by Sean Hannity
By October 2019 Durham had transitioned his probe into a full-fledged criminal investigation, giving him subpoena power and the ability to empanel a grand jury and file charges. That announcement is excellent news, because it finally holds out the potential for equal justice.
The Russia hoaxers did great damage to the country. They weaponized our most powerful intelligence tools, committed a fraud on an intelligence court, killed faith in our institutions, destroyed the reputations and lives of American citizens, and attempted to remove a duly elected president. But the great casualty has been equal justice.
I like to use the WWHTH standard. What Would Happen To Hannity? If an inspector general determined I was a liar and leaker, I’d go to jail. If I deliberately deceived a court, presenting it with “verified” information that I knew wasn’t true, I’d be behind bars. Or imagine if Trump had a private server containing classified material and chose to delete 33,000 subpoenaed emails and destroy the evidence? The media mob would be howling for his removal.
But Hillary Clinton never faced any charges for mishandling top secret material and acid-washing her hard drives. Mueller went after Manafort and Papadopoulos and Cohen and Flynn for lying. Some may spend years in jail. But James Comey cashes in on a book, and McCabe lands a cushy job at CNN. We have laws against leaking classified information. We have laws against spying on Americans. And so far, not one person has yet been held to account.
If we don’t have equal application of our laws, we might as well shred the Constitution. We cannot have dual justice in this country. We cannot have one system that applies to corrupt actors in the upper echelons of government, and one that applies to the rest of us. The Durham investigation will not only provide us information, but, hopefully, will answer the crucial question of whether we can still have faith in our system of government.
CHAPTER SIX Deep State II: Impeachment—The Failed Attempt to Decapitate the Trump Presidency
On December 18, 2019, Democrats did to Donald J. Trump what they’d promised from the moment he was elected: they impeached him.
That vote had nothing to do with telephone calls to the Ukrainian president, or quid pro quos, or obstruction of Congress. It had nothing to do with high crimes or misdemeanors—or even impropriety. It was not about “protecting national security,” or “upholding the Constitution,” or any of the dishonest arguments Democrats gave for their vote.
Impeachment was instead the foreordained outcome of the left’s psychotic rage against President Trump. They were unable to accept that he won the 2016 election. This president, as a result, lives rent-free in their heads, every second of every day. It’s become a sickness.
The Ukraine allegations were actually just a subset of the much bigger trap the left was laying—what would become the Russia witch hunt. Even as Trump prepared to take office, Comey was doubling down on the Clinton dossier, Obama officials were unmasking transition team members, and the Obama DOJ was pursuing its crazy Logan Act claims. The Obama and Washington-bureaucrat and media machines were out to destroy Trump from the very beginning.
The radical left spent nearly three years on the Russia hoax, betting, as I explained earlier, that Robert Mueller would give them the goods to undo the 2016 election. Democrats were so convinced of their win that in early March 2019—before Mueller finished his work—Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler laid the groundwork for impeachment by opening an investigation of “alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption, and other abuses of power by President Trump” and his associates.1 And even after the special counsel proved an utter dud, Nadler and his comrades kept it up. They held more hearings, issued more subpoenas. They expanded their impeachment “proceedings” into Trump’s finances, pardons, inaugural committee, and Stormy Daniels. It wasn’t just rage fueling this gutter politics, it was escalating Democratic worry that they might lose to Trump again. Here’s how Al Green, a Texas congressman, put it in May 2019: “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”2
And that’s how Russia, Russia, Russia became Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. On August 12, a Deep State Democrat working in the intelligence bureaucracy filed a “whistle-blower” complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election.” By mid-September, Democrats had leaked the outlines of the Ukraine story and the media mob was spinning it 24/7. So it went for nearly five more hysterical months.
DEMOCRATS—THE REAL PURVEYORS OF CORRUPTION IN UKRAINE
The Trump impeachment was actually two stories. The hate-Trump press wanted America to hear only one of these—the fantasy claim that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden. But it’s the other story that matters, since it puts everything into context.
That’s the story of Ukrainian corruption. The media never covered this reality because it vindicated Trump. That story also centered on the front-runner for the Democratic nomination: former vice president Joe Biden. It particularly spotlighted Biden’s second son Hunter, a lawyer and lobbyist. Hunter was acutely aware of the sway of the Biden name, and Ukraine gave him the opportunity to cash in on it.
Ukraine had a revolution in 2014, which led to the ouster of its pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Obama in early 2014 dispatched Joe Biden to lead the administration’s work with that new government. Sleepy Joe became a regular visitor to Ukraine, traveling there frequently from 2014 to 2016, getting to know all the major players. This position also gave Biden a say over how to direct Western aid dollars to the country.
