Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, testified this week about President Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s influence-peddling scheme.
His testimony contradicted every claim by then-candidate Joe Biden against claims by President Donald Trump and others that Biden himself was corrupt. He had, in fact, discussed his son’s business interests with him; he had, in fact, met his son’s foreign partners; his family had, in fact, earned millions from China and Russia. Biden lied about it all.
Why, however, did it take this long for America to hear from Devon Archer? Why did it take Republican control of the House Oversight Committee to produce this testimony?
The answer is that when then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) empowered then-House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to conduct an impeachment inquiry, she broke with precedent and adopted a peculiar set of rules that allowed Democrats to veto Republican requests to call their own witnesses.
Not only that, but when the House Intelligence Committee’s report reached the House Judiciary Committee — which should have conducted the inquiry itself in the first place — committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) broke the Democrats’ own rules for the House that allowed the minority party on committees to call their own witnesses. Democrats were determined to prevent the Republicans from calling Devon Archer, or any other witness that could have interfered with their case against President Trump.
Recall that Democrats claimed that Trump had threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky unless the latter conducted an investigation into Biden, who was then emerging as the preeminent opposition candidate in the 2020 election. The transcript of the conversation never showed a “quid pro quo”; no military aid was withheld, though some security funds were delayed. But Democrats stuck with their partisan narrative, even faking the transcript.
Left unasked was the question of whether Trump was right — whether there had been, as he said, an effort by Joe Biden to have Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired because he was investigating Burisma, the corrupt energy company to which Hunter Biden had been inexplicably appointed as a board member. Democrats showed no interest in getting to the truth, even when their own witnesses admitted that they themselves had raised concerns about the Biden family’s glaring conflicts of interest in Ukraine.
The entire impeachment effort thus functioned as a way of covering up what the Bidens had actually done. It was its own form of election interference, attempting to suppress the truth about the Democrats’ leading candidate while tarnishing the incumbent president with the label of having been impeached. It had profound implications for the country — not just deepening political mistrust, but delaying the congressional response to the coronavirus pandemic, and undermining our alliance with Ukraine.
It need not have been so. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), the Levi Strauss heir who was Schiff’s lead counsel in the impeachment inquiry, played dumb before the cameras this week after Archer testified. He claimed, bizarrely, that Joe Biden’s phone calls with his son’s business partners had been innocuous chitchat about the weather. Aside from its hilarity, Goldman’s performance was also deeply cynical, because he and Schiff could have called Archer as a witness, or allowed Republicans to do so. They did not.
Normally, vacating an impeachment would be pointless — especially since Trump was acquitted in the Senate. But in this case, the House’s own rules and precedents were violated by Schiff, Goldman, Pelosi and the rest. Vacating the 2019 impeachment would acknowledge that the process was abused.
The second impeachment is another matter: it was a snap decision with no pretense of process. The Chief Justice didn’t even show up.
But the first impeachment pretended to follow the rules. That must be undone.
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 new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
