Spare a thought for the Democrat Senators who are stuck in the Capitol for days on end, forced to listen to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) repeat endlessly what he and his gang have been saying on television for months already.
There are ten days left before the crucial Iowa caucuses, and just a little over two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, and four of the Democratic candidates are grounded in Washington.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been forced to cancel events in Iowa. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) seems to have resigned herself to staying in Washington past the Iowa caucuses themselves on Feb. 3. CNN has also canceled an Iowa town hall.
Not to be outdone, back-of-the-pack Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) — polling at less than one percent, on average, nationally and worse in New Hampshire — issued a statement that he would suspend fundraising during the trial.
But Joe Biden is out on the road.
And just in time, too.
Sanders recently took the lead in Iowa, and has surged to the fore in the latest CNN national poll. A poll Thursday showed him almost doubling his support in New Hampshire in a month.
Impeachment could help Pete Buttigieg, who doesn’t even have to phone it in to South Bend, Indiana, anymore: his term as mayor ended on New Year’s Day.
Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang are also free to campaign.
And so is Biden — though he is the man at the heart of the story, the supposed victim of President Trump’s nefarious “scheme” to find out why the vice president fired a Ukrainian prosecutor with scrutiny of his son’s company.
Biden’s conflict of interest was not a secret.
In May 2014, journalists asked both the White House and the State Department about his son, Hunter Biden, taking a lucrative seat on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
State Department official George Kent, one of the Democrats’ witnesses in the House impeachment investigation, testified in Schiff’s “basement” that he questioned Biden’s conflict of interest in Ukraine — but nothing was done.
Likewise, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich testified publicly that she had been coached by Obama administration officials to refer all congressional questions about Burisma to the vice president’s office.
The reason the rest of the Democratic presidential frontrunners are stuck in the Senate is that President Trump learned about Biden’s conflict of interest, and apparent cover-up, and started asking inconvenient questions.
The so-called “whistleblower,” a CIA employee whose lawyer had been plotting a “coup” for years, and who had reportedly worked with Biden, and supported him, ran to Schiff to protect his former boss and take out Trump.
Nearly six months later, here we are.
Biden is the center of the impeachment trial — so much so that Schiff felt compelled to issue a disclaimer that the House impeachment managers were not trying to help his campaign.
And perhaps they weren’t.
The House Democrats went too far, claiming there is no “scintilla” of evidence that the Bidens had done anything wrong.
That may have made the Bidens necessary witnesses — if witnesses are ever called.
The Bidens also feature in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, the new book by Peter Schweizer, Breitbart News senior contributor and president of the Government Accountability Institute.
Democrats may already regret placing Joe Biden in the spotlight. Because of him, America is talking about a pointless trial, instead of health care or climate change.
Joe Biden has, in that sense, interfered in the Democratic presidential primary.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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