For anyone following US politics post-2020, the moves to potentially impeach President Joe Biden land as inevitable. Equally predictable is the fact that the putative reason centres around the president’s son, Hunter, a figure of obsession on the US political right and a man who appears to have enough skeletons in his closet to staff a battalion in Jason and the Argonauts.
So is there anything to it? And what stage is the process at?
Allegations
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has ordered an impeachment inquiry into Biden, to investigate whether he benefited from Hunter’s business dealings during Joe’s time as vice president in the Obama administration. An impeachment inquiry is a formal step on a path that could ultimately end with a vote in the House of Representatives on whether to issue articles of impeachment — although there’s no guarantee that’s where this will end up.
“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption and warrant further investigation,” McCarthy said last week.
There are two major allegations at the core of this. First, an unverified tip received by the FBI that Biden had pressured the government in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who had been investigating Ukrainian energy firm Burisma — Hunter Biden was on the board — and that both Joe and Hunter had received US$5 million afterwards. This forms part of a wider narrative flowing from an investigation by the Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee, which alleged it had “identified over $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates”, back in May.
Further, back in July, two Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigators told Congress that their investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax returns was subject to politically motivated impediments by Justice Department officials. Hunter at the time was expected to plead guilty to wilful failure to pay federal income tax and possession of a firearm while a drug user, but the plea deal fell apart when Trump-appointed US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika raised concerns and refused to “rubber stamp” it.
The IRS employees who testified, supervisory special agent Gary Shapley and criminal investigator Joseph Ziegler, alleged that Hunter should have been charged with more serious offences and received leniency on account of his connection to the president.
So, is there something to it?
Not as yet. The claims that Joe Biden lobbied the Ukrainian government to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin on account of his investigations into Burisma cropped up first in 2019, while Donald Trump was approaching his first impeachment. There were a couple of teensy issues with it, as The Washington Post pointed out at the time, the big one being that Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden at the time of his widely welcomed ousting.
“Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” Daria Kaleniuk of the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Action Center said in 2019. “And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”
Indeed, Joe Biden publicly bragged about getting Shokin done in because it was in keeping with US policy in Ukraine, as Colorado Republican Ken Buck has pointed out.
It seems appropriate that scrutiny is placed on how Hunter Biden made his money and any conflicts of interest this has caused his father. Indeed, a former business partner testified to the House Oversight Committee that Hunter would frequently put his father on speakerphone with business partners, selling the “illusion of access”, but that the then-VP was never directly involved in financial dealings. However, for all their florid language about tens of millions flowing from US enemies into the coffers of the “Biden crime family”, the Republicans are yet to locate the smoking gun directly connecting Joe Biden with anything dodgy.
What next?
As we had plenty of occasion to be reminded during the Trump years, for impeachment to result in the removal of a sitting president, it must be passed by a simple majority in the lower house and then by a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which is currently controlled by Democrats and thus where impeachment proceedings would come crashing to a halt. Republicans have acknowledged this, but argue the process could reveal the kind of evidence they are yet to uncover.
Expect a lot of discomfort for the Bidens between now and, say, November next year.
Is there a valid case for the US president’s impeachment or is Biden being railroaded? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
The Republicans complain about witch hunts, but that is just projecting their behaviour onto others, and this investigation into Joe Biden is only the latest example. After Nixon resigned following investigation of his involvement in Watergate the Republicans have been obsessed, driven mad, by the desire for retaliation. Bill Clinton was investigated for years over his involvement in an allegedly dodgy financial scheme called Whitewater; absolutely nothing of interest turned up, so the investigation was repurposed to look into Clinton’s conduct with Lewinsky. This was led by Ken Starr, a truly weird and creepy individual whose report tells more about his strange obsessions than anything of real interest about Clinton. This set the pattern for subsequent equally prolonged and obsessive investigations — Benghazi, Hilary Clinton’s emails, etc. — which were all fishing expeditions with nothing of substance to work on, conducted simply to do damage by generating any number of headlines suggesting something is wrong. It did not matter if in the end they produced nothing significant.
The lack of any real findings from all this only proves that their targets are surely among the cleanest and least corrupt politicians in the world, because if there was anything of any substance to be found it surely would have been. But that has not helped the Democrats at all. The Republicans have gained steadily because in this conspiracy-crazed world there is nothing quite so damning as a complete lack of any incriminating evidence. Nothing here? — That’s just what they want you to think, sheeple! Lack of any proof is the best possible proof of how cunning the targets are, how well protected, how deep the deep-state conspiracy runs.
It seems the opposite is true as well………………
……..the Democrats nailed Trump blackmailing Zelensky to “Find” something incriminating on Biden (with an eyewitness in the room), but this gets dismissed as “Fake News” and ignored by Senate Republicans. The eyewitness then gets kicked out of the Military and demonized by the MAGA crew.
Up is Down, Black is White, all they need now is a “Minitrue”……………..
