OPINION
As I’ve already written for The BFD, the NZ mainstream media seem determined to keep their dwindling numbers of readers completely ignorant of the Biden impeachment proceedings. Even if they have to grudgingly admit that the potentially severest sanction against an American president is hanging over Biden’s head, the NZ media, like their American cousins, will lie through their teeth about it.
The biggest and most obvious lie of the mainstream media is “without evidence”.
This is simply untrue: there are mountains of evidence. Whether that evidence amounts to proof, particularly proof enough to convict Biden of “high crimes and misdemeanours”, is yet to be tested. Because that is what an impeachment proceeding does: it tests the evidence. If the evidence is convincing enough, the President will be convicted. If convicted, then removed from office.
That has never happened to a president, yet. (It’s a common misperception that impeachment proceedings automatically mean a president is removed.)
Whether it meets the high threshold for the Senate to convict remains to be seen, but there is no shortage of evidence for the proceedings to consider — no matter what the mainstream media say.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley summarises:
The record currently contains witness and written evidence that the President (1) has lied about key facts in [his son’s] foreign dealings, (2) was the focus of a multimillion-dollar influence peddling scheme, and (3) may have benefitted from this corruption through millions of dollars sent to his family as well as more direct possible benefits.
The President and his legal team may or may not rebut or disprove these points, but here’s what previous investigations have so far disclosed.
Hunter Biden and his associates were running a classic influence peddling operation using Joe Biden as what Devon Archer called “the Brand.” While this was described as an “illusion of access,” millions were generated for the Bidens from some of the most corrupt figures in the world, including associates who were later accused of or convicted of public corruption.
Some of this influence-peddling directly impacted US foreign policy and relations. Most notoriously, Biden’s direct intervention to have Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Hunter Biden’s business associates, removed from office. This is not supposition: Joe Biden boasted about it on camera to a room full of journalists.
President Biden has made false claims about his knowledge of these dealings repeatedly in the past, including insisting that he had no knowledge of Hunter’s foreign dealings, which Archer has declared “patently false.” The Washington Post and other media outlets have also declared the President’s insistence that his family did not take money from China is false.
We know that the last one in particular is false, because we have the receipts of wire transfers of millions of dollars to Hunter Biden, using the Biden family home address. We also know that President Biden lied about what he knew (and which he keeps changing his story about).
The President had been aware for years that Hunter Biden and his uncle James were accused of influence peddling, including an audiotape of the President acknowledging a New York Times investigation as a threat to Hunter.
The President’s son unwittingly became one of the most damning witnesses against him.
E-mails and other communications show Hunter repeatedly invoking his father to secure payments from foreign sources and, in one such message, he threatens a Chinese figure that his father is sitting next to him to coerce a large transfer of money […]
Hunter Biden reportedly claimed that he had to give half of his earnings to his father and other e-mails state that intermingled accounts were used to pay bills for both men, including a possible credit account that Hunter used to allegedly pay prostitutes.
New York Post
Hunter’s taste for hookers may yet land him in very hot water.
Federal investigators raised the possibility of charging first son Hunter Biden for crimes related to sex trafficking, according to IRS whistleblower documents made public this week.
New York Post
As it turns out, though, trading on the family name has allegedly extended to the third generation.
Hunter Biden’s eldest daughter Naomi worked as a lawyer on behalf of the government of Peru around the same time she was living at the White House with her granddad, President Joe Biden, a review of public records shows.
Naomi Biden, 29, joined the Washington DC-based law firm Arnold & Porter in January 2021 — the same month Joe Biden was sworn in as the nation’s 46th president […]
It’s unclear how many other foreign nations Naomi Biden has repped while working there.
Perhaps all was indeed above board. So, why is the firm being so secretive about it?
Despite joining the firm more than three years ago, Arnold & Porter apparently has gone to great lengths to shield the Biden scion from public scrutiny.
Unlike other firm attorneys, she does not have a public lawyer page and her name appears on a few filings […]
A rep for Naomi Biden insisted she only worked on the [Peru] case for “three weeks” in September 2021 — and not while living at the White House.
They declined to say why she was taken off the case, and only offered this explanation after publication.
New York Post
Clearly, it pays to be a Biden.
Joe Biden himself saw his personal fortune suddenly leap from the paltry half-million it had hovered at from 1998-2016, to a staggering $11 million-plus in 2017.
What was it Harry Truman said about getting rich in politics?