in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 5 election, in which Republican Donald Trump is locked in a tight battle with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Even if the Republican-controlled House were to pass such a measure, it would be unlikely to remove Biden from office, given that he would need to be convicted by a Senate controlled 51-49 by his own Democratic Party. Biden, who withdrew his own reelection bid last month, is due to leave office when his successor is sworn in on Jan. 20.
With Kamala Harris now firmly ensconsed as the Democratic nominee, and with Joe Biden thus a completely lame-duck President, the political calculus is unlikely to move the GOP to proceed aggressively on impeachment.
At almost any other time, and under almost any other circumstance, a report such as this would demand articles of impeachment. Even if the Democrats are sure not to convict in the Senate, an impeachment vote and an impeachment trial are an effective means of taking the impeachment case to the electorate, which is always where such cases should be made.
As Joe Biden is no longer running for re-election, the political gains to be had from such a move are slim at best. While the report is emphatically a case that Joe Biden should be impeached, it is unlikely the House GOP will move to do so, preferring instead to just let his Presidency expire naturally.
Now comes the question will Joe Biden be impeached?
Comes now the answer: probably not. But he should be.
Committee on Oversight and Accountability, et al. REPORT OF THE IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY OF JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR. U.S. House of Representatives, 2024, https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024.08.19-Report-of-the-Impeachment-Inquiry-of-Joseph-R.-Biden-Jr.-President-of-the-United-States.pdf.
This is all so depressing because we are seemingly on a steady march to collapse, chaos and tyranny. What can possibly turn this around. I have zero faith in the ballot box and even less in the institutions that are eating us alive. NO ONE is being held to account nor justice being meted out. Just we citizens as we get trapped in the maelstrom of forces of evil fighting it out amongst us. I’m old. This is extremely unsettling. All I can try and do is pray for discernment and NOT COMPLY.
I don't think impeaching Biden will be wise at this point. Indeed, he will be headed to the fiery Hinnom Valley, also known as Hell, which is a better resolution than the justice of Man