Events outpace the ability to keep up with them. Even at this moment as this is written, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal multi-committee impeachment inquiry; President Trump says he will release the full transcript of his July 25 “perfect call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the House Intelligence Committee says it has heard from the whistleblower’s attorney to arrange his testimony.
While all of this will likely change hour by hour and day by day with much more to come over many months just 13 months from the 2020 election, there are some fundamentals worth observing.
The whistleblower’s reported disclosures put Trump on the phone with Ukraine’s Zelensky urging him eight times to investigate Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, for Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine during the Obama administration and to examine Joe Biden’s role or not in that.
As to Hunter Biden, the New York Times and other mainstream news organizations have reported extensively on his ethically dubious Ukrainian business involvement, which stunk of nepotism and is one knot in a tail of Hunter Biden business messes tied to the kite of his father’s political career, prominence, and power.
Hunter is the son who — divorced from his wife in 2015 after she alleged in her divorce filing that he had blown all their money on strip clubs and drugs, leaving them broke — in 2017 entered an affair with his sister-in-law, widow of his just deceased brother Beau. The affair ended. Where that improbable escapade left them only they know but it suggests that all is not and for a long time has not been well within the Biden family.
If all of that, the business and personal sordidness, were just about Hunter Biden it would not matter. But Hunter Biden is not about himself. He is all about Joe Biden, which is the reason Trump saw and pursued an opening to discredit the man everyone says would be the strongest Democrat against Trump. That’s the common wisdom although we know that the common wisdom in politics commonly fails. I don’t share it, not at all.
Hunter’s excesses, his unsubtle trading on his father’s name perhaps shines an unflattering light on Joe Biden’s judgment that will be judged by the voters. Trump, however, could not wait for that judgment but allegedly attempted to use the bellows of the presidency to fan a political conflagration that would consume Biden’s candidacy.
We know this much from news reporting and be sure to note that qualification. It is reported. None of it is yet fact in a court of law or congressional hearing, no matter how much it has become fact in the court of public opinion: Trump acknowledges the Zelensky phone call, acknowledges there was a hold on $391 million in U.S. military and foreign aid to Ukraine. He denied any link between the call and the aid. The “whistleblower” reported knowledge of the call and perhaps other like concerns to the Inspector General of the office of the Director of National Intelligence.
We know it is reported — is reported — that on eight occasions during that call Trump urged Zelensky cause Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business activity and his father’s involvement if any when he was vice-president with a heavy portfolio concerning Ukraine.
We know it is reported Joe Biden urged a former Ukrainian regime to fire a prosecutor, later proven to be corrupt, who had launched an investigation of the company of a Ukrainian oligarch on whose board Hunter Biden served. We have read that a great many others urged the same and that yes, the prosecutor was corrupt
And we know that everyone who is anyone categorically denies that Joe Biden did or would have done such a thing to benefit Hunter. Sadly however we know that Joe Biden did not tell his son to stay out of Ukraine in the first place nor, apparently, ever told him to stop trading on his name. We could also note that no matter how much he did in that vein, it pales by comparison to the colossal, open corruption of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and the Trump brothers, Donald and Eric, and their father.
We know that $391 million of American military and foreign aid earmarked for Ukraine that was placed on hold by Trump was released. The transcript will tell us if Trump openly linked the two — investigation of the Bidens with payment of the aid. In any case, whether literally mentioned or implied such linkage would raise the specter of extortion and bribery, either or both “high crimes” in constitutional terms for certain.
Lastly, for now, we know that all of this has set off a proverbial firestorm in which the heat of the political/governmental conflagration has taken the prospect of impeachment from about 50/50 to virtual certainty once the case is built.
But if there is impeachment nothing says there will be a trial. The Constitution makes the Senate sole trier of impeachment.
It says nothing – nothing – that requires the Senate to try the matter. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can let it sit notwithstanding the wrath of the Democratic Party and most of the political punditry. He has long since shown himself immune to criticism. His calculation will be solely what is best to retain a Republican Senate in the 2020 election.
We know to absolute certainty there are not and will not be the required 67 Senators to vote to convict. Democrats have 46 seats. Republicans have 54. There is more chance that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia would vote no than that 21 Republicans would vote yes to convict Trump and remove him from office.
For now, there is this: Trump can run for reelection under impeachment by the House, using it to gin his base for the better part of a year.
An impeached but unconvicted president could be reelected. If hypothetically, he was actually convicted before November 2020 he could remain a candidate for President even though if reelected he could not serve again as president or in any other federal office.
The Constitution says you cannot serve in the federal office again on conviction for impeachment. It does not say you may not run for an office. Would Trump? Do you have any doubt he would?
This all points to this: All the vast, unending commotion and corruption of the Trump presidency to date is but prelude to what is to come, very likely to the very most ferocious year in the history of American politics.
Peeling the Onion 