National Review’s Argument Against Impeaching Biden Is Based on False Assumptions

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The American press, including even the Republican Party magazine National Review, is against the holding of impeachment hearings in the U.S. Congress against U.S. President Joe Biden. On September 12th, the Republican Speaker of the U.S. House (which is where the hearings will start) announced that these hearings would nonetheless be held. Immediately, National Review editorialized headlining “The Impeachment Risk” (as-if everything isn’t risky) and assumed that impeachment hearings are always only an expression of partisan politics, and that for Republicans now to support these hearings would be interpreted by the public as nothing more than Republican petulance against Democrat Joe Biden’s ongoing criminal prosecutions against the prior Republican President Donald Trump; and that therefore these hearings will only reduce not improve Republicans’ chances for electoral victory in 2024. They said that this would be only harmful, because “If they [Republicans in the House] do manage to impeach Biden, the Democratic Senate would never vote to convict him.” There, they risked making fools of themselves, because (as links here will prove) Joe Biden is the most corrupt President in American history, and makes Warren G. Harding, the most infamously corrupt U.S. President, a piker by comparison.

In other words: that magazine held the U.S. Constitution’s governmental system in such low regard as to believe that the actual facts in such a case can have no constructive impact upon its results — that only the politics matters and should matter. They acknowledged that Republican investigations whose evidences were made public on July 20th exposed “some gravely concerning behavior [by Joe Biden] through bank records, various other documents, and witness testimony. What they have found is that the Biden family and associates raked in millions of dollars from foreign entities that were funneled through various shell companies. The product for sale was access to and influence with then-vice president Biden; no other products or services were involved that could possibly have justified the sums involved.” Yet, they considered this to be only “gravely concerning behavior” (instead of shocking, and the first-ever instance of a U.S. President or Vice President having solicited and received a bribe and then performed the agreed-upon action of expending a billion dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money in return) despite their admitting that this “gravely concerning behavior” was nothing less than bribery — which even the Supreme Court’s landmark unanimous, 8-to-0, 2016 McDonnell v. U.S. decision that legalized corruption by U.S. public officials except for outright bribery — would label as being outright bribery (V.P. Joe Biden bribing Ukraine’s government with a billion dollars of taxpayer U.S. funding, on condition that the Ukrainian investigator into the Ukrainian corporation, Burisma, that had just hired Biden’s son would immediately be fired and replaced by someone acceptable to Joe Biden — which did happen, and so the investigation into Burisma stopped); and, so, National Review was calling this bribe by Biden with taxpayer funds, merely “gravely concerning behavior” and too much of a “risk” for the Party to hold hearings on, because it would be only futile, and would reduce Republican votes on Election Day 2024.

On July 21st, I headlined “The Significance of the Congressional Probes into FBI-Biden Corruption” and linked-through to the key evidences — including from Hunter Biden’s laptop — proving this corruption, and I concluded that:

The significance of the July 20th congressional releases is that not only did the FBI have Hunter’s laptop ever since December 2019, nearly a year before the election, but that what was shown on the laptop confirmed what the whistleblower to the FBI said to the FBI’s investigator — and that the top levels of the FBI (including the Trump and Biden Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray) had blocked all of that information, and had called it “Russian disinformation” and “hacking,” and consistently denied that any of it was established by any evidence to be true, factual.

If the FBI had investigated the information, instead of merely hid it from the public (ever since at least December 2019), Joe Biden almost certainly wouldn’t today be the U.S. President.

The same day as that National Review editorial, was published also an OpEd by their columnist Dan McLaughlin, “Impeaching Biden Is Just but Unwise”, which gave the following false excuses as ‘reasons’ why Republicans shouldn’t support impeaching this President:

“History furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments.” So what? And are dictatorships supposed to be any better than that, any less corrupt than “republican governments”? How favorable toward dictatoships is National Review?

“The failure of the 1998–99 Bill Clinton impeachment had established a high precedential bar for presidential impeachments.” Quite the contrary, his “I did not have sex with that woman“ was anything BUT a “high crimes and misdemeanors”; it was a stunningly low bar, not even illegal, and Ms. Lewinsky never alleged that he had raped her, the Republicans’ impeachment case against Clinton was ludicrous (though he had been a rotten President), and many U.S. Presidents had committed multiple adulteries and never charged with anything, and adultery is only a civil-law — not at all a criminal-law — matter, and the Bible-belting Republicans (such as, perhaps, Mr. McLaughlin) who pretend otherwise (that the failure of the Republicans’ case against Clinton constituted the failure of an exceptionally strong case to convict him) are either fools or liars to do so (to consider mere adultery — which isn’t a crime at all — a “high crimes and misdemenors”).