I doubt the GOP Freedom Caucus (Koch influenced) and many Reps really want to go ahead with this, not just because of the lack of evidence & need for a quid pro quo for Trump, but how details of Trump campaign and claiming Ukraine was behind hacking of the DNC etc., would cause too many problems…..especially when one see the types involved Manafort, Firtas, Giuliani, Flynn, Barr, Sondland et al. who may be asked to testify.
Seth Abramson in ‘Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump….
…. don’t know about the concurrent attempts by members of Trump’s inner circle to take over Ukraine’s national gas company and bolster dangerous pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs—moves that would have benefited Putin and destabilized Ukraine’s government and economy.’ (2020, MacMillan Publishers)
Hunter Biden must be the only person in America that could make the Republicans complain about someone illegally owning a firearm.
There’s an article in Slate magazine ‘Hunter Biden Has a Surprisingly Excellent Legal Defense’ that makes a fairly convincing argument it is very likely the illegal gun charge will be dismissed as unconstitutional; there are already solid precedents for that result. The remaining charges, concerned with allegedly filling in a form incorrectly, are not much stronger. The biggest joke in the whole farce is that the Republicans, and their mates at Fox News etc., keep bleating that Hunter Biden is getting favourable treatment from the justice system, when it is plain he is being treated unusually severely in respect of these allegations, compared to any normal defendant.
One guess how they’ll respond if/when he gets off
Small clarification needed to Frank Dee’s remark:
“Hunter Biden must be the only white person in America that…”
From the beginning, the right to bear arms in the USA has been interpreted in a way that excluded those outside the white majority. For example, the attempt in the 1960s by the Black Panthers to assert their right to bear arms went as well as you’d expect. This should not surprise anyone of course, the real surprise is that the relevant constitutional amendment does not say explicitly that it is limited to the dominant section of society. The USA took the UK’s Bill of Rights (1689) as its model, and there the right to bear arms states,
So it was actually a right for Protestants to have arms and not Catholics, and no general right was extended to all subjects or citizens.
The specific section of the U.S. Code that he has been charged under (§ 922(g)(3)) has already been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, so that is a demonstrable dud…………
………….the other charge of “Lying on a Firearms Transaction Record” has almost never been prosecuted (although there have been literally thousands of reported breaches) – that’s how serious that charge is.
“Witch Hunt?”……………. surely not.
That is an interesting quote, but not directly relevant as it derives from the British Bill of Rights.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica:
“In England, following the Glorious Revolution, the Second Amendment’s predecessor was codified in the British Bill of Rights in 1689, under its Article VII, which proclaimed “that the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” Often misinterpreted as a right to defend one’s person, home, or property, the allowance to “have arms” ensured that Parliament could exercise its sovereign right of self-preservation against a tyrannical crown by arming qualified Protestants as a militia.”
All this was done to provide a means of dealing with a dangerous Royal Head of State, never for personal protection. The same motivation was the intention of the US’s Second Amendment, nothing to do with personal protection. Funny thing is that the so called “Constitution Originalists” have no interest in any original intentions that collide with their present day interests. Hypocrisy rules the day once again amongst the right.
I clearly said I was quoting the UK’s Bill of Rights (1689).
What is being set up is not an Impeachment (which would require a House vote that McCarthy knows would not get up) but an “Inquiry” (despite the Republicans having been “Inquiring” for the last nine months……. with absolutely nothing to show for it).
ELEVEN days ago McCarthy said “I’m never going to do an impeachment inquiry without a House Vote”……………
………but then some of the crazies threatened to oust him if he didn’t.
Total nonsensical Yankee politics.
The Democrats can afford to be gung ho. They would benefit from having both Biden and Trump absent from the next election.
I don’t see the same vigour in looking into Trump and his mini-mafia family’s already established corruption. They “claim”, without any evidence whatsoever, that Biden took in $5,000,000. This is peanuts, even if it were true, compared with the $2,000,000,000 that Kushner took from the Saudis immediately after leaving office. Kushner was actually in the executive, Hunter never had a role. Kushner was directly involved in procuring a massive arms deal for the Saudis, an arms deal that was in doubt due to the bloodthirsty and murderous nature of the new King of Saudi Arabia, just one example of which was the ordering of the assassination of Khashoggi out of a fit of pique. From Wikipedia “On May 20, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia’s Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud signed a series of letters of intent for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to purchase arms from the United States totaling US$110 billion immediately, and $350 billion over 10 years.” This “After Saudi warplanes targeted a funeral in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, killing more than 140 people, the Obama administration announced its intention to review U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia.” See any connection here? There were some serious amounts of money changing hands here to influence the Mafia Don in the White House, much more than a mere appearance of graft and corruption, more the real thing. Don’t let’s wait for the Republicans to investigate this though, that would be a pointless exercise. Conservatives have always been the masters of hypocrisy, they have perfected the art over the decades.