Shortly after the 2018 midterms, Jerry Nadler — who was about to become the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — boarded an Acela train from New York to Washington. When he got to his seat, he began loudly speaking on the phone with someone who remains unknown to this day. Unfortunately for Nadler, the editor-in-chief of the conservative website The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway, was seated nearby, jotting down notes about the whole conversation.
Hemingway overheard Nadler outline, in no uncertain terms, Democrats’ plans for going, “all-in” on investigating and ultimately impeaching Donald Trump. It was much more important for Democrats to impeach Donald Trump than Brett Kavanaugh, Nadler said, because going after Kavanaugh might remind voters of Joe Biden’s disastrous handling of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas. That could harm Joe Biden’s chances of becoming president. So, Nadler said, the safe play was to impeach Donald Trump for colluding with Russia, which is an accusation that Jerry Nadler has never had any evidence to support. If Democrats went with that strategy, Nadler said on the phone, it would clear the way for a Joe Biden presidency.
In one sense, what Mollie Hemingway overheard wasn’t surprising. More than a year earlier, just minutes after Donald Trump was inaugurated, The Washington Post announced, “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.” But in retrospect, Jerry Nadler’s remarks on that train back in 2018 didn’t just foreshadow Donald Trump’s two impeachments, or the presidency of Joe Biden. They also established the blueprint for how Leftists would treat all political investigations moving forward. They have no interest in the evidence. They don’t care about the law. Their goal, instead, is to use the force of the legal system to punish their enemies.
This was a shift that was much bigger than Jerry Nadler. The same year that Nadler made those remarks on the Acela, Letitia James was campaigning to become New York’s attorney general. And she said pretty much the same thing. She promised to find some way to take Donald Trump to court, however implausible. Aand she followed through.
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One of the many problems with this strategy is that it’s short-sighted. Democrats failed to ensure they’d hold onto political power forever. That’s certainly their goal. It’s the entire justification for their immigration policy. But they haven’t achieved it yet. So right now, Republicans are in control of the House of Representatives. And yesterday, they announced their own impeachment inquiry. They’re looking primarily at whether Joe Biden sold favors to overseas interests, particularly in Ukraine and China.
In a moment, I’ll go into some of the evidence that justifies this inquiry. But really, we don’t have to go into all of it. Once Jerry Nadler adopted the Stalinist standard for impeachment — basically, “show me a man and I’ll show you the crime” — then evidence became moot. Impeachment is all about raw political power now. It’s not about evidence. And it’s certainly not about fairness, or the rule of law.
The White House and the Biden family know all of this. That’s why they’re not even pretending to defend themselves. Hunter Biden went in front of the cameras and announced he’s not going to comply with a congressional subpoena he was served. Watch:
Hunter Biden refuses to comply with @JamesComer's subpoena to be deposed behind closed doors and demands a public hearing so he can tell sob stories on TV.
Reminder that Don Jr. testified behind closed doors for over 40 hours about the Russia hoax.
Hold him in contempt! pic.twitter.com/1FoJB06zyX
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 13, 2023
Hunter Biden received a lawful subpoena for closed-door testimony. This is the same kind of subpoena Donald Trump Jr. and many other Trump aides were forced to comply with, for hours on end. But he just doesn’t want to do it, so he refuses.
And his justification for refusing is completely absurd. There’s no legal basis for it, and Hunter Biden isn’t pretending there is one. Instead, he’s saying he wants to testify in front of the news media, instead of a closed-door session. It’s just his preference, and he seems to think that his preference is somehow binding on Congress.
It was just a couple of years ago that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon defied a congressional subpoena. Unlike Hunter Biden, he had a reason for doing so. He argued it was unlawful for Congress to compel him to testify about his work in the White House, citing executive privilege.
Now, whatever you make of that defense, it’s clearly rooted in the law. It’s working its way through the federal appellate process as we speak. What happened to Steve Bannon because he asserted that defense? He was sentenced to four months in prison:
Is that going to happen to Hunter Biden? As of now, congressional Republicans are threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress, which they obviously should. But then there’s the question of whether Joe Biden’s DOJ will pursue criminal charges. Will they throw Hunter Biden in prison for this? Will they demand he testify, under oath, about his father’s involvement in his business?
That’s an open question. Right now, the DOJ is pursuing charges against Hunter Biden about his fraudulent gun form, and his tax evasion. But those charges don’t directly relate to the main issue in this impeachment inquiry, which is where Hunter Biden got all of his money from — and more importantly, Joe Biden’s involvement in procuring that money.
