It appears that Senate Republicans might do what The New American suggested they would do should the hate-Trump Democrats in the House impeach the president: Get testimony from leading Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, about the influence-peddling scheme in which they were involved in Ukraine.
Why call the Bidens? Because the push for Trump’s impeachment grew from his request of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, during a phone call on July 25, to find just what the Bidens did and when they did it.
The news in yesterday’s Washington Post that Republicans might target the Biden boys follows John Solomon’s explosive report about Hunter Biden and his colleagues at Burisma Holdings. Biden and Burisma’s D.C. legmen, Solomon reported, were all over the State Department like white on rice in the weeks and months before Joe Biden moved, in 2016, to pink-slip a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating the natural gas company.
That firing is the key event in the Biden-Burisma scandal. The question: When he was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, did then-Vice President Joe Biden force Ukraine to fire that prosecutor to block the probe of the company that had enriched his son?
Trump’s impeachment might tear the lid off the scandal.
Republicans Divided?
The Post reported that Republicans are “privately debating” whether to bring in the Bidens for questioning.
GOP Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and John Kennedy of Louisiana raised the idea at a “private lunch,” the Post reported.
Then “Paul took his private push public at a campaign rally with the president Monday night in Kentucky,” the Post reported. “I say this to my fellow colleagues in Congress, to every Republican in Washington: Step up and subpoena Hunter Biden and subpoena the whistleblower!”
Said Kennedy, “It’s inevitable that when the trial comes to the Senate, one of the issues is going to be: Did the president have a good faith reason to believe that Hunter Biden may have been involved in corruption? And if I’m correct in my analysis, then there will be a lot of time spent on what Mr. Biden did for the money.”
Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon said the same thing on Fox News. “The Bidens have to be called,” he said. “Joe Biden is a hand grenade, and Hunter Biden is the pin. And when that pin gets pulled, the shrapnel is going to blow back all over the Democratic establishment.”
Though Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham thinks conservatives aren’t doing enough to back Trump, he won’t call the Bidens to testify, the Post reported, because he doesn’t think it’s his place to do so.
Not all Republicans, the Post reported, are on board of course. Senator John Cornyn of Texas thinks asking what the Bidens did and when they did it is a “sideshow.” He doesn’t want to “make this any more of a reality show than it’s likely to become.”
Biden’s Arm-twisting
It’s not a “sideshow” if what Solomon disclosed on Monday is true: Hunter Biden and his pals at Burisma — the company that hired young Biden despite no experience in energy matters and his record as a raging dope fiend — were in close touch with Obama’s State Department in the weeks and months before Joe Biden ordered the firing of Prosecutor General Victor Shokin.
Biden senior threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine if it didn’t fire Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, which employed and enriched Biden’s son. Shokin says he was fired because of the Biden connection, and Biden bragged that firing Shokin was a quid pro quo for the money.
That’s what Trump asked Zelensky to investigate. Given that CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella’s hearsay account of the Trump-Zelensky phone call triggered the impeachment inquiry, calling the Bidens and perhaps Shokin himself to testify is an obvious move.
But beyond them, as The New American reported, the impeachment might also reopen the forgotten attempt by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to collude with Ukrainians to sink Trump’s election.
The DNC paid $71,918 to a consultant who sought dirt on Trump and former campaign chief Paul Manfort from the Ukrainian embassy.
Clinton’s campaign paid Fusion GPS to gather foreign dirt on Trump that resulted in the notoriously false Steele Dossier. A Ukrainian legislator provided anti-Trump information to the consultancy, which compiled multiple reports that falsely connected Trump to Russia via Manafort and his work in Ukraine.
The author of that dossier, British spy Christopher Steele, falsely accused Trump of ignoring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during the campaign in exchange for hacking the DNC’s e-mails and their publication by WikiLeaks.
Photo: AP Images