“We already know that an impeachment of Biden will die in the Senate.” Oh, really? You have a crystal ball?

“Republicans may feel that impeachment is necessary in order to break the story through the wall of media denial of the Biden family’s foreign grift. But it could easily work in the opposite direction, because impeachment will raise expectations that Republicans may not be able to meet, and the inevitable Senate acquittal — or worse, a failed vote in the House — will be painted by the press as a complete vindication of Biden.” Oh, really? You have a lot of crystal balls?

“The House’s power to issue subpoenas and question witnesses is not unlimited.” So what? The same is so in ANY trial.

“The main thrust of the investigation relates to Biden’s time as vice president — a job he no longer holds.” Joe Biden right now as President is carrying out the same policies he did when he bribed the leader of Burisma — the firm that had hired Biden’s son as its chief fixer in Washington.  No law says that if a person changes his/her current employment, that frees the person from being investigated and convicted of a bribery that had commenced during a prior employment.

“Republicans feel that they must put their investigation on stronger legal footing if they are to get the evidence they need.” That might be true (they might feel that way), but so what? It is, in fact, false (they already have loads of exceptionally strong evidence on which to convict). Furthermore: hearings in an impeachment matter empower investigators considerably more than prior investigators on those same matters had possessed access to. This is one of the reasons WHY these hearings will be historic, and not merely historical: they will be the top bribery-investigation in the entire history of the U.S. That’s what National Review magazine wants to forego.

Already, more than enough solid evidence has been made public displaying beyond any reasonable doubt, that Joe Biden committed bribery with, and thereby committed treason upon, the U.S. Government while a federal office-holder, and should therefore be punished with the full force of the law, for that exceptionally “high crime.” This cannot happen without starting in these impeachment-hearings.

Furthermore: just the day before those two National Review articles, Rich Lowrey, the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief and therefore who had personally approved both of them, had headlined, on September 11th, “Yes, Joe Biden Is Corrupt”, and he opened by saying, “We really don’t need to know anything more.” If he was intending to allege that these hearings will be merely adding yet more evidence regarding a case on which already there is more than enough solid evidence for a conviction, then that was a true statement. But if he was intending to allege that therefore House Republicans should not commence hearings on Biden’s impeachment, then he was wrong, because, then, he would be saying that a briber and a traitor should be able to get away with his crimes. That precedent would effectively end even the possibility of democracy in America.

Lowrey’s article was stunning — and not ONLY in those negative ways: it went even beyond what had been made public on July 20th, and provided informations that he had gleaned from his own network of informants in and to Republicans in Congress, and he gave there the most comprehensive trustworthy summary yet, of what will now likely become made public in these hearings.

His account — being, of course, from a Republican propagandist — opened by false-or-distorted allegations against two prior recent corrupt Democrats, Bill Clinton and Rod Blagojevich: saying, of Biden, “He may not be Representative William Jefferson cash-in-the-freezer corrupt, or Governor Rod Blagojevich I’m-going-to-sell-this-Senate-seat corrupt.” (The Clinton charge was false, but the Blagosevich charge was against merely a Governor, about whom Wikipedia notes, “He was the fourth Illinois governor to serve time in federal prison, after Otto Kerner Jr., Dan Walker, and George Ryan.^[139]” That’s not even nearly as historic as what Biden has actually done — he’s the first U.S. President to have done it, to have been caught red-handed in bribery. However, the rest of Lowrey’s article ought to be read by every American, not ONLY Republicans, but ESPECIALLY Democrats, because those are the points that will now be even more fully documented to the American press, from these hearings, and — if that press isn’t TOTALLY controlled by the Democratic Party’s billionaires (and it really is not, because there are also Republican Party billionaires who control the Republican Party’s media), then there will be a very high likelihood that at least a few of the Senate’s Democrats will vote to convict and remove from office the most corrupt President in American history.

However, as-of 13 September 2023, the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, states, in its article, “Impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden”, that, “The investigation has not yet provided evidence of wrongdoing by the president.^[d]” Many additions had been made to that article after 20 July 2023 (the time when House and Senate Republican leaders laid out sufficient evidence to send Biden to prison); and, so, that Wikipedia article was certainly false on September 13th. but they still hadn’t yet corrected it, nine weeks later.

