Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, revealed Sunday that Democrats’ push to impeach Donald Trump led to the discovery of key Hunter Biden information.
What’s the background?
Democrats conducted an investigation into Trump last year over allegations that he engaged in a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian president by threatening to withhold military aid if Ukraine did not investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Ultimately, the House, which is controlled by Democrats, voted to impeach Trump. However, the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted the president.
Meanwhile, the Bidens were swept into the controversy when Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings was scrutinized.
Joe Biden later added fuel to the fire
with an apparent admission that, when he was vice president, he persuaded then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma. Biden’s admission came during a 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion,'” Biden explained. “I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.'”
“Well, son of a b****, he got fired,” Biden bragged. “And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
What did Johnson say?
Speaking with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Johnson explained that his committee never “targeted the Bidens” — but only uncovered key information about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings as a result of the push to impeach Trump.
“When I met with the attorney general, it was really talking about the corrupt FBI investigation relating to the Russian hoax, so I don’t believe I ever really talked about our investigations of Hunter Biden, which by the way we never targeted the Bidens,” Johnson said.
“That whole issue was brought forth during the impeachment. That’s when we started expanding our Ukrainian investigation to include his financial dealings, and then when we started seeing all these wire transfers that were connected to Hunter Biden,” the Republican senator explained.
Johnson went on to express disagreement with the fact that Attorney General William Barr
did not disclose the criminal investigations into Hunter Biden during Trump’s impeachment.
“I’m sympathetic for keeping investigations confidential unless there’s an indictment,” Johnson said. “But when you’re talking about investigations within the political realm, particularly one that would have affected the impeachment trial of the sitting U.S. president in the U.S. Senate, that should have been relevant information, the fact that they had Hunter Biden’s computer that had all these emails back in December 2019, that was before the trial, that was part of the trial, we should have known that.”
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the Senate Committee on Finance released a report in September detailing the findings of their investigation into Hunter Biden and the Biden family.
The investigation uncovered, among other things, that “Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board negatively impacted the efforts of dedicated career-service individuals who were fighting to push for anticorruption measures in Ukraine” and that “[Hunter] Biden and [his business partner’s] work with Chinese nationals connected to the Communist regime illustrate the deep financial connections that accelerated while Joe Biden was vice president and continued after he left office.”
