(Washington) Four years ago, former President Donald Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to obtain potentially compromising information about his rival Joe Biden earned him an impeachment trial.
Today, based on the same diffuse suspicions, the American right has initiated similar proceedings against Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s successor in the White House.
The request for an impeachment investigation made Tuesday by the Republican President of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, a priori doomed to failure since the Democrats are in the majority in the Senate, follows repeated recriminations from Donald Trump.
“The Republicans in Congress, who want to do well, spend their time talking about an impeachment investigation against Joe Biden-the-Scum,” he sighed at the end of August on his Truth Social network. “Biden is a pure scoundrel, there is no need for a long investigation to prove it, it is already proven,” he asserted.
The former president saw impeachment proceedings against his successor as a fair blow. “They did it to us!” “, he concluded in reference to the two impeachment trials which resulted in his acquittal, in 2020 and 2021, the Senate then being controlled by the Republicans.
On July 25, 2019, during a controversial telephone exchange – the first in a series of calls, described as “perfect” by Donald Trump – he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for an investigation in his country into Joe Biden, his probable opponent in the November 2020 presidential election, and on the Ukrainian gas group Burisma.
His suspicions focused on Burisma because Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had served for several years on the group’s board of directors, for generous remuneration, while Mr. Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president (2009-2017). and oversaw U.S. policy in Ukraine.
As early as 2018, Donald Trump sent his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine in order to find information likely to embarrass Joe Biden, bypassing and denigrating the American ambassador to Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, who was finally abruptly recalled to Washington in 2019.
Ukrainian prosecutor fired
Aggravating fact: the telephone call of July 25, 2019 coincided with the freezing of the payment of military aid of 400 million dollars to Ukraine, giving the Republican president’s request a possible dimension of blackmail.
On September 24, 2019, Kevin McCarthy’s Democratic predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, launched the first impeachment proceedings against him.
But the parallel ends there: unlike the telephone discussion in front of witnesses between MM. Trump and Zelensky, the potentially reprehensible actions of Hunter Biden, or even his father, remain to be established.
Conservative parliamentarians accuse Hunter Biden of having made questionable deals in Ukraine and China by taking advantage of his father’s networks and name.
But they go even further, by questioning possible ulterior motives for the pressure exerted on Kyiv by Joe Biden as vice-president to obtain the dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Chokine.
The prosecutor’s ouster in 2016 followed coordinated efforts by the United States with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which accused him of covering up corruption and sabotaging government reforms.
In a letter to the State Department dated Tuesday, the Republican elected official leading the audit commission of the House of Representatives, James Comer, asks American diplomacy for an explanation on its “sudden change of attitude” in 2015 towards Mr. Chokine and his services.
Donald Trump and his allies have often claimed, without providing any evidence or plausible reason, that the prosecutor was removed because of the threat he would have posed to Hunter Biden.
The president’s son is currently being prosecuted for tax evasion and for acquiring a firearm while he was a drug addict, but has not been prosecuted for his activities abroad.