00:01:43.800Anyway, that's – talk about turning lemons into lemonade for this absolutely tedious impeachment trial.
00:01:50.260Really, maybe we can get something out of this because I think people's eyes are glazing over when we talk about impeachment and Burisma and Hunter Biden and Ukraine, and it's just so opaque.
00:02:00.380So I want you to break that down first.
00:02:06.940So I actually think today was a very significant day in terms of this impeachment trial because today the House Democrats effectively threw Joe Biden under the bus.
00:02:17.780I don't know if they did so deliberately, but that's the effect of what they did today.
00:02:22.100Well, they doubled down on something they had started yesterday in Adam Schiff's opening statement.
00:02:27.240The House Democrats, the House managers, they built their entire case on the proposition that investigating Burisma, this Ukrainian natural gas company, is completely unfounded, completely without merit, is a sham, is bogus.
00:02:47.360And Burisma is the Ukrainian natural gas company that Joe Biden's son worked for that was on the board of, that he was on the board of, and we'll get into all that.
00:02:57.200They're saying that any call to investigate this well-known corrupt natural gas company is baseless, and it's just a way for President Trump to get a leg up on Joe Biden in the election.
00:03:10.160So, yes, yesterday Adam Schiff began in his opening laying out that standard that it was a fraud, that it was a sham, it was bogus, and today—
00:03:19.400And Adam Schiff, I don't want to be too slow about it.
00:03:21.960He is the lead House manager for the Democrats.
00:03:24.400Do you know, the reason I have to clarify who he is, there was just a question on Jeopardy where they asked who this man was, and it was a picture of Adam Schiff.
00:03:44.040Today, the House manager spent, I think, over an hour trying to make the case that there was no reason to investigate Burisma, that the only possible reason to want to investigate is for nefarious political purposes because you want to smear your political opponent.
00:04:02.260And I got to tell you, that is, number one, ridiculous.
00:04:10.080But number two, the consequence of that is the media's got to talk about Burisma as much as they don't want to.
00:04:16.400They've got to talk about the evidence of Joe Biden's corruption.
00:04:19.260But it also means that when President Trump's lawyers get to present their case starting on Saturday, that right at the heart of it is now going to be this is the evidence of Joe Biden and Burisma's corruption.
00:04:33.200So the Democrats, by talking about why we don't need to talk about Burisma, have inadvertently made us all talk about Burisma.
00:04:40.860And the standard they've set that it's completely baseless, completely meritless, it's a sham, it's bogus, is absurd.
00:04:50.500So let's walk through some of the specifics and details.
00:04:53.040And we're going to walk through in a little bit of real detail because I think it matters.
00:04:58.900Burisma, well, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, who's one of the sort of star witnesses for the Democrats, Vindman described it as, quote, a corrupt entity.
00:05:10.300Let me give you a little bit of the history of Burisma.
00:05:11.760It's the biggest natural gas company in Ukraine.
00:05:14.800It grew under an oligarch, one of these Ukrainian billionaires.
00:05:20.760Who was at the same time the minister of natural resources.
00:05:25.700So he was granting his company natural gas licenses and then getting rich.
00:05:31.340And it became the richest company, the richest natural gas company, because he was the government official in charge of deciding who gets the license.
00:08:45.140Hunter Biden was getting nearly 10 times as much as a director of ExxonMobil gets in cash compensation.
00:08:51.720And I think it requires a little bit more in the way of a resume to get on the board of ExxonMobil
00:08:59.040than Hunter Biden had to get on Burisma's board.
00:09:01.360Well, and we actually know exactly why Hunter Biden was on the board.
00:09:05.800And for that, let me not tell you, let's take it in his own words.
00:09:10.120Listen to what Hunter Biden said when he was asked why he got put on the board.
00:09:12.680Hunter Biden gave an interview not that long ago where he admitted that the reason he got on the board was nepotism.
00:09:21.080If your last name wasn't Biden, do you think you would have been asked to be on the board of Burisma?
00:09:25.360I don't know. I don't know. Probably not. I don't think that there's a lot of things that would have happened in my life that if my last name wasn't Biden.
00:09:34.060He said the part out loud that he was not supposed to say if they wanted to hide this corruption.
00:09:39.640But look, it's obvious. He was put on the board because daddy was vice president.
00:10:07.020Now, I mentioned that Hunter Biden was business partners with John Kerry's stepson, guy named Chris Hines.
00:10:13.400Yes. Chris Hines actually cut his business ties with Hunter Biden because of and this is this is Chris Hines, his own words, lack of judgment.