So imagine the coincidence when in spring 2014—just a few months after Joe got his Ukraine job—Hunter Biden scored a lucrative position on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company. Hunter had zero experience in the energy industry. Zero experience in the oil and gas sector. Zero experience with the country of Ukraine. And yet according to reports, Burisma started paying Hunter up to $50,000 a month for his non-expertise.3 Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, was also named to the board. According to one report, Burisma paid a total of $3.4 million to a Biden-Archer firm over eighteen months.4
What exactly did Hunter bring to the company? At the time it hired him, Burisma was swamped by corruption allegations. Investigators in Ukraine, the United States, and Great Britain were all looking at its operations. Its owner, a Ukrainian oligarch, had been accused of embezzling public funds and steering government contracts to his companies.5 Nice time to have a Biden on your side, right?
The press downplays it now, but the Hunter appointment was immediately news in Washington and caused a stink. John Kerry was secretary of state at the time, and his stepson, Christopher Heinz, was invested in the Biden-Archer firm. When Hunter’s board position was made public in May 2014, Heinz wrote an email to Kerry’s top aides distancing himself from the decision.6 A Heinz spokesman later admitted that “the lack of judgment in this matter was a major catalyst for Mr. Heinz ending his business relationships with Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden.”7
Aides within Vice President Biden’s office discussed whether “Hunter’s position on the board would be perceived as a conflict of interest.”8 The Washington Post admitted that “one former adviser was concerned enough to mention it to the vice president… but the conversation was brief.”9 And the concerns didn’t die. George Kent, a career State Department official, testified that in early 2015 he raised Hunter’s position with the vice president’s staff, saying it was a potential “conflict of interest” given Joe Biden’s Ukrainian portfolio. “The message that I recall hearing back was that the Vice President’s son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time,” Kent testified.10 Amos Hochstein, the Obama energy czar, also raised the issue directly to Joe Biden.11
Ol’ Joe now claims he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings. We know that’s not true. Discussing Hunter’s position with Burisma, “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what
are doing,’ ” Hunter told the New Yorker in a story written before the impeachment drama.12 There is also a public picture of Joe Biden golfing with Devon Archer in 2014. And on December 8, 2015, the New York Times wrote a story blowing the whole issue into the open. It noted Hunter Biden’s appointment and Burisma’s corruption problems, and questioned whether they “undermined” Joe Biden’s “anticorruption message” in Ukraine. The story explained that “Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Hunter Biden’s business dealings had no impact on his father’s policy positions in connection with Ukraine.”13
Joe knew all about his son’s work and that Burisma was under investigation by Ukrainian authorities. Yet also in December 2015, Biden traveled to Ukraine and demanded the government fire the very prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine unless that firing happened. Joe even bragged about the moment at a Council on Foreign Relations event in January 2018: “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. [Audience laughter]. He got fired.”14
This is the kind of despicable nepotism and influence-peddling that is all too common in Washington and that Trump promised to stop. Joe Biden was leveraging his role in the White House—and your tax dollars—for a get-rich-quick scheme for his family. Hunter Biden and his Burisma buddies were facing a major corruption investigation by Ukraine’s top prosecutors. Who came to the rescue? Daddy, the vice president, ensuring his son would continue to benefit from his get-rich scheme.
Let’s also call this for what it was: a quid pro quo. Biden was giving Ukrainian officials the message: you will not get over a billion dollars’ worth of American aid unless you get rid of a prosecutor who is investigating the company my son is profiting from. This was Quid Pro Quo Joe exploiting his position to keep his son in the cash.
And the Biden corruption doesn’t stop at Ukraine. Even before the Burisma scandal, Hunter Biden in December 2013 jumped on Air Force Two, making a trip with his father to Asia. They stopped in China, where Joe had talks with the Chinese president. Hunter ran off to a few business appointments. Around the same time, a Hunter Biden–connected firm landed a private-equity deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China, owned by the Chinese government.
As Peter Schweizer, author of Secret Empires, has pointed out, this was a deal unlike others given to Western firms. Why would it go to Hunter Biden? As with Ukraine, he had no experience or expertise in China. He had limited expertise in private equity.15 Financial giants like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America—they aren’t getting deals like this. So what did Hunter bring to the table? What did he have to offer beyond being the son of America’s second-most-powerful decision maker?
