President Joe Biden can be impeached for bribery, one of the two offenses specifically mentioned in Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.
The bribery does not — as Democrats reminded us smugly during the Trump impeachments — need to reach a criminal standard. It simply needs to be plain enough to make a plausible case — and we reached that level long ago, even before this week’s bombshell from the House Oversight Committee.
Committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) reported, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), confirmed, that an FBI document exists “that describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”
Comer has subpoenaed the document, lest it be suddenly classified or placed under seal in the ongoing criminal investigations of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Biden was never prosecuted, but there is plenty of evidence already in the public domain of conflicts of interest that the Obama administration, and later the Biden administration, never bothered to resolve.
Vice President Biden was in charge of foreign policy on Ukraine at the same time Hunter Biden, who had just been kicked out of the Navy for a drug violation, was appointed to the board of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
President Biden later boasted that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine unless it fired its chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who at the time had responsibility for investigations into Burisma. Democrats tried to defend Biden’s extraordinary intervention by claiming that Shokin himself was corrupt. But even the State Department, and the press, knew at the time there was a glaring conflict of interest.
Worse, an email on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — which Democrats, the media, Silicon Valley, and the national security apparatus did everything to suppress during the 2020 presidential election — showed that Burisma expected Hunter Biden to help “close down … any cases/pursuits” into the company and its founder. And Hunter Biden did, in fact, arrange for a meeting with then-Vice President Biden and a Burisma executive.
If the FBI document did, in fact, deal with Biden’s role in Ukraine, then it would appear that President Donald Trump was impeached not just for partisan political reasons, but also as part of a cover-up by Democrats.
We do not know that the FBI’s case against Joe Biden involved Ukraine. It could have involved any of the countries where Biden family members had interests — from Costa Rica to Kazakhstan, from China to Iraq.
Moreover, Comer’s committee recently reported that a Chinese Communist Party-linked company sent $3 million to a company controlled by a Biden associate, who distributed the funds to various Biden relatives.
All of this is ample grounds for an impeachment investigation.
It does not matter that the newly-surfaced allegations deal with Biden’s term as Vice President; Democrats taught us that you can impeach a former official. It does not matter that some of the corruption took place when Biden was a private citizen; China obviously knew that Biden had access to senior levels of the U.S. government and could return to politics.
As Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told us, “no one is above the law,” not even a president, and the niceties of criminal procedure can be cast aside. The case is clear; it is time for the House to authorize an impeachment inquiry.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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