At no time since the 1868 impeachment of President Andrew Johnson has an impeachment been more warranted than it is now.
On Thursday, we finally got to see the document the FBI had been withholding from Congress about an alleged $10 million Ukraine bribery scheme involving Hunter Biden and then-Vice President Joe Biden, whom Burisma paid to get rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the energy firm.
The document is damning. If there wasn’t enough evidence for the GOP-controlled House to open impeachment proceedings against Biden before, there certainly is now. Recall that former President Donald Trump was impeached by Democrats just for asking the Ukrainian President about the Biden bribery scheme on a phone call in 2019.
Now we know there was good reason for Trump to be asking about it. We also know there’s far more evidence Biden engaged in impeachable (and possibly criminal) offenses than there ever was against Trump. When Democrats first impeached Trump at the end of 2019, they claimed he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election by asking Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky about the Biden bribery scheme. His questions now appear to be well-founded. They’re questions the FBI and Justice Department should have been asking back in 2017 when the informant first told the FBI what he knew.
What we’ve now learned from the four-page document — an unclassified FD-1023 form, which is used by the FBI to record credible reports and information from trusted confidential sources — is that Burisma allegedly paid $10 million in bribes to the Biden family so that Joe Biden, who at the time was vice president, would make the company’s legal problems in Ukraine disappear. Biden later bragged about how he pressured Ukrainian authorities to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, by threatening to withhold aid to the country. At the time, Biden claimed Shokin was “corrupt.”