Even Hunter has admitted that the only thing he brought to the Burisma board was his dad’s influence. In an October 2019 interview with ABC News, Amy Robach asked, “If your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would have been asked to be on the board of Burisma?” Hunter answered: “I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think there’s a lot of things that would’ve happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”16
At least ABC News asked the question, which is ten times more than most of the press corps has been willing to do. Prior to the Trump impeachment putsch, the media was happy to write about the Hunter-Ukraine story, since it helped Democratic presidential candidates whom the press preferred over Joe Biden. But once Trump asked about the Biden corruption, the media declared it a dead issue. Instead of digging further into the Hunter affair, the press proclaimed the Bidens innocent of any wrongdoing and the story off-limits.
The press engaged in the same cover-up when it came to another example of corruption: Democratic efforts to enlist Ukraine to help defeat Trump in 2016. We know some of the details of this story because, again, the press was interested—right up until it preferred the story be only about Trump and Russia.
On January 11, 2017—before the Russia collusion hoax truly engulfed the public—Politico ran a story by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern. The headline: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire: Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.” The first line: “Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.”
According to the piece, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”17
The story detailed how a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Alexandra Chalupa, had asked the Ukrainian embassy in 2016 to get dirt on Donald Trump and his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in hopes of inspiring a congressional investigation in the run-up to the election. She even asked the embassy to arrange an interview with then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, to grill him for ugly details on Manafort. That sounds an awful lot like Democrats requesting a foreign government to interfere in our election.
Writing at The Hill, reporter John Solomon built on this story, in 2019 getting the former Ukraine ambassador to the United States to confirm this DNC pressure campaign had occurred. Solomon also reported that two top Ukrainian officials provided dirt to the U.S. media that smeared Manafort, forcing him to step down as Trump’s campaign manager. And he noted that Nellie Ohr, a contractor for Fusion GPS (which was behind the infamous dossier), testified to Congress that some of her opposition research against Trump came from a Ukrainian parliament member.18
Our Trump-hating media insists that the Ukraine election-meddling story has been debunked. They want to pretend that Russia was the only meddler. That’s a lie. Ukraine’s involvement was real and consequential, which is why three Senate committee chairmen—Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham—are investigating the matter. Unlike Democrats, these Republicans care about interference in our system, regardless of which country is meddling.
These two issues—Biden corruption in Ukraine and Ukraine’s election meddling—are essential to understanding the Trump impeachment. Democrats ignored these realities, instead shamefully twisting a routine conversation into something nefarious—for their own political gain. These issues also highlight the absurdity of the impeachment “articles” the House brought against the president. The left doesn’t care about corruption or election interference. All it cares about is weaponizing any tool at its disposal against Trump.
A FAKE WHISTLE-BLOWER SPARKS A MEDIA FRENZY
On April 21, 2019, Ukrainians elected forty-one-year-old Volodymyr Zelensky, a lawyer and comedian, as their new president. Zelensky ran against rampant Ukrainian corruption, promising to bring honest people to power. He won by a landslide. Ukraine is ranked one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, and Western leaders were excited about the reformer. They watched anxiously to see if Zelensky’s party would win enough seats in the July 21, 2019, parliamentary elections to allow him to push through his agenda. His party won an absolute majority, the first time in Ukrainian history.
On July 25, 2019, President Trump called to offer Zelensky his congratulations on this “fantastic achievement.” The call transcript shows a conversation that from the first second focused on Ukraine’s biggest problem: corruption.19 Zelensky promised Trump that he was working to “drain the swamp here in our country.” He said he’d “brought in many, many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we want to have a new format and a new type of government.” He thanked Trump for U.S. assistance and for making available Javelin antitank missiles.
It’s in the context of this corruption discussion that Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favo
r.” He explained that “our country has been through a lot,” and “Ukraine knows a lot about it.” He mentioned the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike—which first linked Russians to the 2016 DNC server hack—and wondered if Ukraine might have a missing server. Trump asked if Attorney General William Barr could call to “get to the bottom of it.” Trump was clearly talking about both Russian and Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election (he at one point references the Mueller probe) and was asking Zelensky to cooperate with the Barr-Durham investigation.
Zelensky later brought up how much he also hoped to meet with former New York mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani by this time had publicly announced he was investigating the Biden-Burisma corruption. Trump mentioned that Biden “went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of Burisma and said “it sounds horrible to me.” Zelensky assured Trump that he was appointing a new prosecutor who would be looking into the situation.
In an interview I did with President Trump on October 21, 2019, he laid out the simple reasons for this discussion. “When you look at what’s going on, and then you see all this horrible stuff… I heard Clinton was involved. I heard—they got somebody who wrote the fake dossier. Was it out of—out of Ukraine?… I would like the attorney general to find out what’s going on, because you know what? We’re investigating corruption,” Trump said.20