Commentary
Follow Biden impeachment coverage in Around the Block daily
Around the Block is the place to go to get the most in-depth coverage of the Hunter Biden impeachment trial.
Wait, what? Whose impeachment trial?
Right, it’s the impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump (I). It only sounds like the Hunter Biden impeachment trial based on the arguments of Trump’s (I) defense team.
From NBC News:
“When the House managers gave you their presentation, when they submitted their brief, they repeatedly referenced Hunter Biden and Burisma. They spoke to you for over 21 hours, and they referenced Biden or Burisma over 400 times. And when they gave these presentations, they said there was nothing to see, it was a sham,” Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who is among the lawyers on the president’s impeachment team, told senators Monday.
Bondi was the first member of the White House defense team to bring up the Bidens, but she was not the last. Another member of the legal team, Eric Herschmann, also spoke at length about the Bidens and Burisma in a subsequent presentation.
“In their trial memorandum, the House managers describe this as baseless. Now, why did they say that? Why did they invoke Biden or Burisma over 400 times?” Bondi said.
“The reason they needed to do that is because they’re here saying that the president must be impeached and removed from office for raising a concern. And that’s why we have to talk about this today,’ she said. ‘They say ‘sham.’ They say ‘baseless.’ They say this because if it’s OK for someone to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe there’s something here worth raising,’ then their case crumbles.”
In nearly 30 minutes of remarks Monday, Bondi delved into the minutiae of Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma, repeatedly saying Democrats must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was no basis for Trump to have raised concerns about the Bidens.
At Around the Block we ask, why must “Democrats must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was no basis for Trump to have raised concerns about the Bidens?” Interestingly, based on Bondi’s argument, she is also implying that Trump indeed did “raise concerns” about the Bidens or, more directly, in what is the basis for Article 1, abused his power by demanding the Ukrainian president announce an investigation into the Bidens in exchange for military aid (a crime) and a White House visit.
And with super-lawyer Alan Dershowitz, in oppossition with virtually every other notable Constitutional scholar, including 1998’s Alan Dershowitz, the defense has gone from “a perfect call” and “Trump did nothing wrong” to “an imperfect call” and Trump really did all the things he’s accused of, but so what; it’s not impeachable.
Wonder what they’ll say after a) Four GOP senators show courage and vote to allow Bolton to testify; b) Trump blocks Bolton’s testimony; c) They vote to acquit and a month later Bolton’s book comes leaving no doubt that Trump “did something wrong and should have been removed; d) Dershowitz changes his mind again.
Coming tomorrow, Around the Block covers the impeachment of Barack Obama.
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