In 1974, in the face of overwhelming evidence that Richard Nixon ordered a cover-up of the Watergate break-in, Republicans quickly abandoned him. Faced with certain impeachment and conviction in the Senate, Nixon resigned.
Today, nearly 50 years later, in the face of overwhelming evidence that Biden was directly involved in bribery schemes with foreign nationals while he was vice president, Democrats not only aren’t abandoning him, they’re standing firmly behind him. And they’re insisting that the public ignore the facts they can plainly see.
This isn’t particularly surprising; you’d be hard-pressed to find an example of Democrats abandoning one of their own in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt. A few Democrats voted to impeach Bill Clinton, but the party was largely unified in support of the man who committed perjury and obstruction of justice. To this day, Democrats insist that he was “impeached over sex” in an attempt to make the Republicans the bad guys.
Despite a litany of scandals during Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats falsely claim he had a scandal-free administration and that the most controversial thing he ever did was to wear a tan suit.
But today, we have an unclassified FBI document, form FD-1023, detailing how Joe Biden and his son Hunter “coerced” Burisma co-founder and CEO Mykola Zlochevsky to pay them $10 million in bribes. In return, Joe pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the man who was investigating the company for corruption. Not only do these allegations come from a long-time FBI informant who had been providing reliable intelligence for years and was paid handsomely by the U.S. government for his work, but Biden himself admitted to doing exactly what the bribery allegations said he was supposed to do to fulfill his side of the bargain. In 2018, Biden bragged about using a $1 billion loan appropriated by Congress as leverage to convince the Ukrainian president to fire Shokin.
Related: Bombshell Bribery Revelations Prompt Calls to Impeach Biden
The evidence is damning, but Democrats aren’t abandoning Biden by any means. In response to the release of the FD-1023 form, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, claimed in a statement that the “secondhand claims recorded in the Form 1023” had “already been investigated and dismissed by the Trump DOJ.”
Raskin, however, insists that Barr “spent the summer” with his team of prosecutors assessing the allegations against Biden and “determined there was no grounds to escalate from an initial assessment to a preliminary investigation. He called for the investigation to be closed because of a lack of suspicion of “criminal activity.”
If this were true, Raskin would have a solid point that would undermine the entire case against the Bidens. That’s why he’s pushing the story. The problem is, Raskin’s claim is completely false.
“It’s not true,” Barr told The Federalist last month. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
Raskin has also falsely suggested that the FBI informant’s allegations were related to the investigation of information Rudy Giuliani had uncovered about the Biden family corruption in Ukraine. They are completely unrelated. Raskin certainly knows this, but he couldn’t care less because holding Biden accountable for his corruption isn’t as important as protecting him and his party’s interests. As long as Biden is the presumptive Democrat nominee for president, his party will do everything possible to protect him, including pushing easily disproven lies.
