No, not that impeachment. The attempts to impeach Trump are over, having been successful in the House where The Former Guy was impeached but failed in the Senate, which declined to remove him from office. Unless Trump somehow manages to get re-elected, his days of being impeached are over. (Although House Republicans are talking about trying to expunge Trump’s impeachments from the record, which shows exactly what their priorities are).
Instead, I’m talking about Joe Biden. House Republicans have been hell-bent on a revenge impeachment of President Biden and have spent the past year and a half looking for a justification to proceed. Lauren Boebert (R-Col.) even claimed that she was being directed by God to push for impeachment. To that end, they’ve been holding hearings into the “Biden family” finances and business activities for the past few months.
Lost amid the furor when the Trump Indictment III dropped last week was a hearing that was supposed to be a smoking gun implicating President Biden in his son Hunter’s wrongdoing. The hearing involved testimony from Devon Archer, a business associate of Hunter Biden.
Immediately after the hearing, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), a member of the Oversight Committee that held the hearing, told reporters that Archer’s testimony lacked direct links between wrongdoing and President Biden.
Speaking to CNN, Goldman said, “The witness (Archer) was very consistent that none of those conversations ever had to do with any business dealings or transactions.”
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) seemed to confirm Goldman’s analysis of the hearing when he said, “When Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States, he joined Hunter Biden’s dinners with his foreign business associates in person or by speakerphone over 20 times” but failed to identify any single time in which the vice president discussed business, legal or otherwise, with his son.
This has been my criticism of the Republican investigation all along. The Republican hype about alleged Biden corruption has not been matched by the evidence that they have been able to provide. Comer says that Archer’s testimony reaffirmed questions about Joe Biden’s knowledge and involvement in Hunter’s business activities, but an investigation that is now about a half a decade old should be much further along… if there is anything to find.
In the days that followed, Republicans failed to trumpet the discovery of any smoking guns in Archer’s (or anyone else’s) testimony. With Donald Trump’s indictment for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results in the headlines, evidence of criminal activity by Joe Biden would have been a welcome diversion. Instead, Rep. Comer released the transcript of Archer’s interview on Thursday to little fanfare.
Comer’s website lists “key exchanges” from the interview, but the smoking gun fizzled and misfired. Archer said that he believed that Hunter was hired into Burisma, the controversial Ukrainian energy company, because of the value of the Biden family “brand” but failed to directly tie Joe to the deal.
“Well, I mean, he [Hunter] was a lobbyist and an expert and obviously he carried, you know, a very powerful name,” Archer said. “So I think it was ‑‑ that’s what they were asking for.”
Comer’s key exchanges detail how Hunter would call his father with his business associates around, but noticeably absent from the highlights is Archer’s claim that business was not discussed in these phone calls.
At one point, Archer stressed, “ I’ve said across the board, there was no business-deals specifics discussed ever at any of these things, but it was — it was a nice, you know, conversation.”
In one amusing exchange, a questioner asks Archer, “Did you ever witness Hunter Biden asking Joe Biden to do something for — you know, to help [Chinese company] BHR [Patners] or help out Jonathan Li [CEO of BHR Partners]?”
“A college recommendation,” Archer answers. “She didn’t get in.”
The testimony also exploded myths that Republicans have propagated about the Bidens’ business relationship. When asked about the allegation that Mykola Zlochevsky bragged about bribing two Bidens with $5 million each, Archer said that he was not aware of the payments.
“I would assume he’s probably talking about me and Hunter, but I don’t know. But I don’t know anything about those five,” he said.
“And in Ukraine, in Russia, they brag about how much — they brag about bigger bribes than they actually give,” Archer added.
Archer also disputed Republican claims that Hunter Biden was influencing US policy through his father. Archer speculates that Hunter was giving the illusion of influence with his father to the management of Burisma.
“I have no basis to understand what his father and his conversations were about policy in Ukraine,” he testified, “But, as you can see, that seems pretty familiar, that, you know, he can’t influence it but take credit for it.”
The questioner clarified, “In other words, it’s not that Hunter Biden was influencing U.S. policy. It’s that Hunter Biden was falsely giving the Burisma executives the impression that he had any influence over U.S. policy.”
