Impeachment Hearings: A Very Strange Questions from Devin Nunes

At the impeachment hearings, each party had 45 minutes for the party's leading member on the committee and its counsel to ask questions.  For Democrats, that meant Adam Schiff (committee chair) and Daniel Goldman, Democratic counsel.  For Republicans, that meant Devin Nunes (ranking minority member on the committee) and Steve Castor, Republican counsel. 

Schiff and Goldman were more or less interchangeable, working together in building their case.

Nunes and Castor were distinctly different.  Castor did a normal job of knocking the Democrats' case down.  Nunes, by contrast, wandered off in some very strange, conspiratorial directions.

There was some overlap.  Both pointed out that the former prosecutor general's investigation of Burisma seemed to end when he was paid a bribe.  (Suspicious circumstances, but not proven).  Both pointed out that Paul Manafort was fired as Trump's campaign manager after Ukrainians revealed that he had received payoffs recorded in the black ledger.  Both pointed out that various Ukrainians said mean things about Trump during the campaign, which made him unfavorably disposed toward them.

Only Nunes created the distinct impression that there was a sinister conspiracy involving the Democrats in general and Biden in particular.  Some of it was fairly easy to see through. When he talked about "transfers" of three million dollars to Hunter Biden that implied secret transfers and money laundering.  In fact, if Hunter's salary on the Burisma Board of Directors was $50,000 a month, that would be $600,000 per year.  Over a period of five years that would, in fact, be three million, though what he was being paid to do is another matter.

But there was one other allegation that was truly eye-catching.  Nunes asked the witnesses if they were aware that Vice President Biden made three phone calls pressing for Ukraine to replace Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin right after his office raided the president of Burisma's house.  Everything I had heard up till then had dismissed the possibility that Joe Biden was trying to shield his son from investigation when he pressed to change prosecutor because the investigation of Burisma was dormant at the time.  If, in fact, Biden's interest in changing prosecutor general began right after a raid on the owner of Burisma's house, that is rather a different matter.  So this fits into the category of "important, if true."  The first clue that it was not true is that none of the other Republicans raised the purported raid.

We now have in investigation by Glenn Kessler, fact checker for the Washington Post as to what actually took place.

The owner of Burisma was Mykola Zlochevsky, and he was in exile as all relevant times.  The prosecution was, indeed, dormant at the time of Biden's intervention, presumably as the result of a bribe.  The Prosecutor General's office seized Zlochevsky's property on February 2, 2015.  In November, the Ukrainian parliament passed a statute raising the standard of proof for seizure of assets.  In December, 2015, jurisdiction was transferred to the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).  During the transfer, Zlochevsky appealed the seizure and on December 25, 2015, the court ordered the assets unseized.  The order was published on January 27, 2016, prompting a public outcry.  So the Prosecutor General sought to reinstate the seizure, which was done on February 4, 2016.

Both Nunes and Lindsey Graham made clear that the suspect phone calls took place in 2016, i.e., not after the original seizure, but after the seized property was re-seized.  Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired in March, 2016.  The call readouts show Biden pressing for fighting corruption and calling for the firing of Shokin, but make no mention of Burisma which was, after all, only one of many instances of corrupt business dealings. 

No raid took place.  The suggestion of a raid was apparently a misunderstanding of the seizure of assets in the courts.