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In the rush to impeach President Trump for the phone call with Ukrainian President Voloymyr Zelensky, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Intelligence Committee chieftain Adam Schiff might have forgotten something.
Two witnesses Trump would likely call for testimony are former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, the two key figures in a major influence peddling scandal in Ukraine. Then again, if the House votes for impeachment because of “Russian collusion,” that too could backfire because Trump could then question myriad officials from the FBI, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign — perhaps Clinton herself.
The reason: Trump asked Zelensky to help expose that Biden scandal as well as the collusion hoax over which he was relentlessly attacked until Special Counsel Robert Mueller found nothing with which to accuse Trump of wrongdoing.
In other words, the Democrats might have miscalculated politically, and, in the end, exonerate Trump and convict the Bidens, Clinton, and others.
Long List of Witnesses
“I don’t think the Democrats have thought this through at all,” a Senate staff member told the Washington Times’s Stephen Dinan, because they are exposing multiple top Democrats to subpoenas to testify when the Senate tries the impeachment case.
For instance, Dinan noted, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham said the anonymous whistleblowers who say Trump committed an impeachable offense during the Zelensky call would be forced to testify publicly.
As well, he said, Schiff might also be a witness because he falsely said neither he nor his staff had contact with the now-famous CIA whistleblower before he wrote his nine-page hearsay account.
Then, of course, Trump could call the Biden boys.
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“If Trump is impeached on the Ukrainian call, the Bidens would be fair game, particularly Hunter,” Jonathan Turley told Dinan. “While I do not agree that the evidence supports the allegation against Biden in pushing the termination of the prosecution, there is little question that the Hunter Biden deal smacks of profiteering on his father’s position.”
That “profiteering,” many say, involved Biden senior pushing Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, when he was investigating Burisma Holdings, which employed Hunter Biden. Biden, the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, says he did nothing wrong. But the then-vice president’s son, an irresponsible drug addict with no experience in energy, somehow wound up on Burisma’s board of directors a month after the vice president visited Ukraine to deliver an aid package in 2014, as Lee Smith of Real Clear Investigations wrote yesterday. In March 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if Ukraine didn’t pink-slip Shokin.
But beyond bringing in the Bidens under oath, Dinan noted, “things could get even crazier if articles of impeachment include the special counsel’s investigation into Trump’s behavior concerning Russia”:
Turley said that could give Mr. Trump a chance to raise all the lingering questions about decisions made by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department and the FBI. Several ongoing investigations are expected to find major fault with how investigators pursued Mr. Trump, beyond the already embarrassing text exchanges between Mr. Strzok and his paramour, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
He said that might explain Mrs. Pelosi’s reluctance to pull the impeachment trigger over the Russia accusations, and her insistence on trying to keep things focused on Ukraine.
“The optics of this Senate trial could be quite grotesque. You could have the Democrats beating Trump with the Ukraine call, you could have Trump beating the Democrats up over Biden,” he said.
What About Clinton?
What Dinan didn’t report is this: If the Democrats impeach Trump on the Ukraine call, the president could also force testimony from top officials of the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton presidential effort in 2016, and perhaps even Hillary Clinton.
That’s because a DNC consultant, whom the committee paid $71,918, sought dirt on Trump and former campaign chief Paul Manafort from Ukraine’s embassy, as The Hill’s John Solomon has reported.
As for Clinton, RCI’s Smith wrote yesterday, her 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 consulting firm, which compiled multiple reports that falsely connected Trump to Russia via Manafort and his work in Ukraine.
Christopher Steele, the British spy who assembled the dossier, falsely accused Trump of purposely ignoring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during the campaign in exchange for hacking the DNC’s e-mails and their publication by WikiLeaks.
Clinton campaign button men, of course, passed that information to the media.
Trump might get what he wants: the truth about Russiagate and Biden-Burisma, not from Zelensky, but from the Democrats if they impeach him.
Photo: AP Images
