OPINION:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” — Article II, Section 4, U.S. Constitution
You would think that after six years of fevered obsession with impeachment, the folks in Washington might know an impeachable offense when they saw one.
From the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president after the 2016 election, Democratic politicians and the media were singularly focused on reverse-engineering “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” to hang on Mr. Trump so that they could impeach him.
“The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun,” The Washington Post declared on Jan. 20, 2017. When the presses first rolled on that issue of the paper, Mr. Trump had not even been sworn in yet.
“The effort to impeach President Donald John Trump is already underway,” The Post explained. “At the moment the new commander in chief was sworn in, a campaign to build public support for his impeachment went live at ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org, spearheaded by two liberal advocacy groups aiming to lay the groundwork for his eventual ejection from the White House.”
The cause was immediately taken up by sitting members of Congress, and they never relented — even after he left office. So blind was their obsession with impeachment that Mr. Trump not only became the first president impeached twice on hotly partisan grounds but also made history as the first president ever impeached after he left office.
With so many experts on impeachment lying around the Capitol these days, you would think they might be quick to recognize an actual impeachable offense when it came along.
The problem for the Trump Lynch Mob was that no matter how hard they looked, they could never find an actual impeachable offense to hang on Mr. Trump. And the fact they impeached him even after he left office is final proof they never pretended to take the process seriously. It was all a partisan temper tantrum from day one.
Now comes a slew of charges against a live, sitting president that are such dead ringers for impeachable offenses that they actually made it into the Constitution by name.
Accepting millions of dollars in exchange for public action is the very definition of “Bribery.” Selling out American policy to a foreign adversary in exchange for money is “Treason.” You don’t even have to get into the vagaries of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” when you have “Bribery” and “Treason” staring you in the face.
The FBI has in possession credible testimony that President Biden — as vice president — accepted a $5 million bribe from the head of a Ukrainian gas company in exchange for using U.S. influence to pressure the Ukrainian government to quash an investigation into the company’s corrupt practices. The same witness also claims that Mr. Biden’s son Hunter was paid another $5 million as part of the same scheme.
Dovetailing precisely with this evidence is actual video footage of Mr. Biden openly bragging how he had used his position as vice president to withhold $1 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine unless the government fired the prosecutor investigating the company that paid his family millions of dollars in bribes.
“Well, son of a bitch,” Mr. Biden marvels in the video. “He got fired!”
We also know for a fact that Hunter Biden was paid millions of dollars from the same Ukrainian gas company to sit on its board even though the younger Biden had no experience in the energy field and does not even speak Ukrainian. His only “expertise” was his father’s position as vice president.
We also know for a fact that Hunter Biden had an arrangement with his father to pay him a significant cut of the bribes he collected from Ukraine, China, Mexico and even Russia.
No, these are not just “high Crimes” or “Misdemeanors.” This is “Treason” and “Bribery.”
Yet what are Democratic politicians and the media in Washington singularly focused on today? Mr. Trump’s handling of records from his presidency since leaving the White House.
The impeachment circus goes on. The only remedy for this innocent American citizen is the next election.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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