It was soon after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her intent to begin impeachment proceedings that Fox News aired a taped clip of President Trump answering a reporter’s question.
He described the upcoming investigation as a witch hunt, trashed Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, and wondered why they and the news media were not instead investigating the corruption of former Vice President Joe Biden’s threats to Ukrainian prime minister when he was the vice president.
We soon switched and watched ABC News, which aired the same exact news clip, but ended it before Trump’s comments about Biden. Clearly, the decision was made by ABC News that its audience would not be informed that there might be a question about Biden’s behaviors against Ukraine while he was vice president.
Most of the readership of this newspaper watches or reads liberal leaning news outlets. To anyone who is exposed to both left and right leading media, it is clear that not only is the news spun differently, but complete aspects of a story might be omitted out of the political biases of an outlet.
The Democrats have been calling for the impeachment of Trump since before his inauguration. First it was the Russian collusion story and the Mueller investigation, whose results squelched the initial efforts on the part of the Democrats to overturn the 2016 election.
Now we have a second Slavic scandal, begun by a whistleblower as yet unidentified, claiming that Trump tried to extort the new Ukrainian prime minister into helping investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
The outlines of the story are presented by the left, including this newspaper, as an attempt by Trump to investigate his political opponent and his family. The details of the story, at least as presented by conservative media, start with Hunter Biden obtaining a seat on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, to the tune of $50,000 a month, despite having no background in the energy industry or Ukraine.
Burisma was reputed to be a corrupt organization, run by Ukrainian oligarchs, and was under investigation by the chief Ukrainian prosecutor. It was Joe Biden, in his role as a vice president, who threatened the Ukrainian prime minister with withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid unless he fired this prosecutor.
We know this happened, as there are video recordings of Joe Biden bragging that he gave the Ukrainian prime minister six hours to fire the prosecutor before the U.S. financial aid would be lost, and that the Ukrainian caved in. These recordings are played often on Fox News, but I doubt that people who get their news from liberal leaning media outlets have ever seen this video.
There is also the story that Hunter Biden flew to China on Air Force Two with his father the vice president and returned home from that trip with a $1.5 billion investment by the Chinese into his private equity firm.
It is of these actions on the part of Joe Biden to which Trump was referring as deserving of investigation on the part of the House committees and the news media. This has been referred to as an investigation into Joe Biden’s family, which is not true, as no one has accused Hunter Biden of criminal activity.
It does raise the question of his father’s behavior. It is also referred to by the liberal media as a request by the president for damaging information on his political opponent, thereby inviting a foreign country to intervene on our electoral process.
Yes, Joe Biden is possibly an opponent for Trump in 2020, but he was vice president of the United States when these potentially corrupt irregularities that benefited his son occurred, and, as such, these deserve scrutiny.
Liberal news commentators dismiss the questions raised above by commenting that they have been investigated and that no wrongdoing was uncovered. Really? These have been investigated by whom? Where are the reports that clarify the timelines and any lack of relationship between the business activities that yielded large amounts of money to Hunter Biden and the vice president’s position and actions?
The impeachment proceedings were announced by the Democratic leadership even before any of the content of the whistleblower’s complaint was known, let alone before the release of the transcript of the phone call between the president and the Ukrainian prime minister and before the release the hardcopy of the whistleblower’s complaints. As such, these efforts cannot be taken seriously outside of being a political ploy for the upcoming presidential elections.
I’m sure that some readers of a leftward orientation will set aside these questions, minimizing me as a parrot of right wing talking points, not considering that they may be parroting left wing talking points projected by a liberal oriented media that may as well be manipulating what they may see and consider.
I for one am tired of all the political game playing. Despite the angst of the Democratic Party, we have a duly elected Republican president and a Republican-controlled Senate. On the other hand, we have a duly elected House of Representatives with a Democrat majority.
We have a full docket of national problems spanning a burgeoning federal deficit, health care costs, immigration, infrastructure and environmental issues. We need the branches of government to negotiate and compromise, to do the work of the nation and not this meaningless political posturing.
Jay Fleitman, MD, of Northampton writes a monthly column. He can be reach ed at columnists@gazettenet.com.