Fox News has spent the final weeks of the 2020 election trying to carry President Donald Trump over the finish line by smearing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with stories about his son Hunter Biden’s international business interests. But if that doesn’t work, some of the president’s loyal propagandists are already mulling a back-up plan: Impeach Joe Biden over the allegations.
During Wednesday’s show, two co-hosts of Fox’s afternoon panel show The Five floated impeaching Biden if he is elected, citing allegations by Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski that Joe Biden stood to profit from their proposed joint venture with a Chinese company. (While Fox programs and the Trump campaign have heavily touted Bobulinski’s claims, several news outlets, including Fox, have found they are not substantiated by documents he provided, and the deal ultimately fell apart.)
Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery claimed that Democrats had “lower[ed] the bar” by impeaching Trump over his Ukrainian abuse of power, and asked, “Why wouldn’t you, if you are using the same threshold and the same standard, why would you not impeach Joe Biden?”
“Juan, why don’t the Republicans start preemptive impeachment on Joe Biden, in case he wins?” Greg Gutfeld sneered to the panel’s liberal, Juan Williams. “They could start it tomorrow, what do you think?”
Later that night on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time program, Fox host Jeanine Pirro suggested Biden could be impeached based on the bogus conspiracy theory that he had pushed out a Ukrainian prosecutor to benefit his son’s business while serving as vice president.
“This guy can't get a security clearance if he worked in the Oval Office,” she said. “And they want to impeach Donald Trump? They can impeach him for what he did in the Ukraine.”
It is patently ridiculous for Trump supporters to claim they are deeply concerned with allegations of political corruption. The president, his family members -- some of whom work in his White House -- and members of his administration have an unprecedented array of conflicts of interest through their various businesses and investments.
On Thursday alone, four different news outlets published stories detailing corruption scandals at four different agencies.
The New York Times, for example, reported that Attorney General William Barr had pushed a U.S. attorney to settle with a state-owned Turkish bank accused of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey pressed Trump to quash the Justice Department’s investigation. Trump benefits financially from his relationship with Erdogan -- “he reported receiving at least $2.6 million in net income from operations in Turkey from 2015 through 2018,” the Times reported based on an analysis of his tax records.
The Times further reported that Erdogan had previously lobbied then-Vice President Biden to influence Justice Department investigations involving Turkey, but that Biden had declined.
“If the president were to take this into his own hands,” Biden explained publicly at the time, “what would happen would be he would be impeached for violating the separation of powers."