OPINION:
“The president should be held accountable,” then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sept, 24, 2019, just short of four years ago, opening a formal impeachment inquiry into then-President Donald Trump over a telephone call he made to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had just been elected president of Ukraine. “No one is above the law.”
Mrs. Pelosi initiated the impeachment investigation without a formal vote on the House floor by her colleagues, worried that she may put some of her swing-district members in peril on what amounted to flimsy evidence (a secondhand account from a whistleblower in the intelligence community who was not even on Mr. Trump’s call) to mount a historically partisan inquiry to oust a duly elected president.
Democrats at the time, drenched in self-adulation and righteousness, argued that if they didn’t move forward in impeaching Mr. Trump over reports he pressured Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden on corruption allegations, they would be betraying, in the words of Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon, “the foundation of our democracy.”
“We will never find the truth unless we use the power given to the House of Representatives, and the House alone, to begin an official investigation as dictated by the Constitution,” the Georgia Democrat said in support of Mrs. Pelosi’s move on the House floor that day. “The future of our democracy is at stake.”
Three months later, Mrs. Pelosi got around to holding a full House vote on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Mr. Trump was acquitted of the charges by a Republican-controlled Senate in February. In November 2020, Democrats won the presidency and then impeached Mr. Trump again in 2021, this time for his role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
What goes around comes around.
Republicans narrowly won back the House in 2022, and this week GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden on what may amount to bribery charges against the Democrat — exactly what Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Zelenskyy to investigate while he was president.
From what evidence the House has collected thus far, Mr. Trump’s investigation of Mr. Biden appears to have been entirely validated.
We know Mr. Biden’s son Hunter was paid $85,000 a month from Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father ran point on corruption in the country while serving as Barack Obama’s vice president.
We know the younger Mr. Biden had no experience in the oil and gas industry.
We know Hunter Biden rode on Air Force Two to conduct some of these meetings.
We know he routinely put his father, the vice president, on the phone with Burisma executives to promote what Hunter Biden’s business partner described as the Biden “brand.”
We know the Biden family established at least 20 shell companies to conduct their foreign business dealings, businesses that paid the family about $20 million. From testimony and Hunter Biden’s own emails, we’ve learned that the then-VP was referred to as “the Big Guy,” who reportedly got a 10% cut of his son’s business profits.
We know that Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma while Hunter Biden sat on the company’s board.
We know that the day before Hunter Biden’s appointment was made public, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharsky emailed him from his personal Gmail account, warning that Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky was likely under criminal investigation in Kyiv.
“We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,’” Mr. Pozharskyi wrote to the younger Mr. Biden.
Again from his own emails, we know that Hunter Biden enlisted the Washington consultancy Blue Star Strategies, run by veterans of the Clinton administration, to “close down” any “cases/pursuits against [Mr. Zlochevsky] in Ukraine.”
We’ve learned that after a Burisma board meeting, Hunter Biden allegedly called his father at the Four Seasons in Dubai to request help in dealing with the Ukrainian prosecutor’s investigation.
We know that three days later, the then-vice president visited Kyiv and met with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. According to Colin Kahl, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Mr. Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine if Mr. Shokin were not fired for failing to crack down harder on domestic corruption.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. … We’re leaving here in about six hours, if the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Mr. Biden said, proudly recalling the interaction several years later at a Council on Foreign Relations event. “Well, son of a b——. He got fired.”
An FBI whistleblower says that Burisma executives paid the Bidens $10 million after Mr. Shokin was dismissed. According to a conversation between a confidential source and then-Burisma Chief Financial Officer Vadim Pojarski in 2015, Hunter Biden was hired to the company’s board to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
If true, the cascade of accusations paints a pretty explicit story of bribery, an impeachable offense under the Constitution. The GOP House, with its inquiry, needs access to President Biden’s bank accounts to determine — beyond a reasonable doubt — if the charges are true.
Mr. McCarthy can’t lean on the Fourth Estate to uncover Mr. Biden’s alleged misdeeds. Far too many in the mainstream press have shown little interest in pursuing anything wrong, corrupt or suspicious having to do with the Biden family.
So it will be up to the House — and the House alone — to perform their constitutional duty and find the truth. A sitting president may have sold out his country for personal profit, and Americans deserve to know.
In the words of the late John Lewis, the future of our democracy is at stake.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor with The Washington Times.
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