In creating a free and open system, the framers of the Constitution recognized that corrupting influence from foreign powers was a real threat. They were particularly concerned about a corruptible American president. In his famous Farewell Address of 1796,  George Washington issued a stern warning against the poisonous influence of foreign governments on the affairs of the new United States of America. He said, "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence... the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government."

The Founders were idealists but also realists, and they recognized that people’s private ambitions and thirst for power or money were powerful motivators. They understood that the human condition was flawed, and that goodness of human nature could not be relied upon. So, they set up a system of checks and balances of power in the three branches of the legislative, the executive and the judiciary, and in a federal system of divided power between  states and the federal government. They understood it was necessary to create these competing and redundant structures to guard against abuse of power and corruption. But they went even further.

The Constitution created two other safeguards against corruption in the impeachment powers of Article II, Section 4 and in the emoluments clause in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution. The latter prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting any present, emolument, office, or title from any foreign state without congressional consent. With these safeguards, the Founders believed they had created a governmental system better than any prior to forestall domestic public vice and the corruption that would come from foreign influence. Still, Washington’s Farewell Address of 1797 framed the issue in ways that are as relevant today as they were 227 years ago, when he wrote:

The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave… to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury… So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.

The standard for impeachment as expressed in the Constitution is conviction of Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

President Joe Biden’s questionable activities go back to his first year as Vice President in 2009 and continued  throughout his eight years serving in the two-term Obama administration, punctuated with son Hunter being paid $1 million a year as a board member of  the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2014. That role continued for more than four years, with a large $10 million dollar payoff from Burisma coming to Hunter and Joe Biden after the latter blackmailed Ukraine by threatening the withholding of $1 billion in U.S. aid unless  prosecutor general Victor Shokin was fired from the corruption investigation of Burisma in March of 2016 -- an investigation that would have exposed fraud, including questionable payments to Hunter Biden.  FBI documents refer to the two $5 million payments to Hunter and Joe Biden as a 'bribe' paid by Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

The case for impeaching President Joe Biden goes beyond bribery and emolument high crimes related to Ukraine. In 2014, Hunter Biden introduced his father, then Vice President, to Kazakhstan oligarch Kenes Rakishev at a dinner. Records and testimony obtained by James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee show that at that time of introducing  Rakishev to Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer were working on a deal involving Burisma, on whose board they both served, and a Chinese company that would have been based in Kazakhstan. To facilitate the deal and his relationship with Archer and the Bidens, Rakishev wired $142,300 to Rosemont Seneca -- a shell company created by Devon and Hunter -- the exact amount needed to fund Hunter's sportscar purchase the next day.

Another mysterious payment to the Bidens came during that same year. Shortly after Joe Biden was introduced to Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina at a dinner meeting in February 2014,  $3.5 million was wired to Rosemont Seneca by Baturina.  

These kinds of payments to the Bidens coming from oligarchs from Ukraine and other countries are way beyond a level where impeachment and removal from office is justified. Also, the means of transferring and distributing funds follows the pattern of international criminal enterprises. The Bidens were involved with the creation of  some twenty shell companies for the purpose of concealing money transfers from foreign nationals and then distributing those transferred funds to as many as nine different Biden family members.

As egregious as all these payments and shell game money transfers were, the scope and scale of Biden deal activities in China crosses a new threshold requiring urgent correction.

China engages in unrestricted warfare against the United States, something that the Founders could hardly fathom. Blackmail was not then a term in wide usage, having first been coined in Scotland in the 17^th century. Today blackmail is one of the chief tools in China’s massive elite capture program in the United States, giving them control over many in government in the United States -- with the top elite family in the U.S. being Joe Biden’s family. Preliminary records assembled in 2021 and 2022 by investigative journalists without subpoena power or access to bank records show that the Chinese elite have paid some $31 million to the Biden family. For the Chinese, these payments were and are about control and blackmail, which may explain why Biden more than any other U.S. president has pursued policies that have weakened the United States and helped China.

Bring on impeachment and let the hearings on the Bidens’ involvement in China begin.

Scott Powell is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His timeless book, Rediscovering America, was #1 new release in history for eight straight weeks (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599). Reach him at scottp@discovery.org

Image: Josh Hallett