RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember January? I know it feels like several lifetimes ago, the before times of life as we used to know it. But think back to the biggest story of those chilly days. It wasn’t the Chinese virus slowly spreading to our shores or the Democratic presidential primary. No, it was the impeachment of the president of the United States. This week’s bombshell New York Post story on Hunter Biden now shows what many of us suspected: The impeachment was a ridiculous sham.

The basis for the impeachment, for those whose recollections are understandably shaky, was that President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to launch investigations into the energy company Burisma for the purely political purpose of hurting Joe Biden. Central to that allegation was the argument that Trump and the United States had no legitimate interest in seeing Burisma investigated. If the trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop are accurate, and they have not been disputed, then this argument falls to pieces.

Pam Bondi, working for the Trump defense team, said this back during the national ordeal about the Democratic House managers’ constant attempts to call allegations against the Bidens “baseless”:

In their trial memorandum, the House managers describe this as baseless. Now, why did they say that? Why did they invoke Biden or Burisma over 400 times? The reason they needed to do that is because they’re here saying that the president must be impeached and removed from office for raising a concern. And that’s why we have to talk about this today. They say ‘sham.’ They say ‘baseless.’ They say this because if it’s OK for someone to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe there’s something here worth raising,’ then their case crumbles.

And here we are. If these emails are accurate, then it is as clear as is the summer sun that Hunter Biden was absolutely selling access to his father and the Obama administration in exchange for his lavish salary. This was literally at the heart of the Trump defense, and it really is a silver bullet. What reasonable person would even suggest that the president of the United States may not push allies to investigate legitimate corruption involving the executive branch of the federal government?

House Republicans this week sent requests for information to the FBI to see if they were in possession of these emails at the time of impeachment. It is an important question that the American people deserve an answer to. To borrow a phrase from another show-stopping trial of the century, if the email’s legit, you must acquit. As far as I know, there is no way to reverse an impeachment, but if there were one, now would be the time.

Remember, “Impeachment is forever”? It was the big catchphrase right before “Don’t touch your face” shot up to No. 1. When was the last time you even heard a Democrat say the word impeachment? If this black mark on Trump’s presidency is so very damning, then why isn’t the Biden campaign making a big deal about it? Or frankly, talking about it at all? The reason, of course, is that even back in January, Democrats were concerned that should Biden win the nomination, some of these chickens could come home to roost. Now they have, and my goodness, they are laying some heavy eggs.

What Trump must make clear in the final weeks of the election is that not only was his impeachment a giant lie, a despicable ploy by desperate Democrats, but it was also a massive cover-up on behalf of Joe Biden. It is time for what we naively thought would be the biggest story of 2020, namely impeachment, to make its way back into this election — not as Democrats intended as a negative for Trump, but as his ultimate vindication against charges we now know to be baseless, crude, and deeply cynical.