The weakling Republican Party needs to get some cojones and step up now to prepare for the impeachment of Joseph Robinette (yes, that is his middle name) Biden.
The GOP should make the clear case for impeachment a central piece of their congressional election plan for 2022. We already have a House resolution; now we need a sizable majority in the House of Representatives and Senate to convict and remove him. The time is ripe. The need is urgent.
If the weak-kneed Republican leadership will not do it, they should be replaced. The Paul Ryanesque House Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is certainly not up to the job, never defended Trump, and has so many skeletons in his closet—from rumored extra-marital affairs to bunking with turncoat RINO pollster, Frank Luntz—that he is an unacceptable Speaker of the House come 2022. Replace him now with someone like Steve Scalise (R-La.), who has a backbone, has taken one for the team, and is a patriot and populist of the first order. Why wait? He would impeach Biden.
On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), of cocaine fame, has literally been in bed with the Chinese for years and is precisely the kind of Grand Old Establishment Republican who stands in the way of draining the swamp. He personifies that cesspool of K Street interest group politics, lobbying, and patronage. If he won’t step down, replace him, too. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) would be a good choice and is a reliable conservative.
The resolution to impeach sets forth an article of impeachment stating, in his former role as vice president, and now as president, Biden abused the power of that office through enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors by allowing his son, Hunter Biden, to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept benefits from foreign nationals in exchange for favors.
The article states that, by such conduct, Biden
- endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government;
- threatened the integrity of the democratic system;
- interfered with the peaceful transition of power;
- imperiled a coordinate branch of government; and
- demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office.
The article also states that this conduct warrants immediate impeachment, trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
Needless to say, a case for impeachment could be made on several other avenues of willful misconduct and high crimes, such as disobeying U.S. law and opening the southern border to illegal immigrants without concern to the health or safety of Americans, disobeying the Supreme Court and installing an illegal moratorium on evictions, or challenging the illegal and stolen election by use of fraudulent means. But it is best to focus on just one count and slam dunk that case.
Again, according to the U.S. Constitution, the grounds for impeaching a president are very straightforward. The Constitution provides that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” (Article I, section 2) and “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments . . . The president, vice president, and all civil officers of the United States are subject to impeachment.”
Here then is the overwhelming evidence in the case for impeachment against Joe Biden.
December 2013: Hunter Biden joined his father on Air Force Two on a trip to China, where his father met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Hunter arranged for Chinese Vice Premier Li Yuanchao to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li have what both parties describe as a social meeting.
December 2013: “Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China,” author and investigator Peter Schweizer says. “The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.”
April 2014: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings. Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who was chairman of Burisma, said at the time, “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.” Biden’s primary duty is to attend board meetings and energy forums in Europe once or twice a year, and he is paid $50,000 per month.
May 2014: At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney responds to a question about Hunter Biden’s joining the board and the appearance of a potential conflict of interest:
I would refer you to the vice president’s office. I saw those reports. You know, Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president. But I would refer you to the vice president’s office.
The same day, at a State Department press briefing, AP reporter Matt Lee asked, “Does this building diplomatically have any concerns about potential perceptions of conflict or/cronyism—which is what you’ve often accused the Russians of doing?”
“No, he’s a private citizen,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied.
May 2014: The U.K.-based Guardian newspaper blasts Biden’s new position, “Somebody needs to get involved in Ukraine’s corporate governance, and it might as well be a clutch of rich, well-connected American dudes with weird first names.”
The appointment of the vice president’s son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst. No matter how qualified Biden is, it ties into the idea that U.S. foreign policy is self-interested, and that’s a narrative Vladimir Putin has pushed during Ukraine’s crisis with references to Iraq and Libya.
Late in 2015: Chris Heinz ends his relationship with Rosemont Seneca, the company co-founded by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer in 2009.
December 2015: Writing in the New York Times, James Risen says of the vice president’s trip to Ukraine:
The credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.
December 2015: A New York Times editorial praises Biden’s message to the Ukrainian government but notes:
The credibility of Mr. Biden’s message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices. A spokesman for the son, Hunter Biden, argues that he joined the board of Burisma to strengthen its corporate governance. That may be so. But Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.
A few days later, Risen wrote at The Intercept that Biden’s message on the trip was being completely misinterpreted:
The then–vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase—not lessen—the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.
December 2016: Hunter Biden and his wife, Kathleen, file for divorce. The divorce becomes official April 14, 2017. At some time when Biden is “in the middle of the divorce,” he meets the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming. As CNN described, “at its height, Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”
January 2017: Joe Biden’s second term as vice president ends.
May 2017: Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming and Hunter Biden meet privately at a hotel in Miami. Biden says he offered to use his contacts to help “identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company CEFC China Energy, in liquified natural gas projects in the United States.” After the dinner, Ye sends a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for the meeting. During the divorce proceedings, Hunter Biden and his ex-wife Kathleen dispute the value of the diamond; he says it is worth $10,000, she contends it is worth $80,000.