A more reliable source, the well-known lawyer Jonathan Turley, had already headlined on August 26th, “Why the House Has No Alternative to an Impeachment Inquiry into President Biden”. And, unlike other commentators (excepting, I hope, myself), he produced an unbiased commentary on this. For some typical examples of the far more normal contrary, the following four commentaries were cited in that Wikipedia article at its link [d] (as documentation for its ridiculously false assertion that, “The investigation has not yet provided evidence of wrongdoing by the president.^[d]”:

15. Broadwater, Luke (May 10, 2023). “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden”. The New York Times.

16. Demirjian, Karoun (July 4, 2023). “Republicans Are Divided on Impeaching Biden as Panel Begins New Inquiry”. The New York Times.

17. Perry Stein; Devlin Barrett; Matt Viser (August 17, 2023). “How a fight over immunity unraveled Hunter Biden’s plea deal”. The Washington Post.

18. Otten, Tori (September 12, 2023). “McCarthy Plans Biden Impeachment Inquiry—With No Evidence and Not Enough Votes”. The New Republic.

By contrast: that Wikipedia article excluded any mention, or link to, the Republican billionaire, Rupert Murdoch’s, New York Post, and even no mention of that newspaper’s historic 14 October 2020, first-ever data-dump from Hunter Biden’s laptop, “Hunter Biden emails show leveraging connections with his father to boost Burisma pay” — the key evidence of Joe Biden’s guilt — and which all of the CIA-controlled U.S. ‘news’-media were saying didn’t even exist but was instead merely “Russian disinformation”. However, there had been a few exceptions to that black-out from the U.S.-and-allied media:

On 20 June 2019, ABC News did an excellent news-report quoting and providing evidence against the truthfulness of both Joe Biden’s and Hunter Biden’s statements that they had “never” discussed Hunter’s business dealings. And now it is conclusively documented that both of them were lying about this, and that each of the two received a $5 million bribe for getting Victor Shokin, Ukraine’s investigator who was assembling a case against Burisma, fired. Despite Joe Biden’s repeated tales that he was against corruption when demanding that Ukraine’s President Poroshenko fire Viktor Shokin for NOT investigating Burisma, the reality was the exact opposite: he was demanding that Shokin be fired because Shokin WAS investigating Burisma.

And, on 14 October 2020, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, headlined “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad”, and the authors of this blockbuster article from the N.Y. Post summarized there several of the newspaper’s breakthrough articles on this matter (all of which articles Wikipedia had banned, and still bans, from linking to), as follows:

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post. The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads. An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf. The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer. The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store’s owner. Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images. The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client. The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general. Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence. But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello. Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday. Less than eight months after Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for the introduction to his dad, the then-vice president admittedly pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk into getting rid of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip to Kiev. “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden infamously bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” Shokin has said that at the time of his firing, in March 2016, he’d made “specific plans” to investigate Burisma that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.” Joe Biden has insisted that the US wanted Shokin removed over corruption concerns, which were shared by the European Union. Meanwhile, an email dated May 12, 2014 — shortly after Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board — shows Pozharskyi attempting to get him to use his political leverage to help the company. The message had the subject line “urgent issue” and was also sent to Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, who also sat on the Burisma board at the time. Pozharskyi said that “the representatives of new authorities in power tend to quite aggressively approach N. Z. unofficially with the aim to obtain cash from him.” N.Z. isn’t identified in the email but appears to be a reference to Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, whose first name is a Ukrainian version of “Nicholas.” When the alleged shakedown failed, “they proceeded with concrete actions” in the form of “one or more pretrial proceedings,” Pozharskyi wrote. “We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc .to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,” he added. Hunter Biden responded by saying he was with Archer in Doha, Qatar, and asked for more information about “the formal (if any) accusations being made against Burisma.” “Who is ultimately behind these attacks on the company? Who in the current interim government could put an end to such attacks?” he added. The exchange came the same day that Burisma announced it had expanded its board of directors by adding Hunter Biden, who was put in charge of its “legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations,” according to a news release that’s since been scrubbed from Burisma’s website. Hunter Biden actually joined the board in April 2014, according to multiple reports. His lawyer said last year that Hunter was “not a member of the management team,” adding, “At no time was Hunter in charge of the company’s legal affairs.” About four months after Hunter Biden’s correspondence with Pozharskyi, Archer forwarded Hunter Biden an email chain with the subject line “tax raise impact on Burisma production,” which included Pozharskyi saying that the Ukrainian cabinet had submitted new tax legislation to the country’s parliament.

