Thank God for Pam Bondi. You would’ve thought the Trump defense team would’ve learned something from Adam Schiff and the Democrats droning on for 21 hours in their pursuit to overturn the 2016 election. I was excited that the Republicans would get their turn and we’d get some excitement injected into the impeachment trial.
Then came Ken Starr. Watching a hog sweat looked electrifying by comparison. Starr wasted time on the history of the special council. He bored us with backstory of how the special counsel replaced the independent counsel created after Watergate. That law was scrapped in 1999 for the special counsel law. And I’m sitting there thinking there was no special counsel in this impeachment. It appeared to me that Ken Starr was trying to tell everybody that the Whitewater investigation he headed against Bill Clinton wasn’t his fault. Who cares?
It wasn’t until late afternoon on the first full day of President Trump’s defense that we finally saw somebody with something to say. Pam Bondi, a former attorney general from Florida, at last explained to viewers at home what this impeachment trial was all about. It’s about Joe Biden. Democrats will tell you Biden has nothing to do with it. Biden has everything to do with it. Here’s why.
President Trump is being impeached for supposedly abusing his powers as president to investigate a political rival. President Trump contends he wanted Ukraine to investigate Biden because his actions appeared to be corrupt. In order for President Trump to exonerate himself he has to show there was probable cause to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Bondi laid out the case.
Hunter Biden took a position on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, was a partner with Hunter Biden in an investment firm called Rosemont Seneca. When Hunter took the gig with Burisma, Heinz sent an e-mail to Kerry’s top aides letting them know he had nothing to do with Burisma or Biden’s decision to join them. Heinz severed his business ties with Hunter Biden.
Burisma was a corrupt entity, one that everybody in the Obama administration knew was corrupt. At the time Hunter Biden joined them, making 83 grand a month, the British Serious Fraud Office was investigating Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, for money laundering. The left will argue that Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, would not cooperate with the Brits on the money laundering investigation and thus allowed Zlochevsky to successfully move his ill-gotten booty out of the UK to Cyprus. That could very well be true. However, it’s difficult to understand how Joe Biden was coming to town to rid the Ukraine of a corrupt prosecutor while his own son was working for the corrupt oligarch this prosecutor was supposedly helping.
Optics. They love to use that word in Washington. I can’t think of a situation with worse optics. And don’t tell me Joe didn’t know his son was working for Burisma. Everybody in the Obama administration knew. Obama himself should’ve pulled Joe aside and told him to get Hunter off the board of that corrupt company. If Joe didn’t, then Obama should’ve sent someone else. He did neither.
That sets up the obvious question: If the chief prosecutor in Ukraine is investigating a corrupt company that the VP’s son works for, why is Joe trying to get the guy fired? That’s exactly what President Trump was asking, and it got him impeached. It’s doubtful the president will be removed, but now we know why they were so desperate to do it.