“I think that’s fair,” Archer confirmed.
And that seems to be the bottom line. Hunter Biden was somewhat of a con man. He would apparently get his dad on the phone to say “hello” and then parlay that into the idea that Joe was involved in his business dealings.
Atcher agreed several times to the proposition that Hunter was “projecting this illusion of access to his father.” That is problematic, but it is not illegal. At least not for Joe and probably not for Hunter. The Republicans have not even conclusively shown that Joe was even aware that Hunter was making money off of their relationship, much less that the elder Biden was getting a cut.
The correlation between Joe and Hunter is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s problems with his brother, Billy. Billy Carter was a ne’er-do-well brother of the president who embarrassed Jimmy by, among other things, becoming a registered agent of Muammar Ghadaffi’s Libya. Billy got into trouble on numerous fronts, but his problems were never connected to President Carter.
To the Republicans who claimed during Trump’s impeachments that criminal activity was necessary, the evidence against Biden clearly falls short. As I’ve explained in the past, I don’t hold this view as the original intent of “high crimes and misdemeanors” included a variety of both criminal and noncriminal offenses. I favored both Trump impeachments since Trump clearly did what he was accused of and his actions in both cases were clearly abuses of power.
Other Republicans, those who simply want revenge, aren’t worried about the proper use of impeachment, but they do have other concerns. Chief among these is politics.
If Republicans are somehow able to muster enough votes from their moderate members to impeach Biden, it is highly unlikely they will have the votes in the Senate to remove him from power. While they might technically exact revenge, they would likely do so at a high cost.
An obviously politically-motivated revenge impeachment of Joe Biden would likely unite the fractured Democratic Party and turn moderates and independents against the GOP. Voters typically want the parties to work together rather than instigate pointless and damaging and divisive political battles.
The disappointing (for Republicans) result of the Archer hearings was evident in Rasmussen polling from Friday. The right-leaning pollster found that support for impeachment hearings against Biden had declined from 42 percent in May to 38 percent. And I’d guess, based on my observations of Rasmussen, that those results overstate the truth if anything.
For comparison, FiveThirtyEight’s polling average showed that about 47 percent of Americans consistently favored removing Trump from office during the Ukraine aid scandal. That rose to 52 percent after the January 6 insurrection. Even with a slight majority of Americans favoring impeachment for Trump, there weren’t enough votes to get the job done in the Senate. It would be political suicide for Republicans to proceed with 38 percent (or less) support.
As I’ve said in the past, I’m open to the idea that Joe Biden has engaged in unethical or illegal business deals, but I also look at the evidence. So far the Republicans haven’t been able to prove anything beyond the fact that Joe called his son often to exchange pleasantries and talk about the weather. And that’s after investigations that began back around the middle of the Trump Administration. After all, that was what the Ukraine aid scandal was about. Republicans even released a report on the old investigation of the Bidens just prior to the 2020 election that found no wrongdoing on Joe’s part.
Republicans talk a lot about witch hunts. It’s starting to look a lot like they are running one.
Once again:
They.
Do.
Not.
Care.
The GOP is using the threat of impeachment to wear down ordinary Americans, so we won’t push back on their increasing fascistic leanings. They are flooding the zone with Sh!t so people will loose the ability to determine fact from fiction. They are leading with raw negative emotions – as they have for over four decades – to drive people into rage filled reactions instead of reason filled analysis.
In so doing they can cement power – or so they think.Report
I see no evidence that Joe is more corrupt than normal, or that his family is benefiting from their relationship more than normal.
It was probably worthwhile to do the investigation, certainly from a risk-reward political stance, but it was a dry well.Report
Right – its not like Biden made his son a formal White House Advisor or anything.Report
If he were a formal WH advisor and done the sorts of things he did, i.e. sold access or the illusion of access, then we might be into illegal territory. Now “illegal for whom” gets interesting.Report
Please see Kushner, Jared for another example.Report
The Billionaire? His gov job paid less than his original job.
If you are going to claim it was corrupt then you need to be a lot more specific.
It wasn’t the equiv of HRC’s daughter being hired as an “artist” by NBC for $600k a year. Nor Hunter being hired as an oil expert for $600k a year with no oil expertise and not speaking the language.
