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People (many of them members of the US Congress) keep saying this and then failing to come up with actual evidence (which should be easy, if it is really “in-your-face”), of this corruption of Joe Biden, despite spending inordinate amount of time and (often taxpayer) money on the effort to sell the story.
He bragged about leveraging foreign aid to get the lead investigator fired as part of an effort to fight corruption in the Ukraine. Think about. If your trying to fight corruption, and you have evidence this lead investigator is corrupt, couldn't you just present that evidence to get them fired? Unless of course the corruption goes higher. In which case, the futility of the action is obvious.
The defense doesn't make sense on the merits. The investigator who got fired claims it was because of who he was going after. I don't know if he is honest or corrupt, but I do know that Ukraine claims he wasn't fired or pressured to resign but rather resigned on his own. So someone can't get their story straight.
Media outlets who went out of their way to say there was nothing wrong here all pretty much acknowledged that it at least 'looks bad'
Corrupt people (whether the corrupt official or the people corrupting them or both) often have political leverage to make that technique ineffective; that’s rather the point of political corruption.
Using aid as leverage to get other states to act in ways that local corruption would otherwise make politically unviable is neither novel nor evidence of corruption on the part of a US Administration.
In fact, its long been a foundational element of US policy in a number of areas where corruption is viewed as a wide danger.
And it's just a coincidence that Biden claimed he didn't know his son was on the board of Burisma when it was later proved he did know that. He just, forgot, I guess.
If Comer's claims can be substantiated there is no reasonable legal defense for these actions.
It's hard to imagine that Comer has completely fabricated all of this as well. It would have to be a lot of really huge misunderstandings.
They can’t, though. That's the point.
> It's hard to imagine that Comer has completely fabricated all of this as well.
It's not hard to imagine. At all. In fact, given the violation of norms in his Comer has been conducting the investigation (if it is actually occurring at all, and the information through different channels raises real questions about that) makes it hard to imagine anything else.
> It would have to be a lot of really huge misunderstandings.
Your devotion to the assumption of good faith when people repeatedly show their bad faith is... well, something.
Whether he talked business or not is completely immaterial because _his mere presence_ is influence peddling.
A lot, and it produced a lot of results. Because there very much was a there there.
> Still somehow no charges.
In the criminal investigation (the only ones that can produce charges) there were numerous individuals and entities charged in (or in at least one case, in a handoff from) the Mueller investigations, including 25 Russian nationals and 3 Russian companies.
Of course, many acts involved in foreign interference are not within the scope of criminal law, and much of the investigatory energy outside of the criminal investigation (e.g., the Senate investigation producing the bipartisan report on Russian interference) was not directed at criminal law particularly.