Anyone watching Chris Cuomo’s show on CNN Monday night will have seen just how absurd the reasoning is behind the effort to oust President Trump from the White House less than a year before the next election.
One by one, Cuomo inadvertently stated the crux of each one of the Democrats’ ridiculous assertions about Trump and his dealings with Ukraine.
The revelations came in an interview with Republican Rep. Randy Weber of Texas, who didn’t really have to do anything to elicit the useful information from Cuomo.
Here are Cuomo’s main contentions with Trump (which he said over and over again were a matter of fact rather than merely his own opinion), which also happen to be those of the Democrats:
Cuomo Contention No. 1: Trump may have been right to be concerned that there was something wrong with Joe Biden and his adult son’s involvement with the seedy Ukrainian gas company Burisma, but he didn’t voice his concerns properly. “I think you can argue that what Hunter Biden did was wrong,” Cuomo said. “If you want to investigate him, then fine. But do it the right way. This president did it the wrong way.”
So it’s now apparently okay to point out (on CNN of all places) that there’s a there there when it comes to the Bidens and Ukraine. There really are serious questions about Hunter being paid an obscene amount of money to serve on the board of Burisma. Hunter had no discernible skill or experience to offer the energy industry, but he did have a father who, as vice president, was in charge of overseeing U.S.-Ukraine relations. And Joe Biden himself has admitted that he was uneasy about his son’s position on the board.
Cuomo Contention No. 2: There was a “right way” that Trump could have spurred an investigation into Biden, but he didn’t take that option. “It is his fault that instead of trying to investigate an American citizen the right way,” Cuomo said, “or even just calling his buddy Lindsey Graham and having him investigate [Biden] in the Senate, he did it in a way to keep his hands off it.”
This is a version of the other ridiculous assertion by some Democrats that if only Trump had gone through a more proper channel — the Justice Department, for example — this would have never been an issue. Right, just like every investigation Trump’s administration has conducted that might implicate Democrats, I’m sure that would have gone over really well. If Cuomo believes that Trump could have gone over to the Senate and asked that Republicans investigate the Bidens, and no one would have batted an eye, he should be committed.
Recall when GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California uncovered one of the biggest political scandals in history — that the FBI spied on a major party’s presidential campaign. Weren’t those the good old days of harmony and bipartisanship?
Think back to when Attorney General William Barr said he was authorizing an investigation of how that spying was initiated and whether it was legal and appropriate. Didn’t Democrats welcome that spotlight with beaming smiles?
Wait, no, that’s not right. What happened was that Democrats and much of the media reacted to those investigations with anticipation that their findings might turn out to be Rosemary’s baby. We still haven’t seen the results of the investigation authorized by Barr, but when he announced its inception, Democrats accused him of carrying out Trump’s political revenge.
Cuomo Contention No. 3: Trump should have never asked for anything from a foreign leader that might have had the effect of benefiting himself. “If I were worried about corruption in Ukraine,” Cuomo said, “The only things I would ask them to investigate would not be things that matter to me.”
This is pretty much the same problem some of the career government bureaucrats had when they testified during the impeachment hearings last month. They took exception to the Trump flouting the longstanding Washington norm that the United States is a charity for other countries, and that taxpayer money should seamlessly flow to other parts of the world with no questions asked. That’s how things have worked in the capitol for decades, so why stop it now?
Well, one reason is that there was a 2016 election in which voters said, okay, maybe that’s enough of that.
The three Cuomo contentions comprise the reasoning behind the Democrats’ push for impeachment. They’re just not as succinct about it.
