Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Reuters
Of all the supposedly shocking revelations that have emerged from the
impeachment hearings this week, here’s one that the Democrats in Congress hope you don’t hear about: The Obama White House knew that Hunter Biden’s
extremely lucrative appointment to the board of the Ukrainian gas company
Burisma, which occurred the month after his father was named the
administration’s “point person” on Ukraine, reeked of corruption — and they
didn’t do anything about it.
In Congressional testimony Friday, former Ukraine ambassador
Marie Yovanovitch confirmed
for Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), that in 2016 the Obama State Department
privately ran her through a series of practice questions and answers to prepare
Yovanovitch for her Senate confirmation hearing.
Stefanik confirmed that one
specific question Yovanovitch was asked to prepare for was, “What can you tell
us about Hunter Biden’s being named to the board of Burisma?” Incredibly,
Yovanovitch later testified that the State Department told her to deflect any
questions she might get about Hunter
Biden and Burisma by referring Senators’ questions to the vice
president’s office.
This admission regarding her
senate confirmation prep session was startling, and it flatly
contradicted a prior statement Yovanovitch had made in the hearing: “Although I
have met former vice president several times over the course of our many years
in government service, neither he nor
the previous administration ever raised the issue of either Burisma or Hunter
Biden with me.”
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Rep. Stefanik proceeded to hammer this point. “For the
millions of Americans watching, President
Obama’s own State Department was so concerned about potential conflicts of
interest from Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma that they raised it themselves
while prepping this wonderful ambassador nominee before her confirmation,” Stefanik
said. “And yet our Democratic colleagues and chairman of this committee cry
foul when we dare ask the same question that the Obama State Department was so
concerned about.”
This is not a trivial point. Central to the case for
impeaching Trump is the assertion he was targeting a political rival and had no
legitimate basis for investigating Biden’s potential corruption.
If the Obama administration thought the vice president’s
son as much as a $1 million a year
and, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, dropping Hunter
Biden’s name to get meetings at the State Department was a problem, well, the
case for impeachment is much harder to make.
It also speaks to the circumstances which triggered the
impeachment hearings. Various national
security and State Department bureaucrats have emerged from the woodwork to
condemn Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with the Ukrainian president. If the State
Department was concerned about corruption in the vice president’s office in
2016, why were they directing bureaucrats to avoid answering questions about
it? Where were the whistleblowers and patriotic truth-tellers then? One
unavoidable conclusion is that congressional Democrats and federal bureaucrats
developed their sudden interest in the White House corruption only after Trump
won an election.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at
RealClearInvestigations. Twitter: @Heminator
