PIERS BASHES JOE BIDEN

If we swapped the name Hunter Biden for Donald Trump Jr, the Democrats and media would be going absolutely nuts - so it's time to start asking Joe Biden the key Ukraine questions he doesn't want to answer

By Piers Morgan

Daily Mail
September 30, 2019

I have a question about this Ukraine scandal.

It’s a simple question, but I think a relevant and important one given the current explosive cacophony of Impeachment noise erupting all around Washington.

And it’s a question that I know will provoke an instant new onslaught of hysteria from all sides.

Some will furiously accuse me of playing ‘whataboutery’ to try to distract attention from what they see as the real story.

Others will furiously applaud me for highlighting what THEY see as the real story.

The rest who read it will either be so furious they can’t express themselves at all due to all the foam spewing from their mouths - a common malady in these shrieking social media times – or they don’t care.

But one thing’s for certain, it’s a question that needs asking.

It’s not a question about President Trump’s conduct during that now infamous July phone call with Ukranian President Zelensky.

My view of that, as I wrote last week, is it was a very dumb call to make and Trump is now getting all the savage blowback he deserves for being so reckless.

I don’t know what the hell he was thinking directly asking a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his main rival for the 2020 election, but it was utter madness on his part to do it so soon after the Mueller report cleared him of colluding with Russians to fix the 2016 election.

Whether it was criminal or impeachable madness remains to be seen, though most impartial observers – yes, there are still a few left of this dying breed – appear to think it wasn’t unless future investigations prove Trump executed a ‘quid-pro-quo’ threat by withholding military aid for Ukraine unless Zelensky agreed to the dirt-digging.

At the moment, that remains speculation not fact.

Nor does my question relate to the increasingly bonkers behavior of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

I’ve known Giuliani for a decade, interviewed him many times, and have always had huge respect for him as a smart, considered man who when the going got really tough after 9/11, showed the world what true leadership really is.

But in recent months, Giuliani has morphed from America’s Mayor into America’s Madman, running around the cable news airwaves ranting and raving like a lunatic.

And when he’s not running around the airwaves, he’s been secretly running around the world playing the role of Trump’s Dirt-Digger-In-Chief.

None of this has helped the President.

In fact, it’s hurt him.

It’s not a good look to have your personal lawyer behaving like he’s lost his marbles, and it’s a frankly terrible look to have such a man then conducting highly controversial clandestine business on your behalf while you sit in the White House.

But no, my question’s not about Rudy Giuliani either.

Nor is it about Trump’s outrageous warnings, via a presidential retweet of a Texas megachurch pastor, that any attempt to impeach him would lead to a new civil war in America.

As Republican congressman Rep. Adam Kinzinger said, this was ‘beyond repugnant’.

No, my question relates to the issue of Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s $50,000-a-month employment with a Ukraine gas company while his father was Vice-President, and despite him having almost zero qualifications for the job.

And in particular, whether Biden Snr intervened to stop an investigation into corruption that might have caused problems for his son.

‘There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,’ Trump said on that Zelensky call, ‘that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that.’

It’s true - there IS a lot of talk about it.

Yet the Bidens, and the Democrats, are adamant there’s nothing to see here.

Indeed, they express bafflement and rage that anyone would even seek to raise an eyebrow about it.

Yet I definitely have a few concerns that should be commanding a lot more attention from the mainstream media:

1) What exactly did Joe Biden Do in the Ukraine? President Obama made him his point man there after the overthrow of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in the 2014 revolution. Biden visited Ukraine at least a dozen times over the next two years, ostensibly to help new pro-Western president Petro Poroshenko root out corruption. But what was Biden really doing? We should be told.

2) How and why did Hunter Biden come to land such a lucrative job in the spring of 2014 with Burisma, the largest private gas company in Ukraine? He doesn’t appear to have any real credentials for it other than being the US Vice-President’s son. We should be told.

3) What did Hunter Biden do for Burisma? Who did he meet, what deals did he fix, what influence did he wield and how? How did he earn his $50,000 a month? We should be told.

4) Why, as DailyMail.com reveals today, did Hunter’s investment firm partner Chris Heinz – former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson – split from him when he joined Burisma because he was reportedly worried about Biden’s poor judgement and how it would look? And did Heinz share those concerns with Joe Biden?

5) What conversations did Biden Snr have with his son about Burisma? He says none, but Hunter previously said they had at least one. Neither answer seems credible given how close they were and what they were doing at the time in Ukraine. ‘Ask the right questions’ snapped Biden Snr when a reporter tried to push him on this last week. This is a perfectly right question to ask. We should be told.

6) Did, crucially, Biden Snr interfere with any investigations into Burisma that were conducted because the owner Mykola Zlochevsky was close to ousted Yanukovych? We know Biden Snr boasted of successfully demanding to have Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired if the government wanted $1 billion in U.S. aid. But was another reason that he wanted to protect Hunter from being dragged into any Burisma probe? If that were true then Biden would surely be guilty of exactly the same kind of thing Trump’s been accused of? Biden vehemently denies it, and no hard evidence has yet emerged to prove otherwise. But this is the key charge being leveled by a Trump campaign that ironically calls Biden ‘Quid Pro Joe’. Again, we should be told.

‘Biden doesn’t have to answer for nothing,’ said James Carville, the Democratic strategist and longtime adviser to the Clintons. ‘There’s one story here. The president of the United States tried to sic a foreign government on a political opponent.’

Hmmm.

The last part of that statement is demonstrably true, because Trump’s admitted it - though unless it is proven he deliberately withheld aid until Ukraine did any Biden dirt-digging, I don’t see any impeachment being successful in the Republican-majority Senate.

But there’s definitely more than one story here.

And if Joe Biden wants to be President then he’s going to have to stop pretending there isn’t, stop barking ‘ask the right questions!’ at reporters to deter them from doing their jobs, and start answering some difficult questions.

And this all leads me to the question I really want to ask, and it’s this: what would the same Democrats who say there’s nothing to see here be saying if we swap Hunter Biden’s name for Donald Trump Jr?

We all know the answer.

They’d be screaming blue murder about nepotism, conflict, corruption and collusion.

That’s why it’s time the media stepped up their investigations into the Bidens and Ukraine and put the same heat into those that they’re currently, perfectly correctly, putting into Trump’s phone call.

Because if they do, and they uncover something so dodgy it justifies what Trump said on that phone call or at least provides some mitigation, then it could well decide the next election.