Exhuming McCarthy

It seems inevitable now that Republicans will move to impeach President Joe Biden.

Cementing his status as the absolute weakest Speaker of the House in modern history, Kevin McCarthy has allowed himself to be bullied by the right-wing cranks of the Freedom Caucus into launching a semi-formal impeachment inquiry. It’s obviously a desperate ploy to stave off a government shutdown and prevent a challenge to his speakership, but remember, McCarthy has never exactly been subtle when it comes to launching investigations.

So House Republicans have the go-ahead to pursue impeachment, and now they simply need to find a reason. Any reason. Any reason at all!

For months now, Rep. James Comer (R-Barnum & Bailey) has been trying to come up with something, but has only managed to bumble his way from one hilarious pratfall to another. Meanwhile, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ringling Bros.) has been holding his own show with similarly laughable results. Neither committee has lived up to its hype, but the Freedom Caucus types aren’t ones to be dissuaded just because there’s a complete lack of evidence.

They put on an amazing press conference yesterday, in which Rep. Scott Perry — who’s the target of a slightly more serious inquiry — responded to a reporter’s question about the lack of evidence with a lot of hand waving and very little of substance. The most specific allegation he made was the old claim that Biden pushed to have Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired because he was some kind of crusader against corruption and, more specifically, was looking closely at the business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter.

This is an old charge that’s been roundly discredited before, but seeing how it’s likely going to be center stage (or center ring) in the upcoming circus, it’s worth revisiting.

Yes, as Rep. Perry noted, Joe Biden did brag that he had the prosecutor fired. The House Oversight Committee has the video clip posted, and it’s worth watching, because what the Freedom Caucus presents as some sort of secret, sinister confession is actually Biden speaking at a major event for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, sitting on stage, with cameras and microphones recording him. And as their own clip makes clear, Biden’s actions were wholly in keeping with official U.S. government policy. As he notes there, it was his “assignment” from the Obama administration. When someone challenged him, he said, fine, call the president.

So no, this wasn’t Biden acting in the dark on his own; he was acting on behalf of the government. The Obama administration had repeatedly called for Shokin to be replaced, arguing that instead of prosecuting corruption he was corrupt himself.

And there was ample evidence to support that belief. Shokin turned a blind eye to prosecuting the previous administration, which another Ukrainian prosecutor had denounced as a “mafia”-like enterprise rife with criminality. He even refused to prosecute the police snipers who killed protesters during a 2014 rally that left more than a hundred dead and nearly a thousand injured.

Instead of investigating corruption and crimes, Shokin was apparently involved in them himself. In 2015, police raided the homes of two of Shokin’s top prosecutors, discovering that they had hidden away millions of dollars in diamonds and cash. The “diamond prosecutors” became a huge scandal, but an internal effort to investigate it was thwarted at every turn. Eventually Shokin's Deputy resigned in frustration, denouncing the office as “a hotbed of corruption, an instrument of political pressure, one of the key obstacles to the arrival of foreign investment in Ukraine.”

This is the situation that Biden was confronting, and his stance was wholly in keeping with the public policy of the entire Obama administration. “Rather than supporting Ukraine’s reforms and working to root out corruption,” the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine stated in Kiev in 2015, “corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform.” That fall, an official in the State Department likewise told the Senate that Shokin’s office was filled with “dirty personnel.” And in December 2015, Vice President Biden addressed the Ukrainian parliament, denouncing this “culture of corruption” and insisting that “[t]he Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”

And it wasn't just Democrats arguing that he needed to be replaced! In February 2016, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators — including three Republicans — issued a letter urging the Ukrainian president to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.”

And it wasn't just Americans who were calling for Shokin’s removal. European Union diplomats had been pushing for his removal for some time. Likewise, the head of the International Monetary Fund issued an ultimatum that made $40 billion in financial aid dependent on rooting out the corruption. As the Financial Times reported in 2016, then-President Poroshenko had increasingly “come under pressure at home and internationally for refusing to replace a long-time loyalist, Viktor Shokin, as chief prosecutor. Mr Shokin has been criticised for failing to bring to justice any of the snipers who killed dozens of protesters in central Kiev in the final days of the revolution, and for dragging his feet over investigating senior officials and businesspeople.”

And indeed, Ukrainians themselves demanded the deeply unpopular Shokin be removed. In 2015, Ukrainians held public protests before Poroshenko’s home calling for his removal. When Poroshenko refused to act, the Ukrainian parliament intervened and removed him by a fairly wide margin in March 2016.

The removal of Shokin was widely praised. The European Union’s envoy to Ukraine said it presented “an opportunity to make a fresh start in the prosecutor general's office.” The Atlantic Council celebrated the long-sought sacking of an “odious prosecutor” who had bizarrely been “allowed to do so much damage for so long.” The New York Times editorial board summed up the mood: “Mr. Shokin became a symbol of Ukraine’s deeply ingrained culture of corruption, failing to prosecute a single member of the deposed Yanukovych regime or of the current government while blocking the efforts of reform-minded deputies.”

And on and on.

Look, there’s a very simple reason Joe Biden was on stage and on camera bragging about — and likely even exaggerating — his role in getting Viktor Shokin fired. It’s because everyone in that room understood that Shokin was deeply corrupt and his removal was an absolutely good thing.

But again, the Freedom Caucus isn’t going to be deterred by pesky “facts.” They’re more than willing to push a narrative that is 100% divorced from reality. And since Kevin McCarthy is desperate enough to give them the go-ahead, we’re going to hear a lot more in the coming months.

Buckle up.