“If enacted, this law would kill the entire private gas production sector in the bud,” Pozharskyi wrote. In the Sept. 24, 2014, email, Pozharskyi also said he was “going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.” At the time, Hochstein was the State Department’s newly appointed special envoy and coordinator for international energy ­affairs. In December 2017, the Naftogaz Group, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, announced that Hochstein had joined the company as an independent director, but on Monday he announced his ­resignation. “The company has been forced to spend endless amounts of time combating political pressure and efforts by oligarchs to enrich themselves through questionable transactions,” Hochstein wrote in an op-ed published by the Kyiv Post. In addition to denying that’s he’s spoken to Hunter Biden about his overseas business dealings, Joe Biden has repeatedly denied any conflict of interest or wrongdoing by either of them involving ­Burisma. Last February, he got testy during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show when co-host Savannah Guthrie questioned whether it was “wrong for [Hunter] to take that position, knowing that it was really because that company wanted access to you.” “Well, that’s not true. You’re saying things you do not know what you’re talking about,” the elder Biden responded.

Here are some of the emails from Hunter Biden’s computer. You can see them right there. The references to “N.Z.” are to Nicholas (or Mykolai) Zlochevsky, the oligarch who ran Burisma but who was being prosecuted by the new, Obama-installed, nazi (racist-fascist anti-Russian) government, because he had been an official in the Administration of Viktor Yanukovych (the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom Obama had overthrown and replaced with a government by nazis from the Right Sector, and from the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine — which latter the CIA renamed the “Svoboda” or “Freedom” Party — and from other racist-fascist anti-Russian organizations, which were aiming to capture and prosecute Zlochevsky and others from the prior, neutralist, Government. So: Zlochevsky paid $5 million each to both Hunter and Joe Biden, in order to call off the rabid nazi dogs that Obama’s regime had unleashed against Zlochevsky in Obama’s 2014 coup. Zlochevsky knew how dangerous they were, because Zlochevsky’s Burisma colleague who had become a part of the Obama-installed government, Ihor Kolomoysky, had himself helped to engineer the massacre of the newly imposed regime’s opponents in Odessa on 2 May 2014 inside the Trade Unions Building there. And when Joe Biden threatened Ukraine to block a billion U.S. Government dollars going to Ukraine unless that investigation into Zlochevsky would be called off, that’s the deal he was fulfilling his commitment on, and which had been arranged by his son.

There is nothing new about Biden’s being corrupt, as I documented many times prior to his becoming President, and summed up in my 26 January 2020 “Joe Biden Is as Corrupt as They Come.”

So, if the Republicans in Congress really do want to reveal to the American public realities that could not just get Joe Biden removed from office but reveal crimes so serious that there will be a public demand for him to be locked up in prison for the rest of his life, then they could do that. But would those psychopaths actually want to do this to the leader of the other side of the aisle, who is the President of their jointly-run ‘democracy’? In any case, America’s ‘news’-media appear to be virtually unanimously against their doing it. They all have thrived from this empire of darkness, and seem to want it simply to continue, if not to become even bigger and more terrifying than it already has become.

However, Biden’s briberies aren’t by any means his worst actions. For example, as-of September 14th, Biden’s Democratic National Committee is changing the rules for the 2024 Democratic Party Presidential primaries, so that, for example, RFK Jr. — the Democratic Presidential candidate who has (by far) the highest of all net approval ratings — is saying (“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Blasts DNC’s ‘Rigged Process,’ Slams Biden In New Forbes Interview”, Sept. 7) that, “They’ve made rules, that if anyone campaigns in Iowa, or any candidate that sets foot in Iowa or that sets foot in the state of Hew Hampshire, then none of the votes that are cast for that candidate will be tallied … they will go instead to the President. And, now, they’re trying to change it so that if I campaign in New Hampshire, then none of the votes that are cast in Georgia will count. … [Under the new rules,] I would have to win almost 80% of all of the states in order to beat President Biden. … There’s [also] the really wild things that they’re now considering, including forcing me to actually pay for the primaries, and their logic is that they don’t need a primary because they already have a candidate [the nominee of their Party].  … If the DNC is going to rig it so that it is simply impossible for anybody to challenge President Biden [in the Democratic Party], then I need to look at other alternatives.” This means third-party.  So, Biden is nullifying even the formal democracy that the nation has previously had, and the situation is now beginning to become clearer as being a two-Party dictatorship, and it looks as-if RFK Jr. will end up doing a third-party campaign, contesting against both of the now-established and totally corrupted political Parties — and maybe will create a Second American Revolution, finally an America that represents its public, instead of only its billionaires. Biden is actually the worst of a long line, which started with Harry S. Truman for the Democratic Party, and Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Republican Party. He’s the worst of them all, unless Obama (who started the wars in Ukraine, Libya, and Syria) is. And Biden is trying to achieve the mega-crimes that Obama started. But America’s ‘news’-media are opposed to impeaching him.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.