00:10:22.960Hunter Biden's lack of judgment. And when his other partner, Devin Archer.
00:10:29.140Joined the Burisma board, he said working with Burisma was unacceptable, unacceptable.
00:10:33.920So John Kerry's stepson said, I ain't going to be a part of this.
00:10:36.780I don't know what you guys are doing, but I'm not part of John Kerry's stepson, who's an associate of Hunter Biden, says this is too far.
00:10:42.200You shouldn't do it. Actually, in that same interview that that we just heard from Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden admits that he had a conversation with his father at the time when he joined the Burisma board.
00:10:53.180And his father, Joe Biden, said, you better know what you're doing.
00:10:58.200Well, here's what The Washington Post said he was doing.
00:11:01.340The Washington Post reported that, quote, the appointment of the vice president's son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst.
00:11:28.640Joe Biden, his son, and the case against a Ukrainian oligarch.
00:11:33.600Even The New York Times admitting this is an oligarch's company.
00:11:37.700It's crooked and it involves the Bidens.
00:11:40.400Now, it'll be interesting to see tomorrow if The New York Times or Washington Post are willing to remember that they wrote those stories because, you know, they've shown a real pattern, especially The Times, of just echoing whatever the House Democrats say.
00:11:53.680So they may suddenly forget all about this evidence of corruption.
00:11:57.680But, you know, it wasn't just The Washington Post, New York Times.
00:12:00.900It was also members of the Obama administration.
00:12:03.180So when Hunter Biden was named to the board, Obama's special envoy for energy policy, quote, raised the matter with Biden, with Joe Biden, with Joe Biden, because he was so concerned about the conflict of interest.
00:12:20.640Not only that, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kent, another one of the Democrats' star witnesses of this impeachment hearing,
00:12:26.800He testified that he, quote, raised his concerns, that he had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody the U.S. government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back, and that could create a perception of a conflict of interest.
00:12:43.920You don't say. I think that's the understatement of the year.
00:13:41.960And actually, because it's the Bidens, because they just can't control what they say.
00:13:48.820Joe Biden bragged about this last year at a Council on Foreign Relations event.
00:13:56.360He said in no uncertain terms, he went over there and he threatened to withhold money to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor investigating his son for corruption.
00:14:37.260So they said they had, they were walking out to the press conference and said, no, I said, I'm not going to, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
00:15:55.060Because I hadn't really looked over this case in a while, all of the details about it, all of the videos, all of the timeline.
00:16:02.260What the mainstream media and what the House Democrats are telling us is that this allegation of corruption in the Bidens and Burisma has been debunked.
00:16:18.460But it's worth seeing these dates one after another.
00:16:20.540I encourage you to do that because it's so many names, it's so many dates, it's like all things that are corrupt, it's so confusing.
00:16:29.800I think what the House Democrats are relying on is how confusing the whole thing is so that we don't pay attention to it, so we ignore the corruption.
00:16:39.220Joe Biden is the point person for President Obama on Ukraine.
00:16:42.600April 13th, 2014, Devin Archer, Hunter Biden's business partner, joins the board of Burisma.
00:16:50.960April 28th, Britain's serious fraud unit freezes $23 million for money laundering from the oligarch who founded Burisma.
00:17:01.580May 12th, just a couple of weeks later, Hunter Biden is named to the board of Burisma.
00:17:06.400December 8th, the New York Times article says that the Prosecutor General, Victor Shokin, is investigating Burisma Holdings and the oligarch in charge.
00:17:19.380Victor Shokin, this is the prosecutor that Joe Biden is going to wind up getting fired.
00:17:24.180Right, and that House Democrats spent all day long attacking relentlessly today.
00:17:29.260Here's one, and we didn't mention this before.
00:18:19.840So just to pause for a moment, what it sounds like here from all the Joe Biden phone calls, we're talking about the waning days here of the administration.
00:18:27.980What this sounds like to me is desperation.
00:18:32.880So Devin Archer, March 2nd, a week later, Devin Archer sits down and meets with John Kerry, the secretary of state.
00:19:12.240They then meet with the Obama administration.
00:19:15.100And then all of a sudden, you get people in the administration calling for the prosecutor who's investigating Burisma to be fired.
00:19:21.060And then on March 31st, Biden arrives in Ukraine, he's there personally, and he releases $1 billion in loan guarantees because the week earlier they had fired the prosecutors as he demanded.
00:20:01.280Think about the thousands and thousands of hours, the millions of dollars, the thousands of pages produced to investigate the president, to go after the president,
00:20:13.740and the position of the House Democrats is for anyone to say, hey, investigate this and see if there was corruption.
