Congressional Democrats swear on their lives that they have a clear and simple case to impeach President Trump, but that’s only because they’re able to sleep like sweet babies knowing that the media have no interest in the most scandalous details at hand in the Ukraine drama.
There’s no telling why reporters are so blasé about covering the whole story.
I’m kidding. We know exactly why, and it’s because the whole story doesn’t look particularly good for Democrats or for the media outlets that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in convincing the public that Trump should have never been elected.
It’s not that the facts elude reporters at the biggest newspapers, cable channels, and magazines. Those places are often the first to report them. But thereafter, it’s like the key details and crucial context never happened, having vanished into the ether, never spoken of again.
Once the impeachment vote takes place, remember that there’s a Senate trial that will have to take place. At that point, Democrats are no longer in charge. Republicans are, and there are some things they’ll need to remind everyone about, even if the media would rather they not. Here are just three of them:
1. Joe Biden, as vice president, knew that his now-49-year-old son Hunter Biden was involved in something shady when he took a lucrative job on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Hunter Biden had no background in energy and Burisma eventually ended up under investigation by the Ukrainian government, even as Biden was politically engaged with the country. Both Biden and his son have admitted on the record that the business and political overlapping wasn’t up to snuff. In an interview with a local radio show in New Hampshire, Biden said, “At one point that it came out that [Hunter Biden] was on the board [of Burisma], I said, ‘I sure hope to hell you know what you’re doing.’ Period. I said that.” Asked by the interviewer Jack Heath what exactly it was that concerned Joe Biden about his son and Burisma, the 2020 candidate said, “What his job was.”
2. Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election for the explicit purpose of hurting then-candidate Trump’s campaign, which the Ukrainian government viewed as too sympathetic to Russia. That interference, which eventually brought about the conviction and imprisonment of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, has been all but forgotten by a media that instead obsesses over Russian bots posting memes on Facebook. Out of nowhere, just days after Trump was named the Republican nominee in 2016, an anti-Russia politician in Ukraine claimed to have been given an ashen diary linking Manafort to a corrupt network of other politicians who were dealing with the Kremlin. Notes in the book were all handwritten and had some dollar figures and names, including Manafort’s. Where did it come from? The guy who had it said it was found by an “anonymous source” in the “burned-out ruins” of an old building in Kyiv. Coincidentally (or maybe not), the FBI had just begun secretly spying on the Trump campaign. To this day, no one has fully explained the root and purpose of that investigation. Surely there are some questions left to ask about Ukraine’s involvement in 2016 and the FBI’s.
3. To all appearances, Trump never got anything out of Ukraine in return for the military aid that was delayed this year. The entire impeachment effort is centered around the midsummer phone call wherein Trump asked that Ukraine’s president root out any potential corruption, including with relation to Burisma and definitely in terms of the 2016 election. That’s not a “quid pro quo.” A quid pro quo is when one person offers something to another person in return for something else. If we believe every word of the recently leaked opening testimony of former Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor, what Trump wanted was to talk with the head of Ukraine about the corruption issues before sending over hundreds of millions of dollars, no questions asked. According to the transcript of that call, Trump had his say, and that was the end of it. The aid was released several days later, though there’s no evidence that Trump got anything in return for his request about corruption investigations, which he was perfectly entitled to make. (Remember, Ukraine worked against him in the 2016 election.) This is a lot like the media’s persistent hysteria about Trump “calling on a foreign adversary to interfere in the 2016 election.” That rage-filled but hilariously dumb storyline goes back to when Trump, in summer 2016, jokingly suggested that Russia might have possession of the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton had destroyed on her private computer server. He said that if Russians had them, they might be rewarded for releasing them. Well, setting aside that it was an obvious joke said in public on national TV, we never got those emails. If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? More specifically, if Trump asks for something, and it’s not delivered, do we give a damn?
Democrats are steering the ship right now. But those are just three things Republicans will get to talk about soon enough.
