No one is above the law — unless you’re a Democrat

OPINION:

“No one is above the law,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said when announcing the start of the impeachment process against President Trump.

She should have tempered it with: “unless you’re a Democrat.”

For starters, literally hundreds of Democrat-controlled jurisdictions operate as “sanctuary cities,” flouting the law by refusing to cooperate with federal immigration officials. Nothing ever happens to the Democratic politicians, just the crime victims at the hands of criminal aliens who are released instead of being turned over to immigration enforcement officers.

In Democrat-heavy Montgomery County, Maryland, eight illegal aliens have been charged with rape or other sexual crimes since County Executive Marc Elrich signed a “sanctuary” order in July barring police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

Flagrant Democratic lawlessness is also common at the national level. The Clintons made a fortune by openly bribing foreigners to contribute to either their own pockets or their $2 billion Clinton Foundation, leveraging Bill’s celebrity status and Hillary’s stint as secretary of State. Uranium One gave the Clinton Foundation more than $145 million in donations just before the State Department, under Hillary, approved giving Russia control over 20 percent of U.S. uranium.

For years, the Kennedy clan has operated by its own rules, even making sure that court records were sealed in the case dealing with Ted’s leaving the scene while Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in his car off Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969.

Ted, by the way, committed treason in 1983 by advising Soviet Union leaders on how to undermine President Reagan’s missile defense strategy, according to a KGB memo. Talk about actionable foreign collusion.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, American missile and computer technology was transferred to the Chinese Communists in return for massive contributions to the Democratic Party, a far more serious scandal than the Monica Lewinsky affair and for which the media showed zero interest.

While running for re-election in 2012, President Obama was caught on a live mic asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to give him more time, “particularly with missile defense,” until after the election, when he would “have more flexibility.” This is a direct request to a foreign power to assist in his re-election by framing an issue the way he wanted. “I understand your message about space,” Mr. Medvedev said.

Several Obama administration officials, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice, were caught lying repeatedly on TV about the 2012 deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder was caught committing perjury while testifying before Congress in 2012 about his department’s disastrous gun-running scandal at the Mexican border. He got censured, and then went about business as usual. He openly undermined election integrity, calling voter ID laws “racist.” In 2011, he betrayed his oath of office, refusing to defend a federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act.

More recently, Democrats in the nation’s intelligence agencies who violated their oaths, concocted the phony Russian collusion scandal and spied on the 2016 Trump campaign, have not faced serious consequences. Russiagate should be about them, not Mr. Trump.

Fast forward to today. As Adam Schiff’s Pot o’ Impeachment Circus fixates on hearsay regarding a telephone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s current president, no one is being allowed to bring up far more disturbing evidence of Joe Biden’s and son Hunter’s corrupt dealings with that country.

On Oct. 9, Ukrainian Member of Parliament Andriy Derkach held a press conference at which he displayed documents purporting to show that Hunter Biden’s lobbying firm was paid $900,000 from Burisma Holdings. That’s the energy company on whose board Hunter was inexplicably serving at a salary of $50,000 a month. No conflict there, cough, cough, but it gets worse. Rudy Giuliani, who contends that the vice president got the money, pointed out in the Nov. 13 Wall Street Journal that the invoice “said the money was for lobbying Joe Biden.”

This is more than a bombshell. It’s a neutron bomb. And yet, Mr. Derkach’s claims are being ignored by major media and by Adam Schiff’s legal charade.

Speaking of bombs, former Vice President Biden, who was tasked to oversee U.S. dealings with Ukraine, threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless they fired Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor who was said to be investigating Burisma.

In a 2018 video filmed at a Council on Foreign Relations event, Mr. Biden boasted about it. The video is so damning that everyone who thinks Mr. Trump’s phone call is impeachable conduct should see it. Here’s the key excerpt:

Biden: “I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from [President Petro] Poroshenko and from [Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t … I said, you’re not getting the billion … 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 b-tch. (Laughter.) He got fired.”

And Mr. Trump is the one on trial for supposedly “bribing” a foreign government for his benefit?

No one is above the law — unless you’re a Democrat.

• Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times.