The Wrong Impeachers A large swath of Trump-skeptical voters haven’t forgotten the Democrats’ Russia collusion hoax. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wrong-impeachers-11572649090
Donald Trump keeps it simple, and likely too simple given Ukraine’s opaque and corrupt politics, when he says Joe Biden arranged the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into a company that employed his son.
You can find quotes on both sides from Ukrainians, but all have axes to grind. And why was Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko so resistant to the prosecutor’s firing that Mr. Biden had to threaten to hold back $1 billion in aid? Never explained. Some reports say the prosecutor was actually using the threat of investigating Burisma as a lever to extort something of value from regime colleagues—which makes a certain sense.
Mr. Biden can claim he was uninfluenced by his son’s employment. But his staff knew about the job. The Ukrainians knew. America’s European allies knew. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund knew. All knew that Burisma had to be pussyfooted around to avoid causing a scandal for Mr. Biden that might mess up the Obama administration’s ability to sustain support for the shaky regime.
This is what made Hunter Biden worth the money Burisma paid him to sit on its board between April 2014 and April 2019. And whatever the reason for firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin, it was decidedly not with the goal of making trouble for Burisma.
Until a few weeks ago, the press understood the implicit corruption of U.S. foreign policy involved here. The facts themselves may not be disqualifying for Mr. Biden, but the sight of him endlessly prevaricating could be. And the story is not going away because Democrats have put Ukraine at the center of their impeachment spectacle.
Then there’s this: On Aug. 28, 2016, the Financial Times reported that Mr. Trump’s rise to the GOP nomination had spurred “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a US election.” We open a can of worms when holding U.S. candidates responsible for things foreign governments do, or refrain from doing, to influence our elections. But the facts here are more compelling than anything dug up against the shambolic Trump campaign. Mr. Biden was acting as a virtual U.S. proconsul to Kiev, using U.S. aid to bludgeon actions from the Poroshenko government at the very moment a prominent Ukrainian ally was leaking confidential investigative material to discredit Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Mr. Trump’s way of fishing in these waters has been typically ill-advised, but presidents always have their political interests in mind when conducting foreign policy. (JFK and LBJ were blunt with aides about how their Vietnam decisions were influenced by their re-election needs.) Mr. Trump is also unique in the degree to which he is opposed in his own bureaucracy. Notice that Democrats have abandoned the silly claim that the “high crime” here is a campaign-finance violation. Their “damning” witnesses now are all administration officials who, unlike the president, are keen to turn the U.S. into Ukraine’s military guarantor.
Which brings us to the Achilles’ heel of this impeachment if the goal is to bring along a broad public: Democrats’ and the media’s astonishing and studied obliviousness to the bonfire they made of their own credibility with the Russia hoax. Unless I miss my guess, even many Trump-skeptical voters have no interest in giving victory to so corrupt an opposition. An irony is that many of these voters would probably make an exception for Mr. Biden, in whom they have a hard time seeing the kind of fanatically careerist sleaziness that motivates Adam Schiff. (Indeed, Mr. Biden keeps stepping in it with his base by saying nice things about various GOP colleagues.)
Let’s briefly touch on a few other points. The universal pretense that persons in authority (who aren’t Mr. Trump) know what they’re doing plays a role here. The media would have you believe Mr. Trump’s bureaucratic enemies are uniformly competent, disinterested and patriotic.
Secondly, I’ve come to regret referring to journalism as a profession. It’s clearly an industry given to “driving the numbers” with the trope du jour. Exceptions are as likely to be found on the left as the right. T.A. Frank of Vanity Fair, Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept, the Nation’s Aaron Maté and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi are all writers on the left who knew the Russia collusion story was a fraud and said so for years.
Though I don’t expect to see it, one thing might yet transform our national dilemma: if Mr. Biden, in response to a reporter asking an interesting question for a change, lent his support to the Justice Department’s John Durham investigation into the Steele dossier and other troubling 2016 questions. The 2020 race then would become a shockingly different election from the one we’re now slated to get. The one we’re slated to get, unfortunately, is an all-out war of two sides that fundamentally reject each other’s legitimacy.
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