Trump did corrupt things, to the best of my knowledge Jared isn’t alleged to be involved in them.Report
What I’m claiming is that if it’s acceptable for Jared Kushner to be named an actual White House aid, while raking in millions because he had actual access to the oval office in an official capacity, then its acceptable for Hunter Biden to call his dad to create the illusion of access even though he apparently never employed that access. We have talked often around here – at your insistence I might add – that “corruption” has both legal and moral/ethical dimensions, and that something can be legal but still unethical. Thus corrupt.Report
Define “raking in millions because he had actual access to the oval office in an official capacity”. If you’re going to claim he was doing insider trading you need to get real specific.
JFK’s brother was appointed US AG. He got the job from a personal relationship with the President but he actually did the job for which he was hired. Far as I can tell, Jared did the same thing but he was given a lot less power (thus avoiding the 1967 Federal Anti-Nepotism statute).
If you want to call the President hiring a relative for any job that they can legitimately do corrupt then you can… but you don’t seem willing to do that because you keep larding it up with vague “raking in millions” claims.
RE: Hunter
Hunter is/was doing things we have outlawed for the children of foreign politicians. The name of the law is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
My expectation is if we decide to outlaw various corrupt practices, then what Hunter did will be outlawed as a problem while what Jared did will not.Report
Start here. Like Biden it’s not (yet) illegal, but mighty shady.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/jared-kushner-affinity-partners-saudi-arabiaReport
Well, it looks like lots of smoke, which might indicate fire. The counter point is Jared set this up after he (and Trump) left office.
My strong expectation is Hunter’s amazing ability to get hired to do very little disappears the moment his dad leaves office. Like how HRC’s charity’s international arm folded the moment she lost the election.Report
“More Corrupt than Normal.”
…
Right. And we just wasted how much time on a Presidential Impeachment to tell Don to “keep your paws off our corruption?” (Please bear in mind, SBF was a conduit to get money from the Ukraine to American Electioneering.)
…
I’m reminded of the old bit about “Everything’s the same, except we’re all cats. In another universe.”Report
This is a thought experiment. I’m not sure I completely buy this line of thought myself. But I do think there’s some value to playing the game, if only for a couple of minutes.
After all, we think we have a pretty good idea of what a corrupt President would look like. A corrupted President would steer policy towards interests from which he would benefit, either immediately or in the future. He might use a family member as a proxy to collect this graft, but he’d for sure be doing things that we could plausibly translate into actual dollars flowing into his pocket. Debatably, we’d see connections between the President and past associates or donors or sponsors or allies and understand some future repayment after the President had left office.
What would an actually, completely, totally honest and non-corrupt President look like? What behavior could you point to that would tell you the President was being straight up and straight arrow? Could you tell that the President was 100% non-corrupt from their policy decisions? Could you tell? Policy decisions cannot be neutral, after all; there will always be winners and losers.
So I’m not saying that Joe Biden is uncorruptable (although like the OP I don’t see evidence that anything in Ukraine has corrupted him despite a lot of ballyhoo by Republicans anxious to find something, anything, for which they might impeach him). But maybe it would be hard to tell if he wasn’t.Report
SBF is a pretty good indication that Biden’s Administration was corrupted. He was chosen to launder campaign finance money through the Ukraine because he looks like a guy from Superbad.
$40 million dollars to buy 2022 — to buy Fetterman (didn’t cost much) and a whole host of other people.
What scares me is that Biden’s Administration is kinda… incompetent. (They’ve sunk a lot of propaganda time and capital towards besmirching Trump, and it hasn’t even gotten the moderate republicans). If Jill starts feeling like the impeachment is closing in on her family… well, it wouldn’t be out of the question for them to release a “causus belli” for another “mail-in” election.Report
It’s amusing watching everything that people with half a brain (including Nancy Pelosi!) said about “impeachment” come true. It’s just a pointless statement now, a “vote of no confidence” so that the Opposing Party can make a formal declaration on the record that The President Is A Big Dumb-Head With A Big Stupid Face And We Don’t Like Them, Nyaaahh.Report