House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made the right decision to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden for what he called “serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct,” which taken together paint a picture of a “culture of corruption” surrounding the president.
That’s correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It won’t be enough simply to impeach Biden if GOP lawmakers don’t also go after the corrupt federal law enforcement agencies that have been hiding evidence against Biden, covering up his corruption, and obstructing investigations into the Biden family business. Indeed, the Justice Department and FBI’s involvement in all this is a much greater threat to America.
Let’s start with what we do know. With apologies to Speaker McCarthy, the evidence uncovered thus far suggests much more than just a culture of corruption around Biden, but actual, straightforward corruption — foreign oligarchs allegedly bribing then-vice president Biden to make policy decisions that would benefit them. This wasn’t a complicated scheme. It involved overseas firms hiring or contracting with Biden’s son Hunter for access to Biden, and then laundering the money through a bunch of shell corporations. (Throwing money at Hunter was the best investment a corrupt foreign oligarch could ever make, it turns out.)
As my colleague Jordan Boyd chronicled back in July, dozens of people, including Hunter Biden’s former business partners, FBI and IRS whistleblowers, and at least one “highly credible” confidential FBI informant, have corroborated President Biden’s involvement in what amounts to a vast international bribery scheme. An impeachment inquiry is more than justified — there’s vastly more evidence of Biden’s corruption than there ever was of Trump’s, for example — and arguably it’s overdue. Biden is likely the most corrupt president in American history, and impeaching him is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit for the House GOP.
But all that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Biden family corruption scheme goes right through the White House and out into the vast bureaucracy of the executive branch, reaching to the top echelons of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department and a totally weaponized FBI.
For example, the confidential FBI informant’s claim that Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each to get rid of a top Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma was memorialized in an FBI FD-1023 report that the FBI withheld from Congress for months. That report, it seems, was buried by a select few DOJ lawyers and FBI agents, as Margot Cleveland explained in these pages last week, and hidden from the IRS investigators looking at Hunter Biden’s finances.
We know, too, that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who slow-walked the Hunter Biden investigation for years, tried to sneak a sweetheart plea deal for Hunter past a federal judge — but got caught, which is why the plea agreement fell apart. The deal involved a pretrial diversion agreement (no jail time, no permanent record) on a gun charge that would have granted the president’s son blanket immunity from all future prosecution, including any crimes relating to his foreign influence-peddling operations.
This immunity provision was buried in Paragraph 15 of the diversion agreement, likely in hopes that U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika wouldn’t see it, or, if she did, would accept it rather than reject the entire plea deal, which is how the agreement was structured.
Keep in mind that the immunity provision, which would have effectively killed an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals — deals which, despite his repeated denials, Joe Biden knew all about — wasn’t something proposed by Hunter’s defense team. It was offered up by Weiss and the DOJ.
Speaking of Weiss, whom Garland named special counsel last month, it seems he never had the authority to pursue the Hunter Biden investigation that Garland claimed he did. For more than a year, Garland insisted Weiss had “full authority” to investigate the president’s son and “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary,” as he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in March and as Weiss himself later confirmed.
Garland and Weiss stuck to their story even after an IRS whistleblower revealed last October that Weiss had said he “is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.” (After the transcript of the IRS whistleblower’s testimony was released, however, Weiss clarified that he meant Garland had promised he would be granted authority to make charging decisions, which as Cleveland noted last week isn’t quite the same as having the authority to begin with.)
All of this is by way of overview. The depth and breadth of the Justice Department and FBI involvement in protecting the Biden family might never be fully known — and it certainly won’t be known without a full impeachment inquiry, not just into Biden but also Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The corruption of the Bidens is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the corruption of a weaponized deep state that’s willing to suppress evidence, intimidate whistleblowers, and trample the rule of law in order to keep a corrupt president in power. Voters can throw Biden out of office, but only an impeachment that results in the removal of top leadership in the DOJ and FBI, and the subsequent dismantling of those agencies, can protect the American people from what has become a tyrannical rogue government.