Yesterday a reporter at Fox asked the White House press secretary about all of this. She proceeded to make it clear that Joe Biden knew that Hunter would defy the congressional subpoena. Beyond that, she just made light of the whole situation. Watch:
KJP to Doocy on whether President Biden knew his son would defy a congresional subpoena: "I don't have anything else to add. The President was familiar with what Hunter was going to say today &, you know, look, he's proud of his son…how he's rebuilding his life back. He's going… pic.twitter.com/envjQGxsEl
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 13, 2023
This kind of question should be extremely easy to answer. If you’re asked whether the president told his son to defy a congressional subpoena, you should be able to respond and explain yourself. Instead, the White House press secretary cracks a joke, and starts talking about how much Joe Biden loves his son.
What this means, almost certainly, is that Joe Biden did advise his son to defy the congressional subpoena, without any legal basis whatsoever. Under the standards Democrats established with Steve Bannon and several other Trump aides, that’s a crime.
And there’s an obvious motive for why Joe Biden would want his son to commit this crime. Hunter Biden himself made that motive very clear during his remarks to reporters yesterday. Watch:
Hunter Biden moves the goalposts again: "My father was not financially involved in my business" pic.twitter.com/n9L3miu2h8
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 13, 2023
Did you catch the qualifier there? Hunter wants you to know that his father was not “financially involved” in his business dealings with corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine and China. So this is not a denial that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Now it’s a denial that Joe Biden was “financially” involved.
This is a very different claim from the one Joe Biden has been making for years. Watch:
This is one HELL of a new qualifier from Hunter Biden.
Hunter now says, “My father was not financially involved in my business”
FLASHBACK: Joe Biden used to say he has never talked about business with his family. This is a major shift from the Bidens. pic.twitter.com/4oiALdD4Yg
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 13, 2023
The reason for this change is the Biden family knows they can’t deny a direct link between Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s influence peddling operation. Devon Archer, one of Hunter Biden’s business associates, has already testified in front of the House of Representatives, saying that Joe Biden spoke with Hunter Biden’s business partners roughly 20 times. Those conversations, according to Archer, took place while Joe Biden was the sitting vice president of the United States.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Archer testified that, “Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the [Biden] brand attached to it.” As you will recall, Burisma is the Ukraine oil company that paid Hunter Biden tens of thousands of dollars a month for a no-show job, despite Hunter Biden having no oil expertise whatsoever. Burisma was being investigated by Ukraine’s attorney general, up until Joe Biden threatened to withhold money to Ukraine’s government until they fired him.
Then there’s the fact that Joe Biden used a fake name to email with Hunter’s business partners. There’s also the many public comments of Tony Bobulinski, the Hunter Biden business partner who has repeatedly said that Joe Biden personally profited from Hunter Biden’s influence peddling. Bobulinski — who had no reason to lie whatsoever — told Tucker Carlson that Joe Biden was the “big guy” referenced repeatedly in emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Big Guy, according to the emails, was slated to receive 10% of the profits from one business venture in China.
It’s important to recount all of this because even now, Democrats are claiming that there are no witnesses to support the idea that Joe Biden could possibly be corrupt. Here’s AOC for example:
"They have not called a single witness, a single first-hand witness to any of their allegations."
AOC says Republicans don't have witnesses to back up their alleged allegations of Hunter Biden's financial crimes. pic.twitter.com/mMca5v7UhL
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) December 13, 2023
This is how the Left plans to respond to the congressional investigation into Joe Biden. They’ll deny reality. They’ll pretend that witnesses don’t exist, even when those witnesses have appeared before Congress and on primetime television. They’ll make fun of you, as Karine Jean-Pierre did yesterday.
All of this was foreseeable when Jerry Nadler, Leticia James, and other top Democrats decided to use the legal system and the impeachment process to punish their political opponents. It was inevitable that soon enough, they’d be forced to admit they can’t possibly live up to their own nonexistent standards. Just five years after Jerry Nadler’s conversation on that Acela, that moment is here now.
Conservatives can either take advantage of it, or they can do what they usually do. They can make a big show for the cameras and completely fail to follow through. It’s clear that Karine Jean-Pierre and Hunter Biden think that will happen. They don’t believe their political enemies are anywhere near as ruthless and cynical as they are. For once, it’s time for conservatives to prove them wrong.