In an admission he probably wishes he could take back, CNN host Chris “Fredo” Cuomo acknowledged that former Vice President Joe Biden engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukraine when he threatened to withhold U.S. aid unless the nation’s leadership fired a prosecutor in charge of investigating the gas company his son worked for.
In an exchange with President Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow, Cuomo said that while Biden’s actions at the time qualified as a quid pro quo, those things could not necessarily be considered an “abuse of power.”
“This isn’t about the law,” Cuomo said. “This is about finding something worthy of impeachment or not.”
Ah. Well, that admission is just about as bad as the other, but okay.
“Something can be wrong,” he continued, “but not a felony. An abuse of power can be wrong but not a felony.”
Cuomo turned to Sekulow and asked him if he believed it was “okay” for the president to ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with help investigating “a political opponent.”
“That’s not what the president said in the transcript and you’ve read it and you know that it’s not what the president said,” Sekulow replied. “And Joe Biden bragged on television that he gave a prosecutor in Ukraine to be fired in six hours or a billion dollars was going to be withheld. Do you think that’s a quid pro quo?”
“I think it’s absolutely a quid pro quo,” Cuomo admitted, “but it wasn’t done for personal advantage.”
“Oh, really?” Sekulow said. “Chris, you know that’s not the case.”
But this is the extremely thin shade with which Democrats are trying to cover Biden with. Because there was widespread global consensus at the time that Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was a corrupt dude who needed to go, Biden gets a pass on this flagrant conflict of interest. And, to be frank, even if Biden hadn’t threatened to withhold money from the nation, there’s still a significant problem. Hunter Biden had his lucrative job with Burisma for one reason and one reason only: It gave Ukrainian oligarchs an “in” to the Obama administration. Nothing else could possible explain why they would hire this unqualified man for tens of thousands of dollars a month.
At the very least, it was incumbent on Biden to recuse himself from this matter. Shokin was in charge of an investigation into Burisma. It was on Biden to go to the president and explain that he could not be the point man on Ukraine so long as his son was profiting from the relationship. The whole thing stinks, and if this had been a Republican administration, we would never hear the end of it.
But sure, let’s pretend it’s all fine and just concentrate on a phone call Trump made. That makes perfect sense.
By the way, the Trump campaign and the GOP have raised $5 million in the last 24 hours.
Keep it up, Nancy.
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