Sure, Impeach Trump, But Let’s be Honest

By Scott Tucker

December 11, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Sure, impeach Trump for legitimate reasons explicitly stated in the Constitution. But let’s be honest that an 18^th century document did not include slaveholding among high crimes against humanity, and certainly has no specific clauses covering modern war crimes and state terrorism.

The New York Times has a recent article (“Republican Tactic: Using Impeachment Hearings to Smear Biden on Ukraine,” by Katie Glueck and Maggie Haberman, Dec. 7, 2019) delicately threading the needle on the issue of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Burisma Holdings in Ukraine. Anyone who pretends to believe that Hunter’s dad had no actual wrongdoing influence in gaining his son a gig with the Ukrainian gas market should try to pitch that point of view on MSNBC. Or indeed in the pages of The New York Times, where Glueck and Haberman wrote the following:

“Hunter Biden did hold a lucrative position on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father was vice president, and while there is no evidence of wrongdoing, the arrangement struck some Obama administration officials as unseemly given the elder Mr. Biden’s role in Ukraine policy.”

Unseemly. Well, that’s both high-toned and begrudging, but only an afterthought since “there is no evidence of wrongdoing.” To be sure, the Republicans are claiming a false equivalence between business as usual nepotism and presidential corruption explicitly forbidden by the Constitution. Even so, the Democratic Party is also striving to change the subject whenever its own partisan policy in Ukraine gains too high a profile in the daily news.

Though I must not wander too far afield of my subject here, I do advise readers willing to follow this trail of evidence through the career of Victoria Nuland, a former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State, a former CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, and the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale University. She served under Vice President Dick Cheney, and in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was published on YouTube. Nuland and Pyatt discussed how to get the US State Department’s favored candidate, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the post of Prime Minister of Ukraine. Yatsenyuk duly took that job on February 27, 2014. In this phone call, Nuland stated her strong preference for the United Nations as mediator rather than the European Union, adding: “Fuck the EU.” To which Pyatt responded, “Oh, exactly . . .”