The Plea for Impeachment

A rough and ready sketch of the U.S. 2020 presidential campaign

The openly anti-Donald Trump newspaper, The New York Times, has sounded a new “crusade for impeachment.” The article “Trump Walks a Crooked Mile” is full of prewar hype: “Washington — Everyone here is keyed up for the Big One. The One that’s going to finally bring Donald Trump down. […] Democrats haven’t been able to get Trump on paying off a porn star to protect his campaign. They haven’t been able to get him on being a Russian agent. They haven’t been able to get him on obstruction of justice. But maybe this time. Maybe this was the One where all would decide that they wanted impeachment, that the president’s behavior was so outrageous that they couldn’t imagine this sleazy business guy sitting in the Oval Office playing a tinpot dictator in a tinfoil hat for another second.”

In this “plea for impeachment,” there is an adage about the real goal here: “[T]hey couldn’t imagine this sleazy business guy […] for another second.” This is not a termination of the first presidential term (which is hopeless considering Trump’s economic successes!), but rather a fight against a second; in other words, it is a fight for a Joe Biden victory, for the Democratic candidate. The aforementioned “Big One,” the denunciation of the president, takes the form of Trump’s call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a request to investigate Biden as part of efforts to eradicate corruption.

The facts of the “Biden case” are well known. Biden’s son, Hunter, is connected to Ukrainian gas oligarch, ex-Minister of Ecology and owner of the Burisma Holdings company, Mykola Zlochevsky. Biden’s son is earning a mega-salary at Burisma. But his father, during a visit to Ukraine (in March 2016), threatened to delay the provision of $1 billion in American loan guarantees to Ukraine unless the general prosecutor, who was responsible for dealing with offenses related to Burisma Holdings activities, was fired. On April 3, 2016, Petro Poroshenko dismissed the general prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.

That’s right,. Out of the large number of “tainted” corrupt officials, President Trump named Biden, wanting to damage his potential 2020 opponent. But “drilling for dirt” and hunting for prey in the Ukrainian fields is an old business, and primarily that of the Democrats. In 2016, betting on Hillary Clinton, the Poroshenko administration dished out dirt on Trump’s campaign manager – the goods were delivered in excellent condition. (See Paul Manafort’s criminal case.)

But we mustn’t forget about what another American publication, The Wall Street Journal, mentioned in the article ”Trump’s Ukraine Call.” “Mr. Trump acknowledges,” writes The Wall Street Journal, “that he asked Ukraine’s new President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden as part of his effort to clean up corruption […] Mr. Trump’s request showed bad judgment. He was trying to draw a foreign leader into the middle of American presidential politics, which can only lead to political trouble. […] More troubling is that none of the whistle-blower’s cheerleaders in the press and Congress seem to care about the precedent of making a President’s private calls with other world leaders open to public scrutiny. Imagine if this happened to JFK’s calls amid the Cuban Missile Crisis or to Richard Nixon’s during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. We have reached a dangerous pass if intelligence officials feel they have open season to use whistle-blower laws whenever they dislike a President or one of his policies.”

So, the fever of the future campaign has already compelled us to forget about the famous “two-party consensus” regarding the most important foreign policy decisions being made outside of the framework of the interparty battle – if this were not the case, every change of power in the White House would bring down the system of long-term U.S. allies. Yes, we’ve even forgotten about executive privilege, which is connected to the administration of his duties, for example, in the sphere of diplomacy.

The precedent that has scared The Wall Street Journal limits the special communications of the president: let him discuss matters with foreign leaders, their delegates and military leaders over the telephone, openly, democratically!

The fact that the Democrats and their New York Times took up the exoneration and increased prestige of Biden leaves us with a sneaking suspicion. There are still 10 months until the Democratic National Committee casts its final vote and determines its presidential candidate, and all the information points to that position being taken by Biden. What’s that? Again, everything has already been decided.

The Wall Street Journal highlights the moral and political outcome of the first act of the Trump vs. Biden campaign: “[T]o millions of Americans this all looks like Russia redux. […] Those accusations, though uncorroborated, were used to justify wiretaps against at least one Trump campaign official, and to gin up a two-year special counsel investigation that severely damaged the Trump Presidency. All without finding evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.”

Today, Hunter Biden is turning into Trump’s prey. Trump, who is hunting his father, who is in turn shooting at Trump, if only due to the fact that the investigation into Hunter’s sinecure was requested all too emphatically.