Yes, Biden’s Filegate Is Impeachable – The American Spectator

The legacy media is once again, though sluggishly, coming to the defense of the crook who occupies the White House in the wake of a brand-new Joe Biden scandal. It seems that Biden was caught spiriting away classified documents covering national security issues and ensconcing them in a “think tank” he had set up at the University of Pennsylvania. Several of the items in question were marked Top Secret.

No bueno, José:

Among the items from Joe Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a private office last fall are 10 classified documents including US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has received a preliminary report on the documents inquiry, a law enforcement source said, and now faces the critical decision on how to proceed, including whether to open a full-blown criminal investigation….

The documents were dated between 2013 and 2016, according to the source familiar. They were found in three or four boxes also containing unclassified papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act.

So … briefing materials on Ukraine, from the same time period in which his son was reeling in all that sweet Burisma coin as part of the greasy pay-for-play arrangement Biden had put his family into with respect to that country. Complete with his demands for firing the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the methane smell coming out of that company.

And these were squirreled away in 2018, only to be found …

… just before the midterms.

Which we find out about two months later.

Hey, how similar is this to the unforgivable offenses Donald Trump committed against the Presidential Records Act, which necessitated the FBI snooping through Melania’s lingerie?

Not at all, says CNN after grudgingly reporting the story in the first place:

There are clear distinctions between the two classified documents cases involving President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump https://t.co/fCjS88bCr4 pic.twitter.com/xEhkJHtt9G

— CNN (@CNN) January 10, 2023

It was immediately noted that not only was this “cooperation” between Biden and the authorities a little bit different in spirit than the “obstruction” Trump is guilty of — after all, the authorities in question are the most politicized, weaponized, partisan Department of Justice in American history, and they work for the Big Guy — but something else important was missed in CNN’s little disinfographic.

Namely, that Donald Trump was president and therefore had plenary power to declassify anything he wanted, and implicit in that power is that the simple act of taking documents home would constitute their declassification.

As compared to Joe Biden, who had no such power as vice president.

Every single argument you could make imparting culpability to Trump on the presidential documents he had at Mar-a-Lago blows up in Biden’s face.

Especially given that it was said Trump was keeping “nuclear secrets” in a storage closet at his residence. Biden’s keeping foreign policy secrets about Ukraine, a subject for which he’s at minimum ethically weak?

Nope. Can’t paper this one over, CNN. Or Adam Schiff, lately and rightly bounced off the House Intelligence Committee. Or any of the other Usual Suspect liars who commonly peddle falsehoods and equivocations into the national discussion. Dirty Joe is busted cold here, and there is nothing you can say that exonerates him.

It’s amazing how consistent this stuff is, isn’t it? Every time these people accuse Trump or some other Republican of some foul deed here or there, they turn up guilty of identical behavior or worse.

You can’t go to a movie theater and get projection as expertly perpetrated as today’s Democrat Party offers.

So what to do? Well, Texas Rep. Pat Fallon dropped impeachment papers against Biden’s lying SOB Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and those were well deserved. This column has suggested Biden’s whole cabinet should be hit with similar results. It doesn’t matter that the Democrats in the Senate won’t take up the impeachments. The House impeachment trials are just the right kinds of ordeals that can shake loose chaos in the administration to match what it’s done to the American people. Remember Trump’s first impeachment and what a distraction and a mess that was? Why wouldn’t we want to gum up Biden’s team in a similar way?

Besides, impeach a cabinet secretary who’s got one eye toward K Street in the first place, and you might just be able to take credit for a resignation. Skins on the wall are not nothing, you know. Imagine if you impeached Pete Buttigieg for what he’s done to air travel and the supply chain, and he then decided he “wants to spend more time with his family” rather than have to answer for all of his ineffective and ridiculous antics while the economic sectors for which he’s responsible have burned to the ground.

It might be enough to finish off his political career, which would be a real service to America. And there’s a bit of “social justice” in it, seeing as though Buttigieg was outspoken in favor of that first Trump impeachment.

And should that same fate befall a Jennifer Granholm or Lloyd Austin or Xavier Becerra or Antony Blinken or Miguel Cardonas or Merrick Garland … well, you know, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

But what about the Big Guy?

Here we have a clear violation of the Presidential Records Act. That’s going to fall within the definition of High Crimes and Misdemeanors the Constitution prescribes as justifications for impeachment.

Breitbart’s Joel Pollak says this isn’t complicated, and it’s time to put Biden under the impeachment heat lamp:

First, it appears that Biden has committed a crime — certainly by the standard the Department of Justice applied to former President Trump in conducting the raid on his private residence at Mar-a-Lago. And while then-FBI director James Comey let Hillary Clinton off the hook, he did so by reading an “intent” requirement into the relevant statute that isn’t there.

But Biden is not a private citizen at the moment, and he cannot be prosecuted while in office. Moreover, as Andrew McCarthy observed on Fox News Tuesday, there is a five-year statute of limitations that would likely expire this year (the center was founded in 2018).

So the only way to hold Biden accountable is through Congress — and breaking the laws on classified information clearly fits the definition of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s standard for impeachment.

Second, ordinary congressional committees have limited subpoena powers, but impeachment investigations can dig deeper and wider.

That became clear during the endless fights between the Democrat-run House of Representatives and the Trump White House, in which Trump’s lawyers argued that they did not have to comply with document requests that were not part of a valid impeachment investigation.

The litigation ended in a settlement, but reinforced the idea that during an impeachment inquiry, the executive branch has fewer grounds to resist demands for documents and testimony than it does during an ordinary investigation.

An impeachment inquiry could look not only at the mishandling of classified documents, but also at broader questions about what Biden and his family have been doing, both during and between his terms in office.

Third, Republicans need to pursue the principle of reciprocity. Democrats must endure, measure for measure, every abuse of power and precedent that they imposed on Republicans. They impeached Trump in 2019 without any legitimate basis.

Now that Republicans have a real reason to open an impeachment investigation of Biden, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on the Judiciary Committee, they should not waste the opportunity.

Pollak isn’t wrong. And here’s the thing: the imbroglio over the classified documents at Penn is simply a straw breaking the camel’s back where Biden is concerned. He’s the most impeachable president in American history — based on the things in Hunter’s laptop; his role in the Trump–Russia hoax as part of the outgoing Obama administration, which weaponized the CIA and FBI against members of Trump’s campaign; his Afghanistan pullout; his (perhaps intentional) mismanagement of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and domestic energy supply; the abuse of the FBI against public school parents protesting at school boards; his administration’s open censorship of dissenters on social media, as Jeff Landry’s lawsuit is establishing beyond doubt; his mismanagement of the southern border, including his inaction as the nation drowns in Chinese fentanyl; and, yes, his abuse of the federal law enforcement apparatus to persecute a former president.

Joe Biden richly deserves to be impeached,…