RUTHFULLY YOURS

I don’t understand. Former Vice President Joe Biden asked Ukraine to fire a prosecutor so Donald Trump needs to be impeached? I need somebody to connect the dots. Before we go any further down the road of impeachment, I’m challenging advocates of impeachment to answer these six questions.

Should Joe Biden be immune from consequence if, as suspected, he threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine to enforce his demand to remove the prosecutor investigating his son’s Ukrainian company?

This is more than a “conspiracy theory.” Joe Biden bragged openly about having the prosecutor fired. And contrary to the reporting that the investigation went dormant, we just learned from investigative reporter John Solomon that Ukrainian authorities “raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S. presidential election.” Solomon went on to report that Burisma specifically invoked Hunter Biden’s name in its efforts to enlist U.S. diplomatic help to stop the investigation.

Most Americans agree that we cannot afford to have our foreign policy guided by these side-deals between foreign interests and the relatives of politicians and diplomats charged with representing U.S. interests. Americans have a lot of questions about why certain policies are promoted by the establishment in spite of public opinion to the contrary. This is a serious problem of experts ignoring elections and subverting the will of the American people.

With Hunter Biden receiving an outsized salary and his father using U.S. aid to get the prosecutor fired, why shouldn’t U.S. authorities look into that?

Assuming you answered, “no,” to the first question, what’s wrong with the president asking Ukraine to cooperate in any DoJ investigation of the apparent pay-for-play Biden/Ukraine scandal?

As noted by the White House, “Senate Democrats pressured Ukraine last year to cooperate on the Mueller investigation into President Trump. This year, President Trump has asked Ukraine to fully cooperate with any Justice Department investigation into the actions of former Vice President Joe Biden and his family in Ukraine.”

Why is there anything wrong with Donald Trump asking Ukraine to cooperate in an investigation of a credible allegation of Biden threatening to withhold aid to protect his son’s company?

What “crime” did Trump commit by asking Ukraine to look into the Bidens’ Ukraine shenanigans? 

Missing from the House Impeachment resolution is any discussion of what exactly the House is investigating. Indeed, I could not find the word, “Ukraine,” anywhere in the resolution. Are Democrats reserving the flexibility to change the charge at the end of the process? How is the president supposed to defend himself if he doesn’t know what constitutes the “high crime” or “misdemeanor” that he is accused of committing?

Some have used the term, “extortion.” But extortion involves a threat of violence, not adding a condition to foreign aid. Others have argued the president solicited a “bribe” by asking for dirt. By that logic, wouldn’t everyone connected with the Steele dossier be guilty of the same thing? Neither term makes sense. I can’t think of any charge against Trump here that wouldn’t apply also, indeed, even more so to Biden’s threat to block aid. If Biden’s call (which came first) broke the law, then asking about the call is a legitimate area of inquiry for the Constitutional head of American law enforcement (the president). What am I missing?

With an election in November 2020, why not instead skip the trial in the Senate and use the electoral process to deny Trump the 2nd term?

According to all the sources Democrats counsel us to trust, polls now show Democratic candidates beating Trump in the general election. The full Senate trial might not conclude until late spring/early summer of 2020. This falls only a few months short of the November 2020 election. How do you explain to a voter at that point why she can’t bet trusted to make her own decision about whether Donald Trump should serve a second term?

Why is Adam Schiff in charge?

Representative Adam Schiff chairs the Intelligence Committee. The Washington Post recently awarded Schiff four Pinocchios in a fact check of his claim that he did not coordinate with the whistleblower before he filed his complaint. He also claimed to have seen direct evidence of the Trump/Russia Collusion that never materialized. He also has a pending ethics complaint for performing a parody of the Trump/Ukraine phone call that inaccurately represented what was said during the phone call. Why put him in charge of the impeachment effort when (1) almost any other member of Congress would be less tainted by bias, (2) his committee does not have an obvious basis for jurisdiction, and (3) he has a record of misrepresenting intelligence to the American public?

Why isn’t the House following the Nixon and Clinton precedents?

I’ve examined the arguments that the Democrats are not required to follow the Nixon and Clinton precedents which allowed the president to have attorneys present during the inquiry, provided for public hearings, and designated the suspected wrongdoing at the outset. I understand that the House has the power to ignore precedent. But why? What makes this scenario different from the Nixon and Clinton scenarios?

Please email your answers directly to me and I will honestly read and consider your case. If you persuade me, I will submit for publication an opinion piece restating your arguments.