00:20:28.000I'm just trying to process all of this because you had two and a half years of the Mueller investigation into Russia based on very, very flimsy evidence that fell apart day by day over those two and a half years.
00:20:40.800Then you had the impeachment inquiry into Ukraine corruption by the Trump administration because President Trump suggested that Ukraine investigate the corruption of the past administration that we've just been talking about for 15 minutes.
00:20:55.540Yet the government has dedicated virtually no resources to investigating the actual corruption that is at the heart of this whole shame.
00:21:09.520House Democrats blocked investigating it.
00:21:11.860So among the most absurd moments were today, one of the House managers who was making the argument that there's no basis for investigating Burisma said, of the 17 witnesses we had, nobody testified that there was a reason to investigate Burisma.
00:21:28.660A number of them said there was at least an appearance of conflict of interest.
00:21:31.700But number two, the reason they didn't have witnesses testifying to that is because the House Democrats blocked all the witnesses when House Republicans tried to call them.
00:21:42.780They only called prosecution witnesses.
00:22:44.400Well, because it was the only company that we know of that had the son of the U.S. vice president make it a million dollars and impacting impacting potentially U.S. policy.
00:22:55.580Look, Trump wasn't interested in the abstract in every form of corruption in Ukraine.
00:22:59.540It wasn't like he was worried about someone sticking up a 7-Eleven.
00:23:02.120Listen, this is corruption in the United States.
00:23:05.120This is potential corruption of the vice president of the United States.
00:23:11.580And in fact, it's the responsibility of the president to ensure you investigate serious corruption.
00:23:16.520You know, just put simply, what it looks like from the outside is that the Democrats are accusing the president of doing what they themselves did.
00:25:18.120They covered up all the evidence of Burisma corruption.
00:25:22.620But in the House, we're in day two of three days of the House's never-ending opening argument.
00:25:28.800So for two days, the president's lawyers have been sitting there silently not allowed to speak.
00:25:34.900So they're going to speak finally on Saturday.
00:25:37.220And I hope and expect this to be a big, big part of what they say.
00:25:43.100What I hope to see, I hope to see the president's lawyers walking through each step of that timeline calmly, carefully.
00:25:50.580You know, the two clips we played on this show, I hope and expect to see the president's lawyer play both of those clips.
00:25:56.940And in fact, I'd like to see the Joe Biden son-of-a-bitch clip played at least as much as the clips that the House managers have been playing over and over and over again until you want to run out and scream.
00:26:10.200I mean, what it seems like to me, I had done some research into Burisma and Hunter Biden and all of this, and I probably didn't know half of what we were just talking about tonight.
00:26:21.500I hope that Burisma is the word that constantly is coming out there from Republicans, from the White House, from the president's defenders.
00:26:29.960It's just so much to digest, and yet, simply put, the facts of it seem so clear.
00:26:37.720You've got a corrupt Ukrainian company.
00:26:39.580You've got a corrupt son of Joe Biden.
00:26:43.020You've got a lot of evidence of corruption from the Obama administration.
00:26:46.640And then the minute that President Trump wants to investigate the corruption, they accuse him of doing what they did and they impeach him for it.
00:27:04.400Once he knew that his son was doing this, you know, it wouldn't have been that hard for Joe Biden to say, you know, I'm just going to recuse myself from Ukraine.
00:27:39.740I think there's, there is so much in that to digest so much that people probably haven't heard of before.
00:27:47.000And yet that really ought to be the basis of what we're talking about, because that lies at the heart of impeachment.
00:27:52.980It is the reason President Trump is innocent, and it is the reason President Trump will be acquitted by the Senate, is because a president has the authority to investigate corruption, and there was more than enough evidence of corruption to ask that it be investigated.
00:28:08.160I want to get to one mailbag question at the very least.
00:28:11.320You know, we now have a mailbag email address.
00:28:14.520You can email mailbag at verdictpodcast.com.
00:29:45.960If, on the other hand, 51 senators say we want additional witnesses, then we're going to have debate and argue about who to call.
00:29:54.480The case I've been making to the Republican conference is the principle of reciprocity, which is we're not going to do a one sided show trial.
00:30:01.660If the prosecution gets a witness, the defense gets a witness, which means if the prosecution gets, say, John Bolton, who they've been talking about, then the defense ought to get Hunter Biden or whoever they want to call.
00:30:13.080And I got to say, I think there is widespread agreement, if not complete consensus in the Republican conference.
00:30:20.020But you'll see the vote next week, hopefully, if we go down that road.
00:30:24.180Because in the House, you didn't get witnesses for both sides.