September 24, 2019

Joe Biden Says Congress Should Impeach Trump If He Doesn’t Hand Over Whistleblower’s Report

“If he continues to obstruct Congress and flout the law, Donald Trump will leave Congress, in my view, no choice but to initiate impeachment.”

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Former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden, who has been a central figure in the Ukraine scandal rocking Donald Trump’s presidency, said in a speech Tuesday that if Trump fails to release a copy of a formal complaint made by a whistleblower, Congress will have “no choice” but to impeach.

“If he continues to obstruct Congress and flout the law, Donald Trump will leave Congress, in my view, no choice but to initiate impeachment,” Biden said. “That will be a tragedy, but a tragedy of his own making.”

As my colleague Inae Oh reported, “Trump on Monday appeared to confirm that he pressured Ukraine to investigate debunked corruption allegations against Joe Biden in exchange for releasing US military aid to the country.”

As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden called for the top Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to step down due to his failure to quell corruption in the country, as NPR reports. While Biden was working with Ukraine, his son, Hunter Biden, took a position on the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest natural gas company. Trump has accused Biden of having a conflict of interest, but these claims have been disproven.

This week, Trump admitted to having discussed Biden, a potential challenger for the presidency in the 2020 election, during a phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

“I can take the political attacks,” Biden said in his Tuesday speech. “They’ll come and they’ll go, and in time, they’ll soon be forgotten. But if we allow a president to get away with shredding the US constitution, that will last forever.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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