What a great opportunity Nancy Pelosi just handed to President Trump and Senate Republicans!
Now the country can finally find out what the national media have been so desperately trying to hide.
The House speaker announced Thursday morning that Democrats were moving forward with the impeachment effort by drafting up formal charges against the president. In other words, we’re now getting to the part where we can actually find out why Trump did what he did in that midsummer phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It’s taken for granted that Senate Republicans simply won’t convict Trump out of party loyalty. But they can make their decision about so much more than that.
The New York Times on Wednesday reported disapprovingly on Rudy Giuliani’s continued efforts in Ukraine to find evidence that the country interfered in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden, along with his middle-aged son Hunter, were corrupt in their own dealings in Ukraine.
“Even as Democrats intensified their scrutiny this week of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s role in the pressure campaign against the Ukrainian government that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry,” the report said, “Mr. Giuliani has been in Europe continuing his efforts to shift the focus to purported wrongdoing by President Trump’s political rivals.”
Wow, he was doing that even as Democrats intensified their scrutiny?! What a shock.
The media have been denying the clear evidence for months, dismissing Ukraine’s 2016 election meddling as a “conspiracy theory” and accusing anyone who so much as publicly questions their narrative of participating in a “Russian disinformation campaign.”
With regard to the Bidens, journalists and cable news hosts will only allow that maybe there was an “appearance” of impropriety when Joe Biden, as vice president, demanded Ukraine fire a state prosecutor who had been investigating a shady energy company that was paying Biden’s son Hunter for — well, we still don’t know what. But that’s where the story always ends, and the media loses its curiosity. Instead of asking further questions or gathering facts, we are told from there on that there’s just no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens, and that questions about it are “baseless.”
This is like a homeless man mumbling on the sidewalk about the $1 million he has in the bank. Just because he says it over and over again and believes it to be true doesn’t make it so.
Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election for the purpose of harming Trump’s campaign is not a conspiracy theory. It happened. The New York Times broke the story in 2016 that an entire Ukrainian government agency was investigating Paul Manafort, who at the time was serving as Trump’s campaign chairman.
Back then, the paper reported that Ukraine’s “newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” which worked in conjunction with America’s FBI, was in possession of a mysterious, handwritten diary that showed Manafort was receiving millions of dollars in payments from one of the country’s pro-Russian politicians. “Investigators assert,” the Times reported, “that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.”
I’m sure all of that was by coincidence that Ukraine’s most consequential government agency suddenly came into possession of evidence against the head of a major-party U.S. presidential campaign. It was purely a matter of fate that that government agency then went to America’s most important paper to share the details. Surely none of that was a form of retaliation against Trump, who had been saying positive things about Russia, which remains actively engaged in a years-long war with Ukraine.
Yeah, I don’t buy that it’s a coincidence, and no one else should, either.
The Times has never said how it got that major scoop or how it learned about the diary, often referred to as “the black ledger.” But in the Times report from Wednesday, the paper did dispute a claim by a conservative reporter that it received the diary from a Democratic operative who was working with Ukrainians in 2016 to push out damaging information on the Trump campaign.
The official story — which is laughable — is that the ledger was found by an unknown source in the ashes of a burned-down building. Okay, stipulate for a moment that one of the few things to survive a raging fire is a bunch of paper bound together in a book. Right. So, then, how did the Times happen upon it?
A spokeswoman for the paper didn’t return an email from me on Thursday asking about it.
The questions about the Bidens aren’t baseless, and there is certainly evidence that there was something corrupt about their connection to Burisma, the seedy Ukrainian energy company.
To its immense credit, the Washington Post gave the situation a gander at least once, reporting in late September:
Hunter’s decision entangled him in a country that Transparency International had ranked among the world’s most corrupt, a place where business executives have co-opted prosecutors and manipulated the courts to enhance their financial interests.
While this was going on, Joe Biden, as vice president, was the lead on U.S.-Ukraine relations and he has since bragged about pressuring the government to fire a prosecutor, lest the Obama administration withhold foreign aid the country. (I think there’s a word for that.) That prosecutor was supposedly suspected of corruption but he also happened to be investigating Burisma and he has told the Post that he believes he was fired because of his probe into the energy company.
This is all supposed to amount to “baseless” questions about Biden. They’re not baseless. They very much have a base.
Now that impeachment is about to move to the Senate, Republicans and the White House have the perfect chance to lay it all out for everyone to see for themselves what the media have been refusing to show them.
