The release Thursday of an FBI “FD-1023” document detailing allegations of bribery against President Joe Biden boosts the case for opening an impeachment inquiry into the president.
The FD-1023 suggests that a Ukrainian businessman from the Burisma energy company allegedly paid Joe Biden through shell companies, and hired his son, Hunter Biden, in an effort to help remove a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
The FD-1023 also contains allegations that Joe and Hunter Biden were each paid $5 million to make sure that prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired, apparently because Burisma wanted to list itself on U.S. stock markets and could not be under investigation if it were to do so. Joe Biden is referred to as the “big guy,” the same nickname that would later be used in a different venture, with a Chinese company, as described on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
These allegations were made in June 2020, and date back several years. They are similar to allegations first raised in 2018 when then-former Vice President Biden bragged about having Shokin fired in 2015.
President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate in 2019, which led to his impeachment by Democrats, who denied all along that there had been anything untoward about the Bidens and Burisma.
The FD-1023 suggests that Hunter Biden was hired, despite being allegedly “not smart,” to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Joe Biden denied the allegations, and claimed in 2019 that he had never discussed his son’s or his family’s business interests with them — a claim that has since been shown to be a lie, one that Democrats have all but admitted as they attempt to argue that he knew, but did not participate.
Democrats impeached Trump over the obscure and constitutionally-questionable question of whether he had damaged U.S. foreign policy by withholding security funds from Ukraine until the investigation took place (the funds were ultimately delivered and did not impact the shipment of aid, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles). But “bribery” is specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution as an impeachable offense, along with treason.
As Breitbart News noted in June (original links):
As I wrote in March, there were already amble grounds to investigate Biden for bribery — one of only two crimes specifically mentioned in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment and removal from office.
At that time, the House Oversight Committee had just revealed that the Biden family received $3 million from a company controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. There was no clear business purpose, nor goods traded.
That came on top of suspicions — first raised within the Obama administration itself — that there were conflicts of interest in allowing Biden run Ukraine policy while his son, Hunter, was paid by a corrupt Ukrainian firm.
And it came after revelations — suppressed by Silicon Valley and the mainstream media, but nonetheless damning — that Joe Biden had been part of a corrupt joint venture with a Chinese firm after leaving office.
The Department of Justice had slow-walked allegations against Biden and his family; Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to appoint a special counsel; and the mainstream media showed little interest in the facts.
So the case for an impeachment inquiry — with broader subpoena powers than an ordinary oversight inquiry — was strong. It is even stronger today.
Calls for an impeachment inquiry were already growing; now the case is even stronger.
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.