On January 23rd 2018, former Vice President and current Democrat front runner, Joe Biden, told the Council on Foreign Relations that he forced the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating a Ukrainian energy company accused of wrongdoing. Referring to American foreign aid, Biden bragged, “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” The company was Burisma Holdings with whom the Vice President’s son, Hunter Biden, had a close business relationship through his law firm, and on whose board he sits for $50,000 a month.
A whistleblower, anonymous as of this writing, claimed that in a conversation on 25 July, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen the investigation into Hunter Biden and Burisma Holdings and that he threatened to withhold American foreign aid if the Ukrainian government did not do so. The whistleblower had no direct knowledge of the conversation and heard about it second hand. The Intelligence Inspector General determined the claim was not worth passing on to congress and the whistle blower was politically biased against the president. On Wednesday September 25th, President Trump released the transcript of his conversation with Zelensky, he mentions Joe and Hunter Biden once and asks Zelensky to look into the matter of the Vice President’s shakedown, nothing more. Even so, Democrats are calling for the impeachment of President Trump.
Since becoming House Speaker this January, Pelosi has had to squelch calls for impeachment from the radical members of the house. In the forefront of this effort is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the symbolic leader of ‘The Squad’ of hard-left Freshman Democrats. AOC last week declared that it was scandalous that the House had not yet impeached Trump. On the House floor, Congressman Al Green (TX) has forced three different impeachment votes. None have passed but with each vote the number of Democrats voting in favor increases. Earlier this week, seven moderate freshman House members, each from swing districts, published an editorial in favor of impeaching the president. Pelosi is under tremendous pressure from her caucus to act.
Finally, on September 24th, Pelosi came from a meeting with House Democrats and announced they would begin a formal Impeachment inquiry. She put forward no details on the inquiry, no specifics, and refused to say if a select committee will be established, when there will be House votes, and so on. Pelosi is stalling once again.
The Speaker knows that the polling data on impeachment for Democrats is terrible. One Monmouth University poll published on August 22nd found that 61% of Americans overall and 64% of crucial independent voters oppose impeaching President Trump. A June poll conducted by On Message found over 60% of voters in battleground states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Arizona oppose impeaching President Trump. A Morning Consult Poll conducted over the weekend, after the Ukraine story broke, showed only 37% of those polled nationally support impeachment. Still, the Democrats push impeachment. Perhaps the revelations about Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky will move these numbers.
But the Democrats made several highly inappropriate overtures to Ukraine themselves. The Hill reports that President Obama met with Ukrainian prosecutors in January of 2016 and urged them to drop their investigation of Burisma Holdings. This month, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) pressured Ukrainian officials to ignore Trump’s calls to investigate Hunter Biden and threatened to withhold US financial aid to the country. Several times during the 2016 election Democrat party officials urged the Ukrainian government to look for incriminating evidence on Trump. In 2018, Senators Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) who sent a letter asking the Ukrainian Attorney General to reopen investigations relevant to the now defunct Mueller probe about the Trump Campaigns alleged Russian Collusion.
After the years and long Mueller investigation over Russian election interference, which produced no evidence whatsoever of collusion or obstruction by the Trump campaign, the nation has tired of impeachment talk. But, Republicans haven’t. Given that the issue of impeachment is such a loser for the Democrats, the Republicans will talk about it ad nauseum. Unlike previous Republican presidents, Donald Trump fights and so do Republicans. In every television appearance, newspaper article, and tweet, Republicans will talk about Hunter Biden’s payouts from Burisma Holdings and his father’s pressure on his son’s behalf and the Democrats bullying of the Ukrainian government. Trump already did so at an impromptu press conference with President Zelensky in which he accused the Democrats and the media of propagating a hoax. The Republican counter-narrative is set. Democrats did it too and much, much worse. Pelosi and the House Democrats have fallen into a trap of their own making.
