President Joe Biden has been accused of doing what President Donald Trump was impeached for allegedly doing: putting his own political interest ahead of the national interest by calling on the Saudis to hold off on cuts to oil production until after the midterms.
As Breitbart News reported on Thursday, Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry issued an angry statement replying to Biden’s claim earlier this week that the kingdom sided with Russia by backing an OPEC+ decision to cut oil production by two million barrels per day.
The Saudi statement appeared to led weight to a claim, reported earlier in the week, that the Biden Administration pleaded with the Saudis not to change their minds, but to hold off on the production cuts for another month — i.e. until after the midterm elections.
In other words: Biden asked the Saudi Arabian regime to proceed with oil production cuts, which would raise prices and damage the U.S. economy, in a way that would minimize the political damage to his own party, which is facing a tough midterm election fight. Notably, Biden has not tried to expand U.S. oil production.
As Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) stated in his opening argument of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate: The Framers of our Constitution worried then—as we worry today—that a leader could come to power not to carry out the will of the people that he was elected to represent, but to pursue his own interests. They feared that a president could subvert our democracy by abusing the awesome power of his office for his own personal or political gain.”
Here, Biden has used the “awesome power of his office” to harm the national interest by allowing oil prices to rise, but pleading with the Saudis to help him politically by delaying the OPEC+ decision to cut production until after the November midterm elections — or, at the very least, until after most of the Democratic Party electorate, which favors voting early, had already cast their ballots.
The difference in Trump’s case is that while asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, was in his political interest, it was also in the national interest to probe the Bidens’ conflicts of interest — as the revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop have since made clear.
There is no national interest promoted by allowing oil prices to rise dramatically during a period of inflation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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