Visiting Column #32 -- Explain It to Uncle Joe, Please

Joe Biden, the former vice president and former senator, is running for president these days, as you surely know.  That's enough to keep him in the news, of course, along with the fact that he is leading in the polls.  That is, although, without a very high percentage of those polled, given that there are 5,446 people running.

But Uncle Joe is in the news for something else, and it's not good.  As we all know, while he was vice president, and while he was ostensibly the person in the Obama Administration responsible for USA policy in Ukraine, his son Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma.  Burisma is a corrupt energy firm that paid him somewhere between $50,000 and $85,000 per month to be on the board, despite his lack of knowledge of energy or, you know, Ukraine. 

Hunter himself has said that he doesn't get that job if his father were not the Veep.  Duh and double duh.

So now we have President Trump possibly impeached, depending on which Constitutional professor you listen to.  "Possibly" is because the House voted out two articles (neither of which is a crime) but refuses to send them to the Senate for trial.

But it is actually those articles that are relevant to our discussion of Uncle Joe.  You see, the whole premise of the impeachment is that President Trump supposedly withheld aid to Ukraine until the new president there launched an investigation of Burisma and the Bidens' involvement in the company.  By USA law, however, foreign aid is contingent on some kind of certification of lack of corruption, but let's set that fact aside.

Because now Joe Biden is saying he wouldn't obey a subpoena to a possible Senate impeachment trial, because (paraphrasing) such a subpoena would be only to "distract from Donald Trump's guilt."  Of course, then later he said he would testify, because ignoring a subpoena would be sort of committing the same thing that Trump is accused of, in the other article.

But even that misses the message.  Follow:

If Hunter Biden had extensive knowledge of energy, or of Ukrainian affairs, and his father were not the sitting vice president and in charge of policy toward Ukraine when he was hired, it would be one thing.  In that case, his hiring would have been defensible.

In truth, though, his father was vice president and in charge of Ukrainian USA policy; the son did not have any expertise to bring to the table; and worst of all, Uncle Joe had gone video threatening to hold up aid to Ukraine while he was VP until they fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma.  All of that might have been a total coincidence, but it is a huge crap-pile of circumstance.

And here's the thing.  If President Trump had a legitimate reason to ask the Ukrainian president in July to look into the Hunter Biden hiring and the hold-up of aid by the Obama Administration, then it doesn't matter that Joe Biden was running for president.  The fact that he made himself a political opponent does not insulate him from liability for possible corruption accusations.

Got it, Joe?  If there was a legitimate reason for President Trump to ask for the investigation, there is no impeachable action of any kind.

That's critical.  If the Senate trial includes witnesses, then anyone trying to gather the facts of the case would need to know what the heck was going on with Burisma.  Why?  Because if there was legitimate reason to ask the Ukrainians to investigate Burisma, and the Hunter Biden hiring during his father's tenure as VP, and the huge payments, and the Joe Biden hold-up of aid, then nothing President Trump did was in any way improper.

And that means that Joe and Hunter Biden would be the people that the Senate would want to have testify as to their involvement, under oath.  So of course Uncle Joe didn't want to testify, but it sure wasn't because it was "distracting from Trump's guilt", but because honest testimony from the two of them would show that Trump had all the good and legal reason in the world to ask the Ukrainian president to investigate them.

So for me, if the Senate decides to have witnesses, sure, fine with me, because there'd be some uncomfortable subpoenas handed out, and the public testimony by Uncle Joe, under oath, would be must-see TV.

I hope someone explains all that to Joe Biden, but I believe the candidate knows all of it quite well already.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton