Democrats’ latest impeachment line: Investigating corruption is ‘election interference’ By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://nypost.com/2019/12/09/democrats-latest-impeachment-line-investigating-corruption-is-election-interference/
Here is what you need to understand the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings on Monday: According to Democrats, any investigation of possible Democratic corruption, or of Democratic collusion with foreign officials to interfere in our elections, is itself impeachable interference in our elections.
Seriously.
Numerous problems mar the impeachment process — not least the rush to judgment. Democrats have been rushing congressional proceedings until they catch up with the judgment that the president must be impeached, a judgment House Democrats have already drawn. The haste rubs many Americans the wrong way.
Democrats have also had trouble identifying a crime. That’s why they appear to have settled on a vague “abuse of power” standard that would make every future president impeachable. Without being able to articulate egregious executive misbehavior, they are nevertheless racing ahead.
The public wonders: What’s the rush? After all, Democrats apparently didn’t think the “crisis” was so dire that their Thanksgiving holiday should be postponed. In 11 months, the American people will be able to boot President Trump from office if they believe he is unfit. So why should the political class be permitted to pre-empt voters?
Finally, Democrats have come up with an answer: Trump must be removed, because he is bent on colluding with foreign powers to interfere in our elections; he will do it “again” if he isn’t stripped of power.
“Again,” of course, hearkens back to the Democrats’ Russia “collusion” narrative. They can’t let go of that narrative, notwithstanding the fact that the Mueller probe debunked it. In their revisionist history, Trump’s quip that he hoped Russia would find the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton destroyed somehow proves the scheme that a score of aggressive prosecutors couldn’t find.
Plainly, Trump was trying to draw attention to his opponent’s misconduct. Indeed, the theory of the investigators and Democrats, for two years running, was that Trump was a hireling of the Kremlin, not that he was giving Putin orders.
The point is this: Democrats regard as impeachable “interference” any effort to investigate or draw attention to their known or suspected misconduct.
Democrats have repeated to numbing effect the refrain that Trump wanted the Ukrainians to conduct investigations “that would help him politically.” You aren’t supposed to ask why such investigations might have hurt Democrats. Or, if you do, the Democrats would have you believe that Trump was asking Kiev to “make up dirt” on Joe Biden, his potential 2020 opponent, as Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff misrepresented the matter in his “parody” version of the president’s July 25 phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart.
By the Democrats lights, it makes no difference whether Trump was asking for an investigation out of good-faith reasons. If Trump was asking for investigative assistance, you are to believe it can only be because he wanted foreign governments to meddle in our elections — it cannot be that there was something that cried out to be investigated.
That’s nonsense. For starters, Trump didn’t ask Ukraine for a “favor” and then cut right to the Bidens, as Democrats claim. Trump’s first ask was for help on Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.
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It’s a fact that Ukrainian officials did collude with Democrats in 2016. A Ukrainian court has so concluded. There is reason to believe that the Obama administration’s enforcement agencies leaned on their Ukrainian counterparts to investigate Paul Manafort, who served for a time as the Trump campaign’s chairman.
Ukrainian officials were in consultation with a Democratic political operative and Fusion GPS, the research firm that concocted the discredited Steele dossier at the Democratic National Committee’s and Clinton’s behest. Ukrainians were also complicit in the leaking of information that forced Manafort’s ouster from the Trump campaign.
Moreover, when Trump and the Ukrainian president did get around to discussing the Bidens, Trump didn’t ask for information to be manufactured. Burisma, a notoriously corrupt Ukrainian energy company, had recruited then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son to its board. Hunter Biden had no relevant experience, yet Burisma lavishly compensated him. At the time, Biden was Team Obana’s point man on Ukraine policy. Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who says he was trying to investigate Burisma.
This isn’t to say that the Bidens were necessarily involved in any illegal conduct. Nor is it to say that the effort by Ukrainian officials to put their thumb on the scale in favor of Clinton and against Trump was as serious or systematic as Russia’s cyber-espionage operations against Democratic email accounts. And presidents should probably leave requests for investigative help from a foreign power to the Department of Justice.
Still, it is absurd to insist that seeking to probe Democratic misadventures that warrant probing is somehow impeachable conduct. Yet in its push to undo the outcome of the 2016 election, the Democratic Party has learned to embrace absurdity.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant US attorney, is a contributing editor of National Review. Twitter: @AndrewCMcCarthy
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