Yes, The Biden Impeachment Hearing Presented Evidence Of Corruption — Lots Of It

On the first day of Biden’s impeachment inquiry, Republicans brought mountains of evidence of corruption. Democrats and the media shrugged.

The corporate news media all but refused to cover the opening hearing of the House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden on Thursday, and to the extent they did, it was only to repeat, at the behest of the White House, the exhausted mantra that there’s “no evidence” connecting Biden to his son Hunter’s international bribery scheme.

(The New York Times ran with a cursory and misleadingly headlined article, “First Impeachment Hearing Yields No New Information on Biden,” that boasted “even their [Republicans’] witnesses said the case for impeachment hadn’t been made.” Which, of course the case hasn’t been made yet. That’s why you launch an inquiry, of which Thursday was day one.)

But if the media had actually covered it, the American public might have heard more about the mounds of damning evidence now piling up by the day, including the release on Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee of reams of text messages and emails between Hunter Biden, his uncle James Biden, and a colorful array of foreign oligarchs, business associates, and bagmen. All told, House Republicans presented more than two dozen pieces of evidence on Thursday linking Joe Biden to his son’s overseas business dealings.

This evidence was the centerpiece of the hearing Thursday, which served to lay the groundwork for the impeachment inquiry. So far, the evidence suggests the Biden family “business” is exactly what it appears to be: an influence-peddling scheme on a scale never before seen in American history. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who testified at the hearing, said that even though Washington, D.C., is “awash” in influence-peddling, he’s never seen “anything of this size and complexity,” and that Congress has a “duty to determine if the president is involved in what is a known form of corruption.”

Based on what we already know, it’s hard to see how Joe Biden couldn’t have been involved or couldn’t have benefited from his son’s corrupt dealings. Consider just a few items of evidence mentioned during Thursday’s hearing. In one text exchange with his uncle in June 2017, Hunter refers to his father as his “family’s brand” and “only asset.” That echoes something Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner, said in his July testimony to the House Oversight Committee, that the value of adding Hunter to the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma was “the brand” — clearly a reference to then-Vice President Joe Biden. (Hunter had no experience in the energy sector and brought no value to the company other than access to his father.)

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina brought up an FBI memo released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee about another former business partner of Hunter’s, Tony Bobulinksi. In an FBI interview, Bobulinksi said that in 2015-16 Hunter and Hunter’s uncle James did business with CEFC, a Chinese company with close ties to the Chinese government. But because Biden was still vice president, Hunter and James weren’t paid right away. “There was a concern it would be improper,” Bobulinksi said, because of the company’s affiliation with the Chinese...

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