Biden denied that the diamond could be considered a bribe. “What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office,” Hunter told The New Yorker he gave the diamond to his associates and doesn’t know what happened to it.
Also during the divorce proceedings, Kathleen “requested that Hunter’s access to their joint assets be limited because the couple had a double mortgage and owed more than $300,000 in back taxes.”
Summer 2017: Hunter Biden negotiated a deal for Ye’s company CEFC to invest in a liquefied-natural-gas project in Louisiana. Ye tells Biden that he’s worried about federal authorities’ looking into one of his business associates, Patrick Ho. Hunter agrees to represent Ho as his lawyer.
October 2017: After having an unpaid role on the company’s board since 2013, Hunter Biden acquired a financial stake in Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a 10 percent equity interest that was worth $430,000 as of July 2019, according to Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires. At least half of the firm’s stake is owned by Chinese entities, according to business records.
November 2017: Patrick Ho is arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport on bribery and money-laundering charges. He makes a phone call to James Biden, Joe Biden’s younger brother, and asks Biden for a lawyer. (Hunter Biden has not practiced criminal law.)
March 2018: Ye Jianming, the former boss of CEFC China Energy who gave Hunter the diamond, vanishes from public sight. The Chinese government detained him for questioning, but “no Chinese authority has released any information about him, and he has not been formally charged with any wrongdoing.”
June 2018: Devon Archer, who co-founded Rosemont Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden back in 2009, is convicted of “conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud” for allegedly defrauding investors in sham Native American tribal bonds. A few months later, the conviction is overturned and a new trial is ordered.
November 2018: U.S. prosecutors allege that a nonprofit funded by Ye Jianming—the man who gave Hunter Biden that large diamond, who is still missing and believed detained by the Chinese government—had used its United Nations status to offer millions in bribes to African leaders.
Hunter would later tell The New Yorker that he doesn’t see Ye as a “shady character at all,” and he characterized the outcome as “bad luck.”
March 2019: Patrick Ho, Biden’s former legal client, is sentenced to three years in prison for international bribery and money-laundering offenses. He was convicted of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC China Energy Company Limited.
April 2019: Writing in The Hill, John Solomon quotes Ukrainian former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, telling him that, before he was dismissed, he was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, and that his plans included “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
May 2019: The Intercept reports that Hunter Biden’s investment company in China, known as Bohai Harvest RST, invested in a company called Face++, which develops facial-recognition software. That facial-recognition software is used in an app that “provides [Chinese] law enforcement with easy, daily access to data detailing the religious activity, blood type, and even the amount of electricity used by ethnic minority Muslims living in the western province of Xinjiang.”
May 2019: Yuriy Lutsenko, the current Ukrainian prosecutor general, tells Bloomberg News that neither Hunter Biden nor Burisma was now the focus of an investigation. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws—at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”
May 2019: The New York Times reports, “A lawyer for Hunter Biden said he did not conduct any business related to the China investment fund on that trip” in December 2013.
The paper also reports:
Christopher Heinz argued to Devon Archer, who like Hunter Biden had joined Burisma’s board, that the posts created the appearance of selling influence, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Mr. Archer did not heed the advice. And Mr. Heinz, who was not involved in the China or Ukraine efforts, began decoupling his business interests from those of Mr. Biden and Mr. Archer.
July 2019: Hunter Biden tells The New Yorker in an interview, “I’ve pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck. I never considered it struggling, but it has always been a high-wire act.”
July 2019: Hunter Biden issues a new statement to the Washington Post about his time on the Burisma Holdings board: “At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business or my board service.”
Shokin tells the Post via email:
All I can say is that the appointment of Hunter Biden as a member of the Board of Directors of the energy company is rather questionable from the point of view of effectiveness. After all, this person had no work experience either in Ukraine or in the energy sector. . . . The activities of Burisma, the involvement of his son, Hunter Biden, and the [prosecutor general’s office] investigators on his tail, are the only, I emphasize, the only motives for organizing my resignation.
Other anti-corruption activists in Ukraine strongly disagree with Shokin’s assessment of why he was dismissed. Clearly Hunter’s father got him the gig and protected his ass (on live TV no less) once he was hired.
The Verdict
As the timeline and facts amply demonstrate, Joseph Biden and his son Hunter, were involved in high crimes and misdemeanors that amount to bribery. On more than one occasion they used his government office to unduly influence policy and enrich themselves.
If that is not enough, we now have the Biden record of treason in Afghanistan and surrender to the Jihadist Taliban regime while leaving Americans behind, giving the enemy $85 billion in armaments, and killing 13 U.S. service members—all for a photo-op.
We have the goods on Biden, and he needs to go—one way or the other.
Impeach him.