Adam Schiff is making a grave mistake by denying Republicans the opportunity to present their case against the Bidens in the impeachment proceedings in the House. Central to the Republican defense is that Trump’s request for an investigation into Biden was legitimate because there was legitimate corruption there. Not letting them make that case looks unfair and it doesn’t stop them from making that case in the Senate. Better to have that case made in the House now where Democrats have more control and can more easily respond than in the Senate later where their control will be limited.
Moreover, if Democrats delved into the details of these accusations carefully they could strengthen the case against Trump and make Republicans look like fools. Debunking the conspiracy theories about Biden and the DNC hacking in public hearings would potentially show everyone – even Republican voters -- that Trump wasn’t simply trying to get Ukraine to investigate. He was trying to get them to help spread lies and false narratives spun up by Trump friendly foreign political operatives. That would cement the verdict that this was an entirely political operation devoted to helping his campaign.
It would also be an opportunity to reach an audience with the truth that normally Democrats can’t reach. We all know that Republicans live in an alternative universe in regards to the facts. Most of these people have only heard one side of the Biden accusations, but a public hearing would draw everyone’s attention and therefore could reach them with the other side of the story and the cast of nefarious characters that surround that story.
We could highlight that Burisma was being investigated for conduct that occurred before Hunter Biden joined the company. We could point out that the Burisma investigation had already ended when Biden ousted the prosecutor.
More significantly, the right witnesses and questioning could raise awareness of the fact that the original source of the allegations was two former Ukrainian prosecutors, one of whom is the very prosecutor Biden helped oust while the other has been accused by people within Ukraine of making up the Biden allegation to win favor with the Trump administration and protect his job. Since that accusation came out, that prosecutor has recanted his original accusations and said Biden did nothing wrong.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/05/politics/guiliani-ukraine-shokin-lutsenko-intl/index.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-13/ukraine-prosecutor-made-up-biden-allegation-kiev-lawmaker-says
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/former-ukraine-prosecutor-says-hunter-biden-did-not-violate-anything/2019/09/26/48801f66-e068-11e9-be7f-4cc85017c36f_story.html
Additionally, we could bring to the fore the fact that the other major accusers of Biden and purveyors of accusations regarding Ukrainian hacking are three pro-RUSSIAN Ukrainian legislators. In fact, the legislator who has pushed these accusations the hardest, Andriy Derkach, is a graduate of Russia’s premier university of intelligence operatives – the school that used to train the KGB.
https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/3-ukrainian-lawmakers-doing-trumps-dirty-work-in-scandal.html?cn-reloaded=1
This fact then suggests that these two conspiracy theories are really a Russian kompromat campaign designed to affect US foreign policy toward Russia, which Trump is promoting because he thinks it will help his reelection. It again ties Trump to Russia and shows how Trump’s foreign policy is compromised.
Democratic leaders may fear that the GOP will use this to shift the conversation toward alleged wrong doing by Biden. They might, but only for a time and if we don’t allow the testimony, they’ll shift the conversation to the unfairness of the process. We will have the opportunity to shift the conversation back to Trump’s crimes later and our willingness to consider the allegations against Biden will give us more credibility when we do turn the conversation back. Moreover, we need to stop running from the possibility that there may be ethical issues with the behavior of the Bidens in Ukraine. That’s eventually going to come out one way or the other. Better to deal with it now than after he’s the nominee.
Finally, we can use the GOP’s defense of Trump’s investigation of the Bidens to further legitimize Democratic investigations into Trump. If Republicans want to argue that an investigation into a Democrat isn’t invalidated by the fact that the initiators of that investigation are a partisan Republican president and his equally partisan Attorney General, then they must admit that the investigations into Trump are not invalid just because some of those doing the investigating are Democrats. The truth is on our side. We should never be afraid of letting it all come out.
