When Speaker Kevin McCarthy broached the topic of impeachment it met with scorn from Democrats and from some Republicans in his slender 222-seat majority. This gives individual House members more clout than say in 1998 when Newt Gingrich had 228 seats. Some in his caucus openly question it.
If it can be confirmed, the allegation that Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from Burisma chief Mykola Zlochevsky in exchange for pressuring the Ukrainian government into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, could be a textbook reason for bribery.
Zlochevsky alleged that he had hidden the payment using a myriad of money-laundering tricks and that it would take 10 years to figure out the scheme. The informant behind the FBI FD-1023 form in question told the Bureau that he had no idea if Zlochevsky had been honest with him let alone if the alleged transaction had taken place.
James Madison wrote during the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the framers worried that a president might “pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers.”
Trump Looms in the Background
For Democrats, Donald Trump and his two impeachments looms large in the background. McCarthy’s suggestion that Trump’s impeachments be expunged has them on their heels.
“… [M]any of these same MAGA acolytes want to rewrite history by taking the unprecedented and fanciful step of expunging the record of Trump’s two impeachments. Last month, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, desperate to hold onto his slender majority, gave in to those demands when he announced his support for that effort,” Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut wrote at Salon.com. “That calls to mind a Russian saying from Stalinist times, when rewriting history to suit and flatter a totalitarian leader was de rigueur: ‘Russia is a country with a certain future; it is only the past that is unpredictable.’”
Trump’s impeachments are a trophy for them. Impeachment is a political tool. It’s not a legal or a criminal one. The first impeachment set a bad precedent and lowered the bar for what you can impeach a subsequent president for and Joe Biden could become a target of their lowered bar.
The facts behind Trump’s first impeachment are thin and purely political. Democrats claimed that his call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the summer of 2019 was “election interference” because he ironically wanted the Ukrainian president to look into reports that Biden engaged in a corrupt bargain to get Shokin fired.
The claim that the request was “election interference” is silly considering that Joe Biden was not considered the top Democratic candidate at the time considering his losses in 1988 and in 2008, and Bernie Sanders’ popularity at the time.
With regard to the second impeachment, Trump might not have intended for his supporters to storm the Capitol as happened. However, he inflamed passions that combined with the failure to protect the building to create the events of January 6.
Even if the legalities could be questionable. His second impeachment won enough political support to get seven Republicans to crossover and vote to convict him, which marked the first time a clear majority voted to convict in an impeachment proceeding.
Sarat and Aftergut allege that McCarthy hopes to impeach Biden to placate Trump and to get revenge for his impeachments. They whitewash the allegations against Biden.
“Preserving historical truth and American democracy requires seeing the Republican obsession with impeaching Biden and unimpeaching Trump for what it is: an autocratic fever dream. It is yet another reminder that freedom-loving Americans need to understand that giving MAGA Republicans political power puts us on the road toward ending our constitutional liberties,” they write.
Impeachment Lacks Support
At this point McCarthy has problems even on his own side and Sarat and Aftergut suggest the Republicans could face a backlash and lose their majority if Biden is impeached.
Fox News host Steve Doocy ridiculed the idea of impeaching Biden as an example of overreach.
“We we’ve seen this movie a couple of times before. First step. Impeachment inquiry. Almost always it leads to an impeachment. I’ve heard from members of Congress on the Republican side, they are going to, they’re going to do the I-word of Joe Biden,” Doocy said. “Is the 1023 form makes a damning case against the Bidens, but it’s completely unverified. And in fact, there are certain critical parts of the story that have been refuted by the people in the story! So, so it’s problematic.”
Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck similarly called impeachment a “shiny ball” during an appearance on CNN.
If Republicans move forward with impeaching Biden they are going to need to corroborate the FD-1023 with other sources and have their case together. Doing that without hard proof of a crime would be politically disastrous like Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
From 19FortyFive
The Second American Civil War Has Begun
