It appears the simplest route to impeachment relates to Trump’s effort to extort the president of Ukraine, to get him to gin up an investigation of Hunter Biden that might smear his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, who Trump apparently fears as a potential Democratic nominee. Ukraine needed the $400 million Congress appropriated to help the embattled nation fend off Russian-backed separatists. Trump was holding onto the military aid package until he could talk things over with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. A heavily edited memo of the call, released Sept. 25, shows that, after some small talk about Trump’s support of Ukraine, when Zelensky said he hoped to buy American Javelin anti-tank missiles so it could better repel armored assaults by Russian-supported fighters, Trump replied, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
Trump pressed Zelensky to use the help of Attorney General William Barr in opening an investigation of a company involved in the beginnings of the FBI inquiry of Russia’s 2016 election interference. He also wanted a corruption investigation connected to the Bidens.
Trump and his Republican supporters insist that no “quid pro quo” was discussed in the call. Of course, Trump didn’t need to spell out what might happen if Zelensky didn’t play ball. A few days later the House Intelligence Committee released a series of text messages that show State Department officials made it quite clear to their counterparts in Ukraine that staying in Trump’s good graces — and getting the military aid — was contingent on Ukraine providing Trump the concocted evidence he could use to bolster his crackpot conspiracy theories about the Democrats.
Hunter Biden is a lawyer who joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, in 2014, when the company was trying to clean up its image after its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, was forced to flee to Russia with former Ukraine president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted after massive, sustained protests that focused on corruption in his administration.
Joe Biden, who was then vice president, apparently had nothing to do his son getting on the board, with a $50,000-a-month salary, even if having the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine for a dad didn’t hurt Hunter’s employment prospects. But there is no evidence Joe Biden did any favors for Burisma, and the reason he (and other European nations and international bodies) pushed for the ouster of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016 was because he was widely viewed as corrupt. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, has said Hunter Biden didn’t violate any Ukrainian laws.
Hunter Biden left the board of Burisma earlier this year as his father was launching his presidential campaign.
Trump also has made unfounded allegations about the Bidens in China. On several occasions, Trump has intimated that the Bidens have received millions of dollars from China, implying they capitalized on the then vice president’s political power and connections.
Trump said Oct. 3, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” alleging that they received a “payoff” worth billions. Trump said that while he hasn’t yet asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to look into the Bidens, he will start “thinking about it.”
But CNN reported Oct. 3 that in a June call with Xi, Trump raised Biden’s political prospects as well as those of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi he would remain quiet on Hong Kong protests as trade talks progressed.
According to the New York Times, Hunter Biden has a 10% interest in BHR Partners, a private-equity fund that the Chinese government-owned Bank of China has invested in. As of May 2019, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Hunter had not received any money from the fund or in connection with his role as an unpaid advisory board member.
In July 2019, more than two years after his father left office, Hunter purchased an equity stake in the BHR fund, valued around $430,000, according to the Washington Post.
Yes, the optics of Joe Biden’s son taking advantage of foreign business opportunities while his dad was vice president don’t look good, but bad optics are bipartisan. What do you think Donnie Jr. and Eric have been doing since their dad got into the White House? And at least they don’t have government jobs, like Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who were supposed to stop doing business while they serve as special assistants to the president, but they took in as much as $135 million in revenue from real estate holdings, stocks and bonds and a book deal last year, according to their financial disclosures reported in June.
Still, it’s hard to believe Kushner’s position as Trump’s senior adviser did not play a role in Brookfield Asset Management taking a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue, the troubled Manhattan tower owned by the family of Trump’s son-in-law. Jared Kushner paid a record-setting $1.8 billion for the building in 2007, and it has been a drag on his family’s real estate company ever since.
The deal, in which Canada-based Brookfield paid $1.1 billion rent for the entire 99-year term upfront, helped the family resolve its biggest financial headache: a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower that was due in February 2019, the New York Times reported. Jared technically had divested himself from the property, but he “sold” the assets to his brother and a trust controlled by his mother. A lawyer described the transaction to the Times as a “shell game.”
The Kushners had spent more than two years on an international search for new partners or fresh financing that stretched from the Middle East to China.
Among Brookfield’s investors is the Qatar Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign funds, which raised questions about Jared’s involvement in the deal. Brookfield said that the Qataris had no knowledge of the deal before its public announcement.
The House can pass articles of impeachment any time now, and Senate Majority Leader “Moscow Mitch” McConnell (R-Ky.) appears to be confident that there is no way Democrats will get the 20 Republican senators needed for a two-thirds majority to remove the crooked incumbent president from office, but after the public gets a chance to focus on the shakedown of Zelensky, the admission that Trump raised the subject with Chinese President Xi, the acceptance of emoluments from foreign powers and domestic favor-seekers via payments to Trump-owned properties, such as the Trump International Hotel in D.C., which has become a favorite watering hole for lobbyists, and Trump’s obstruction of the congressional investigation of issues raised by the Mueller report might give Democrats the momentum not only to defeat Trump in November 2020, but also to flip at least three Senate seats now held by Republicans to regain control of the Senate (if they don’t regain the White House, they’ll need to flip four seats).
There are plenty of vulnerable Republican targets in the Senate, whose re-election prospects would diminish if they are saddled with an unpopular vote to keep crooked Trump in office. Democrats should force that vote upon them. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2019
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